To those of us who have been around education for a while, we know that Howard Gardner of Harvard University was first to write about the idea of multiple intelligences. This has been the guiding idea of much of his work, recognizing that some young people are gifted in one area, but not in all areas. All of these intelligences are worthy and should be cultivated. His seminal book, Frames of Mind, was published in 1983 and attracted enormous attention.
But, lo! Bill Gates himself has just discovered multiple intelligences! Maybe he read about it and forget the source.
Gates built his career on strong logic and mathematical skills, establishing himself as a brilliant coder with a knack for solving technical problems. But he admits he lacked other strengths, such as strong interpersonal skills.
In a series of posts on Twitter, Gates shares the things he wishes he knew when he was just starting out in his career.
“Looking back on when I left college, there are some things I wish I had known,” Gates writes.
“Intelligence takes many different forms,” Gates says. “It is not one-dimensional. And not as important as I used to think.”
Do you think this will change his view on standardized testing as the only valid measure of students, teachers, and schools?
I doubt it.
But it is strangely encouraging to know that he has discovered multiple intelligences 34 years after Gardner pronounced them to be valid and important. Gates should give credit where credit is due. It is kind of like someone who arrived on the shores of Cape Cod in 1792 and announced that he just discovered America.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bill Gates, a brilliant coder? Hah! This is another example of people using throw away lines to praise someone they know little about. Since he made his fortune in operating systems, he must have been brilliant at coding. Uh, not so much. Mr. Gates made his money based upon his business acumen.
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Nicely put! I think Microsoft’s first major consumer product, MS-DOS, was something Gates bought from another developer, then tweaked enough to call it his own….
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YES, Bill GATES did purchase MS-DOS from a person in Colorado. Gates has NOT created anything in his entire life. Gates is just a parasite with money … like the Dump.
Here is where Gates got his operating system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS. GATES PURCHASED it. Gates does not have the where with all to create anything.
Like the Dump, the only thing Gates has is $$$$$$ handed down by his father.
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Actually IBM engineers did most of the tweaking. Thus they called it the Dirty Operating System as compared to their main frame systems .
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Interesting, Joel–and thanks for the straight dope….
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It wasn’t DR-DOS, it was QDOS http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=126
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And let’s not forget that Gate’s father (himself wealthy) had lots of business connections that were more than happy to give little Billy a leg up. Bill Gates has done NOTHING for himself. Daddy’s cash, Daddy’s connections and an operating system purchased from another developer. Bill Gates like living in his own mind.
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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was actually the technical genius behind Microsoft and the original operating system that they licensed to IBM — the one that put MS on the map — was actually not written by either Allen or Gates. Gary Kildall insists that a substantial part of it was actually copied from an OS he had written at Digital Research. says Kildall, “Ask Bill [Gates] why function code 6 [in QDOS and later in MSDOS] ends in a dollar sign. No one in the world knows that but me.”
http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-of-dos-how-microsoft-got-the-ibm-pc-os-contract
Gates is not a technical genius. He is a marketeer.
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Gates is EVIL. Thanks SomeDAM Poet.
And now Gates wants to FEED his income flow.
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The Gates’ kids have never been in “human capital pipelines” (reform reference for the schools for our kids), which offers proof of the conclusion about “feeding income flow”. The skin-sloughing Gates sees profit potential in New America’s “badges” which makes him sell the product via “different intelligences”.
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And let’s not even start on Windows’ destruction of Word Perfect, which was a better word processing system than Word. It was a Utah company, run out of business by Microsoft.
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I loved WordPerfect!
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You give him to much credit . He built his fortune on moms connections and dads skills as a technology patent lawyer in Seattle . Young Bill had no more to do with designing those agreements with IBM than he did with creating DOS.
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“Gates built his career on strong logic and mathematical skills, establishing himself as a brilliant coder with a knack for solving technical problems.”
Are you kidding me? Gates built his career on intellectual property and anti-trust violations.
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I worked in the high tech industry for quite a while and when it comes right down to it, the things that are most important for getting ahead are the ability to lie, cheat, shout down anyone who challenges you and most important of all, to take all the credit for things that other people create.
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“. . .the things that are most important for getting ahead are the ability to lie, cheat, shout down anyone who challenges you and most important of all, to take all the credit for things that other people create.”
Certainly describes the majority of adminimals (above the assistant principal level) that I know. That and ass kissing the person above you, all the while trying to figure out how to replace him/her.
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Good point about brown-nosing.
How could I forget that?
I know these are pretty broadly applicable in both the private and public sector, but I think people have this idea that things work differently in the technology sector, that it is somehow a “meritocracy” where creativity and competency matter most.
Ha ha ha!
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To SDP:
You forget one more line in business that if we cannot compete to smarter competitors, we buy them all out.
Lie, cheat, bully, and take over credit are from the money edge advantage. May
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I can just see his logical/mathematical-intelligent wheels turning, hypothesizing how to weave the 9 intelligences into a CBE program for the nation’s public schools.
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Ah, so it has taken Bill Gates over sixty years to learn that intelligence alone “is not as important as I used to think.”
That alone should call into question his intelligence regarding anything other than its mathematical/scientific manifestation (though his will to power can never be in doubt). Perhaps now he’ll discover the importance of empathy, compassion and integrity. And democracy.
I won’t hold my breath on those, though.
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“Intelligence takes many different forms”
So, Gates has just discovered that he is not the only intelligent being on the planet?
Well, at least he is making progress.
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Oh, so this is what genius in action looks like! Who would have known?
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If Gates “discovered” multiple intelligences, then he should have an epiphany and realize the limitations of two dimensional screens. What’s next for Bill? Piaget? Somebody should introduce him to Pasi Sahlberg.
By the way, I love the sarcastic tone in the title and closing of the post.
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How about the work of John Dewey? Gates wouldn’t understand Dewey. Dewey has morals; Gates has money.
Gales has caused harm like McAfee, Zuckerberg. I won’t even name the politicians. They are the INSIDERS CLUB where deals are made at the expense of the common person and the poor.
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Trump created the term “priming the pump.” He and Gates, birds of a feather. Oh look, I just created a new phrase, I’ll copyright it, “Birds of a feather”.
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TAGO!!!
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I don’t tweet. Howard Gardner’s ideas are not the only ones of merit that have been overpowered by the truncated views of Gates, economists, and the all promoters of scores on state standized tests as if objective, necessary, and sufficient to judge education that matters.
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“Bill Gates Discovers Multiple intelligences”
There’s more than one intelligence
You better hold the phone
Cuz Stephen Hawking makes some sense
So I am not alone
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Borrowing from an article by the Great White Snark (he provides examples)
The ways in which Gates and Trump are similar
(1) lack social skills (2) shameless shills (3) both can be bought with gifts that stroke their self-importance (4) both are egotists and (5) both can be “petty little bastards”
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Don’t know that I agree with #1. They have social skills, bastardized ones at that in the sense they know how to use people and get other people to do their bidding, no matter ethical or moral concerns. It’s as if they have truncated social skills with only socially negative ones dominating.
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Those are “antisocial skills”
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Gates would have learned about Multiple Intelligences (MI) a long time ago if he had bothered to talk with and listen to teachers before disrupting education across America. Many teachers had to stop implementing MI in their classrooms after he bought permission from politicians to spread his ill-informed Common Core and high-stakes testing mishegaas.
The George Lucas Educational Foundation has been promoting MI in schools for decades and is light years ahead of the Gates Foundation: https://www.edutopia.org/blogs/tag/multiple-intelligences
Has Gates learned anything about project based learning yet? That’s another engaging approach that many teachers had to drop due to Gates and his know-it-all/buy-it-all intrusion on public education.
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Wow! People have different abilities! Who would have thought it? Those of us who grew up in the country and knew people who could figure the potential profit in a herd of cattle mentally while they leaned on a fence already knew that, before it was studied at Harvard or anywhere else. The admission that Gates did not know this amazes me. If I were that silly, I would remain silent.
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Gates could doubtless see the potential profit in a herd of cattle while he leaned on a fence, cuz that’s how he made all his billions.
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“If I were that silly, I would remain silent.”
Obviously, Gates probably hasn’t understood this little aphorism from Lincoln, eh: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
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Beware of the very obvious inability of Bill Gates to think beyond his specific, limited learning modality.
His sudden awareness of multiple intelligences means he will fund the creation of an algorithm that will be designed to identify a child’s specific intelligence that will shift so-called personalized computer programs so they will focus on that specific type of intelligence.
Human teachers do not compute for Bill Gates specific learning modality. Gates is an artificial intelligence hidden inside a human body. Because Gates lacks interpersonal skills he thinks more like HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey”.
Gates does not understand that many humans are not like him and need and want that human interaction that takes place been compassionate human teachers and the children they teach.
Gates is more of a psychopath or sociopath than a normal human being and it is obvious that he scores low to nothing in the ability to connect with other humans on an empathy level. But he does pay PR people to make it look like he has empathy when he doesn’t.
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Gates is 35 years behind the times, just as Wilbur Ross is six years out of it.
We are seeing the failure produced by American anti-intellectualism before our eyes.
Truth is Tech can’t save us from ourselves, and we can’t say we are a democracy when so few take the responsibility of voting.
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You’re right again!
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I have to disagree. Gates’ latest discovery is but the latest chapter in a dilettante’s journey.
In 2004, UVA cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham reviewed Gardner’s claims and the attempt by some educators to translate them into teaching methods:
http://educationnext.org/reframing-the-mind/
Willingham goes over the difficulty of translating the theory into instructional practice and points out that even Gardner disagreed with these attempts.
Willingham concludes:
“In the end, Gardner’s theory is simply not all that helpful. For scientists, the theory of the mind is almost certainly incorrect. For educators, the daring applications forwarded by others in Gardner’s name (and of which he apparently disapproves) are unlikely to help students. Gardner’s applications are relatively uncontroversial, although hard data on their effects are lacking. The fact that the theory is an inaccurate description of the mind makes it likely that the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective. All in all, educators would likely do well to turn their time and attention elsewhere.”
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My reaction on reading the post was not about the validity of Gardner, an assertion that could stretch on forever, but to Gates obliviousness to ideas that have been around for so long that they are old hat.
As he grows older, he may find out he knows even less than he thought. His pronouncements remind me of my lecturing everyone around me about how to fix schools in my late twenties based on two years experience teaching.
Sometimes I am almost embarrassed for these “reformer.” Then I consider the destruction of individuals lives, if not the countries.
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Reformers and country’s
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West Coast Teacher,
I don’t he will ever learn. He lives in a bubble.
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“All in all, educators would likely do well to turn their time and attention elsewhere.”
And where exactly would “elsewhere” be? Back to the time honored notion that linguistic and mathematical abilities trump all else? Considering the many decades that standardized tests in schools have focused on just that, we’re not exactly talking about yester-year. And what has that gotten us? A lot of students scoring on the left side of the bell curve who don’t feel very successful in one or both of the two subjects traditionally emphasized most in schools, I think.
“First do no harm” was adopted in the code of ethical conduct for my specialty, and I have a problem with setting up half the students to feel like failures. In Gardner’s book Creating Minds, he identified a famous person demonstrating the strengths in each of seven intelligences and the one thing virtually all had in common was a mentor encouraging their progress towards mastery. Sometimes it was a family member, for others it was a teacher or tutor. Not every student has someone at home who can serve in that role, so I want to be that mentor.
Whether called talents or intelligences, I believe this is very much like the learning styles debate –which was pretty much settled by calling them learning “preferences.” Whatever the nomenclature, both notions have been very useful for educators like me in recognizing individual differences, valuing each learner’s constellation of strengths, and nurturing potentials in a much broader array of disciplines and areas of interest to students. I see them as additional tools in my toolbelt which enable me to meet diverse student needs
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