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Charles Fadel's avatar

As someone who knows Howard Gardner personally, I can tell you he always regretted that people took his Multiple intelligences ideas as an ontology to design education by.

I completely agree, but the damage has been widely done. Yet there's no reason to propagate it further...

Nik Bear Brown's avatar

Yes. fair, and you know how I think about this. The taxonomy isn't the deliverable. It's the spec. I can't build a tool to develop counterfactual reasoning until I've named counterfactual reasoning as the thing I'm building toward. Gardner named and stopped. The name here is just step zero of the build.

Madeleine Champagnie's avatar

Excellent analysis of a problem I’ve been banging on about for ages. The problem is not so much that we have built machines that simulate humans, but that we educate young humans as if they are machines and to behave like machines.

Yet, the political will to make the change is just not there, in the same way that it isn’t there to tackle climate change by ending the reliance on fossil fuels.

It’s almost as if maintaining an inefficient and damaging status quo is somehow preferable.

Nik Bear Brown's avatar

Thank you Madeleine — you've put it perfectly. If you want to dig deeper into exactly this problem, you might find https://www.irreducibly.xyz/ worth exploring.