School was designed for 2 of your 9 intelligences. Here is what the framework tells us about the other 7 — and how SPARK is built to reach all of them.
An estimated 75% of what Indian school children learn is through rote memorisation. Let that land for a moment. Three-quarters of what a child carries out of a classroom is not understanding — it is retrieval. It is the capacity to reproduce a fact on a page under time pressure, and then, within weeks, forget it entirely. India’s National Education Policy 2020 named this problem explicitly and called for a shift toward experiential, holistic learning. Five years later, the gap between policy vision and classroom reality remains enormous. The reason is not a lack of political will. It is a much deeper problem: our education system is built on the assumption that there is essentially one kind of intelligence — and Howard Gardner proved, forty years ago, that this is simply not true.
The nine intelligences
In 1983, Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner published Frames of Mind, proposing that human intelligence is not a single fixed quantity measurable by IQ but a spectrum of at least seven distinct capacities. He has since expanded the framework to nine. Each represents a different pathway through which a person understands, processes, and interacts with the world:
Linguistic — the intelligence of words, narrative, and language. Logical-Mathematical — patterns, reasoning, and abstraction. Spatial — visualisation, design, and mental mapping. Musical — rhythm, sound, and tonal sensitivity. Bodily-Kinesthetic — movement, touch, and physical craft. Interpersonal — empathy, social attunement, and collaboration. Intrapersonal — self-awareness, metacognition, and emotional intelligence. Naturalist — sensitivity to living systems, ecology, and environment. Existential — the capacity to engage with deep questions of purpose, meaning, and existence.
The implication is radical, even if it has been quietly absorbed into educational theory without being radically acted upon: every child who struggles in a conventional classroom may not be struggling with learning. They may be struggling with the form of learning being offered to them. A child with exceptional bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and weak linguistic intelligence is not less intelligent than the child who reads fluently — they are differently intelligent. Yet the classroom rewards only two of the nine: linguistic and logical-mathematical. The other seven are largely invisible to assessment, often invisible to teachers, and structurally excluded from the learning process.
What neuroscience is now confirming
Recent research adds urgency to this conversation. Studies published in 2025 confirm that neural architecture is far more flexible than older models assumed — the brain is not pre-wired for one mode of knowing. It is experience-dependent, environmentally shaped, and capable of building multiple competencies through multiple entry points. The problem is not the brain’s capacity. The problem is the narrowness of the experiences we offer it.
Research published in the Journal of Educational Research and Practice (2025) found that designing learning experiences around multiple intelligences improved not just academic performance but student responsibility, critical thinking, and collaboration. These are not soft outcomes. These are the capacities that India’s economy urgently needs, and that its education system is structurally failing to produce. India’s NEP 2020 and Curriculum Reform 2025 have moved in the right direction by replacing rigid academic streams with choice-based systems — but the gap between policy vision and classroom reality remains enormous.
How SPARK reaches all nine
This is the precise gap that experiential learning — when designed with intentionality — is built to close. Not as a buzzword or an occasional field trip, but as a structural framework that systematically engages all nine intelligences in every learning session. At Karkei, we built the SPARK framework — Simulate, Play, Act, React, Know — because we understood that the sequence of experiential learning is not arbitrary. Each phase activates a different cluster of intelligences:
Simulate draws on Spatial and Logical-Mathematical intelligence — learners must visualise a real-world scenario and map its variables. Play draws on Musical, Bodily-Kinesthetic, and Interpersonal intelligence — there are stakes, collaboration, and rhythm to the interaction. Act draws on Linguistic and Existential intelligence — learners must articulate decisions and confront their consequences. React draws on Intrapersonal and Naturalist intelligence — what did I notice? What shifted? What does this system tell me? Know is where all nine intelligences synthesise into something a learner actually owns and retains.
A lecture completes one step of this loop. SPARK completes all five. A lecture activates Linguistic intelligence at best. A simulation activates six or seven simultaneously. And when the full loop runs — when a learner has simulated, played, acted, reacted, and known — they do not just remember the content. They have lived it.
The ninth intelligence is the most urgent
The existential intelligence deserves special attention — Gardner’s most contested addition, and perhaps his most profound. The capacity to sit with big questions: why am I here? What does this mean? What do I owe the world? For children navigating climate crisis, social inequality, and a rapidly automated economy, existential intelligence is not a philosophical luxury. It is a survival skill. At ERA Foundation, working with children in Tamil Nadu government schools through the Climate Clever Children programme, we see constantly how quickly young people engage with meaning-making when given the space. The intelligence is there. It has always been there. The system has simply been too narrow to reach it.
So what
Gardner gave us a map of nine different ways that human beings know the world in 1983. After forty years, the tragedy is not that the map was wrong — the growing neuroscience consensus suggests it was largely right. The tragedy is that we have had the map for four decades and are still designing schools as if there is only one road.
Stop measuring intelligence as a single number. Start building learning experiences that reach learners where their intelligence actually lives. If you are an educator, a school leader, or a parent asking why a brilliant child keeps failing — Gardner’s framework is a place to start. And if you are looking for a platform that has translated that framework into a structured, scalable methodology, Karkei’s waitlist is open.
— Elango Raghupathy
Founder, Karkei · Producer, Karuvachy Films · elangoraghupathy.com