Free The Element by Ken Robinson Page A

Certainly, the epiphany stories in this book indicate that many of the moments when things suddenly come clear happen from seeing new connections between events, ideas, and circumstances.
    The third feature of intelligence is that it is entirely distinctive. Every person’s intelligence is as unique as a fingerprint. There might be seven, ten, or a hundred different forms of intelligence, but each of us uses these forms in different ways. My profile of abilities involves a different combination of dominant and dormant intelligences than yours does. The person down the street has another profile entirely. Twins use their intelligences differently from one another, as do people on opposite sides of the globe.
    This brings us back to the question I asked earlier: How are you intelligent? Knowing that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinctive allows you to address that question in new ways. This is one of the core components of the Element. For when you explode your preconceived ideas about intelligence, you can begin to see your own intelligence in new ways. No person is a single intellectual score on a linear scale. And no two people with the same scores will do the same things, share all of the same passions, or accomplish the same amount with their lives. Discovering the Element is all about allowing yourself access to all of the ways in which you experience the world, and discovering where your own true strengths lie.
    Just don’t take them for granted.

CHAPTER THREE
    Beyond Imagining

    FAITH RINGGOLD is an acclaimed artist, best known for her painted story quilts. She has exhibited in major museums all over the world, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In addition, she is an award-winning writer, having received the Caldecott Honor for her first book, Tar Beach . She has also composed and recorded songs.
    Faith’s life brims with creativity. Interestingly, though, she found herself on this path when illness kept her out of school. She got asthma when she was two, and because of this, had a late start to formal education. During our interview, she told me that she felt that being out of school with asthma made a positive difference in her development “because I was not around for some of the indoctrinations, you know? I was not around to be really formed in the way that I think a lot of kids are formed in a regimented society, which a school is and I guess it has to be in a sense. Because when you have a lot of people in one space, you have to move them around in a certain way to make it work. I just did not ever get hooked into the regimentation. I missed all of kindergarten and the first grade. By the second grade, I was going. But every year, I would be absent for at least, I don’t know, maybe two or three weeks with asthma. And I absolutely did not mind missing those classes.”
    Her mother worked hard with her to help her keep pace with what she was missing in school. And when they weren’t studying, they were able to explore the wider world of the arts that existed all around Harlem in the 1930s.
    “My mother took me to see all the great acts of that time. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine—all these old singers and bandleaders and all those people who were so wonderful. And so these people were the ones who I thought of as being highly creative. It was so obvious that they were making this art out of their own bodies. We all lived in the same neighborhood. You just ran into them—here they are, you know? I was deeply inspired by their art and by their willingness to give of themselves to the public and to their audience. It made me understand about the communication aspect of being an artist.
    “I was never forced to be like the other kids. I did not dress like them. I did not look like them. And in my family, it was not expected that I should be like that. So, it came quite natural to me