Mel Levine says schools are for linguists

Mel Levine, the pediatrician and author who founded All Kinds of Minds is speaking to Mercer Island teachers and administrators today. I went to his talk last night, and one of the things he said is that the trouble with schools is that they're designed for linguists, not scientists. Interesting, so I wonder why it's sometimes so hard for us to hire linguists.

His point is that the education system is optimized for verbal people--those who are good at writing, speaking, interacting well with others--but not so good for people who are best at spatial or sequential reasoning, which is the type of skill that makes a good scientist or engineer.