Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Bodily Kinesthetic intelligence

More from Mason and Houghton's Educational Value of Making, Issues in Design Technology
(Howard) Gardner believes craft education is particularly conducive to the development of bodily kinesthetic knowledge because it is so intimately tied to labor (doing) and the physical handling of materials and it demands exceptional motor control.

Of particular importance for our findings about the low status of craft education is his observation that Western civilization falsely privileges linguistic and mathematical intelligences (probably because they are most useful in business, war making and academic careerism). Whenever these two forms of intelligence are used to predict success and failure, he notes that bodily skills become relegated to the lowest levels of the hierarchy.
An interesting thing to note is that as I have mentioned before, nearly every kind of intelligence can be utilized and explored through experience in the school wood shop. And we all know that academic knowledge is most highly valued over skilled accomplishments in physical reality by idiots.

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