Howard Gardner

Early life

Howard Earl Gardner was born July 11, 1943, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Ralph Gardner and Hilde (née Weilheimer) Gardner, German-Jewish immigrants who fled Germany prior to World War II.

Gardner described himself as "a studious child who gained much pleasure from playing the piano". Although Gardner never became a professional pianist, he taught piano from 1958 to 1969.

Education was of the utmost importance in the Gardner home. While his parents had hoped that he would attend Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, Gardner opted to attend a school closer to his hometown in Pennsylvania, Wyoming Seminary. Gardner had a desire to learn and greatly excelled in school.

Career

Gardner graduated from Harvard University in 1965 with an AB in social relations, and studied under the renowned Erik Erikson. He would go on to obtain his PhD in developmental psychology at Harvard while working with psychologists Roger Brown and Jerome Bruner, and philosopher Nelson Goodman.

For his postdoctoral fellowship, Gardner worked alongside Norman Geschwind at Boston Veterans Administration Hospital and continued his work there for another 20 years. Gardner began teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1986. Since 1995, much of the focus of his work has been on The GoodWork Project, now part of a larger initiative known as The Good Project that encourages excellence, ethics, and engagement in work, digital life, and beyond.

In 2000, Gardner, Kurt Fischer, and their colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education established the master's degree program in Mind, Brain and Education. This program was thought to be the first of its kind around the world. Many universities in both the United States and abroad have since developed similar programs. Four years later in 2004, Gardner would continue writing about the mind and brain and would publish Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds, a book about seven forms of mind-change.

Theory and criticism

According to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, humans have several different ways of processing information, and these ways are relatively independent of one another. The theory is a critique of the standard intelligence theory, which emphasizes the correlation among abilities, as well as traditional measures like IQ tests that typically only account for linguistic, logical, and spatial abilities. Since 1999, Gardner has identified eight intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Gardner is informally considering two additional intelligences, existential and pedagogical. Many teachers, school administrators, and special educators have been inspired by Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences as it has allowed for the idea that there is more than one way to define a person's intellect.

Gardner's definition of intelligence has been met with some criticism in education circles as well as in the field of psychology. Perhaps the strongest and most enduring critique of his theory of multiple intelligences centers on its supposed lack of empirical evidence. Gardner responds that his theory is based entirely on empirical evidence as opposed to experimental evidence, as he does not believe experimental evidence is appropriate for a theoretical synthesis.

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences can be seen as both a departure from and a continuation of the last century's work on the subject of human intelligence. Other prominent psychologists whose contributions variously developed or expanded the field of study include Charles Spearman, Louis Thurstone, Edward Thorndike, and Robert Sternberg.

In 1967, Professor Nelson Goodman started an educational program called Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which began with a focus in arts education and now spans throughout a wide variety of educational arenas. Howard Gardner and David Perkins were founding Research Assistants and later Co-Directed Project Zero from 1972-2000. Project Zero's mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines at the individual and institutional levels.

For almost two decades, in collaboration with William Damon, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and several other colleagues, Gardner has been directing research at The Good Project on the nature of good work, good play, and good collaboration. The goal of his research is to determine what it means to achieve work that is at once excellent, engaging, and carried out in an ethical way. With colleagues Lynn Barendsen, Wendy Fischman, and Carrie James, Gardner has developed curricular toolkits on these topics for use in educational and professional circles.

Achievements and awards

In 1981 Gardner was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. In 1990 he became the first American to receive the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education. In 1985, The National Psychology Awards for Excellence in the Media, awarded Gardner The Book Award for Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which was published by Basic Books. In 1987, he received the William James Award from the American Psychological Association. In 2000 he received a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Four years later he was named an Honorary Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. In the years 2005 and 2008 he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the top 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In 2011, he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Social Sciences for his development of multiple intelligences theory. In 2015, he received the Brock International Prize in Education.

He has received 31 honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world, including institutions in Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and Spain.

Personal life

Howard Gardner is married to Ellen Winner, Professor of Psychology at Boston College. They have one child, Benjamin. Gardner has three children from an earlier marriage: Kerith (1969), Jay (1971), and Andrew (1976); and four grandchildren, Oscar (2005), Agnes (2011), Olivia (2015), and Faye Marguerite (2016).