Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome

This article showed that not all people should be educated on a standard set of progression that weeds out the weaker links, but instead looks at people as individuals and that have different stages of learning ability. Although tests set up to test if a child is up to par with the rest of his class are often set in place, it not correct to abandon a child who does not pass the test. As is stated, the schooled mind does not always mean the person will correlate to a valuable citizen. As Gardner stated, schools already emphasis 1. logical mathematical skills 2. linguistic capacities. But Gardner offered 5 more ways schools should focus, such as 3. capacity to represent space, time, and objects through symbols, 4. musical intelligence, 5. communications and problem solving with the body, 6. capacity to understand others, and 7. ability to understand ones self. By broadening his ideas on what it is to be smart and making more categories, it makes it harder for traditionalists to banish people for just not fitting into the number 1 and 2. There needs to be more ways to understand and value people that just 1 or 2 categories, we need to value people for the many different ways they are and embrace people as individuals.