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Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner is a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero.

Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in Education and in 2000 he received a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2005 and again in 2008 he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. He has received honorary degrees from twenty-two colleges and universities, including institutions in Ireland, Italy, Israel, and Chile.

The author of over twenty books translated into twenty-seven languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past twenty five years, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments, education for understanding, and the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment. In the middle 1990s, Gardner and his colleagues launched The GoodWork Project. "GoodWork" is work that is excellent in quality, personally engaging, and exhibits a sense of responsibility with respect to implications and applications. Researchers have examined how individuals who wish to carry out good work succeed in doing so during a time when conditions are changing very quickly, market forces are very powerful, and our sense of time and space is being radically altered by technologies, such as the web. Gardner and colleagues have also studied curricula. Gardner's books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Among his books are The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, The K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Penguin Putnam, 2000) Intelligence Reframed (Basic Books, 2000), Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001), Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), and Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work (Harvard University Press, 2004; with Wendy Fischman, Becca Solomon, and Deborah Greenspan). These books are available through the Project Zero eBookstore.

Currently Gardner continues to direct the GoodWork project, which is concentrating on issues of ethics with secondary and college students. In addition, he co-directs the GoodPlay and Trust projects; a major current interest is the way in which ethics are being affected by the new digital media.

In 2006 Gardner published Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons, The Development and Education of the Mind, and Howard Gardner Under Fire. In Howard Gardner Under Fire, Gardner's work is examined critically; the book includes a lengthy autobiography and a complete biography. In the spring of 2007, Five Minds for the Future was published by Harvard Business School Press. Responsibility at Work, which Gardner edited, was published in the summer of 2007.

Howard Gardner: I am certainly very much in favor of assessment. I think anybody who's at all serious needs to know how he or she is doing. And as you become more of a professional, you do more of the assessment yourself. I'm a writer and I don't have to have as much editing as I did decades ago. On the other hand, I probably need more feedback on speaking than on writing because I do more writing than I do speaking. So assessment is great. And testing is a kind of assessment. It tends to be more formal; namely you can assess all the time. Testing involves sitting down and doing something in a circumscribed period of time. Standardized testing means this is a test that's done widely for many, many different kinds of people, but it's done under standard conditions. You show up at 10 o'clock in a certain room, maybe with a No. 2 pencil or at a computer station and you click. And there's certainly reasons why we like to do standardized testing. For example, if you want to know how American kids in general are doing compared to 10 years ago or how American kids are doing compared to Finnish kids or Turkish kids, you need to have those kinds of instruments. The problem is in the United States we have excessively valorized a certain kind of test - the short-answer, multiple-choice test. And we do way too much of it.

Somebody once quipped that, you know, if somebody's sick, it doesn't help to take their temperature all the time. It doesn't make them any better. In America now and even in 2015 President [Barack] Obama said we're doing too much testing. The notion is kids aren't doing well; let's test them over and over again. All that does is waste time that could be done in educating kids, getting them excited about learning, and so on. So if you ask Howard Gardner what does he think about the whole environment, what I would say is certainly we should assess and we should give feedback to people conveniently in a way they can use it. There's certain reasons why we need to have standard tests if we want to do comparisons among populations. But that can be done by sampling. You can find out how the United States is doing by assessing 1,200 kids of a certain age. That's how we actually do public opinion polling for elections. When it comes to applying for highly selective colleges or universities, I think it's fair to have a test like an SAT or an ACT, but it's really stupid to make that your only measurement. You should be looking at student work, looking at recommendations, interviewing students if you can. Letting them make a case for themselves and importantly, since I'm a believer in affirmative action, if you have two kids who get the same score and one kid has had thousands of dollars spent on preparation by a Princeton Review and the other kid didn't even know there was such a thing as a test prep, then I think, you know, the 1,200 in the latter kid is much more impressive than the 1,200 in the former. People often say, "I want to have all my kids' intelligences tested," and I don't dismiss it. But the first thing I say is, "How's the child doing? Is the child thriving? Is the child excited about things, school, have hobbies, have friends?" If kids are fine leave them alone and just say a prayer of thanks. When the armamentarium of intelligence becomes important is when an individual is having some kind of problem. Because then you need to know what's the nature of the problem. For example, is the child being asked to learn something in a way that the child doesn't have much aptitude for? Are there other ways of getting at that kind of issue? And this is a good challenge particularly for teachers because a teacher's job is to help everybody learn certain things. But there's nowhere is it written they have to all learn it in the same way. When it comes to parents, what I would say is you have to avoid positive narcissism and negative narcissism. Positive narcissism is: The one thing I can do is play the tuba and my child has got to play the tuba. Negative narcissism is: The one thing I couldn't do is play the tuba and my child must play the tuba. What I say is take your kid on lots of different things. Go to museums. Go to parks. Go on holidays. Watch what your child is interested in and, even more, watch how your child pursues those things. That will tell you what the child's intelligences are. And then you have a choice. Do you want to nurture those or do you want to try to develop ones that aren't so good? I am definitely uneven in my intelligences, like I think everybody is. But I've spent a lot of time trying to bolster the weaker ones just because I want to. But I wouldn't have to do that. I could just go from strength.

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An Intelligence Expert Defines the Real Problem with Standardized Testing in Schools

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Howard Gardner Howard Gardner is a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero.

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Brazil is a very large country with several discrepancies, so my opinion is based only on the perspective that I have from my own reality, and in this case I can say that yes, as far as possible, imposed by an inevitable standardization.

Since I was a child I had the opportunity to develop bodily-kinesthetic, spatial and naturalistic intelligence with physical education, art and general classes, and with the first one making me almost traumatize due to its mandatory until the end of Elementary School. A little later, the focus was more on logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligence until the end of High School.

The possibility of developing musical intelligence was never really offered by the education system itself but in the church or in courses that were not at school, but I was not interested. I developed existential intelligence from all the experiences at school and beyond, so I can't say if the school was able to offer this to me.

What I really think that the Brazilian education system does not offer is the basis for interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence because it focuses so much on obtaining objective results, as a high score on the ENEM, and forgets to give notions of citizenship and to encourage the development of your individuality.

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In my opinion the Brazilian education system is flawed, because it makes the student study only limited things, mainly math and Portuguese. In schools we don’t expand our diverse intelligences because we don't have this opportunity, we are obliged to study specific topics and in the end we are defined by a test,  ENEM.

Often students are disinterested because they see only things that are not of interest to them (it doesn’t mean that we should learn only things that we like, but it’s important we have a time to do activities that are pleasurable).

The school should help the student to develop his skills and should undestand that students learn differently and at different times build their learning.

I was probably prevented from developing certain skills that I might have. Since we were little we are taught to write and solve math exercises, and this is not a bad thing, the problem is to focus only on those areas.

We focus on knowledge, according to our skills and competences and we will be useful and productive in society, following our innate abilities. Otherwise these students will be unhappy in the areas of work they will perform.

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Brazil is known for being a country with deficient public services, making public schools unable to provide an adequate education  for the population. Even though Brazilian private schools deliver a better education, It's noticeable that they only focus on two kinds of intelligence: Logical-mathematical and  linguistic.

In my opinion, since I have access to private education, I have been benefited by the school system. However, like most of schools, I am only taught  how to do well on tests, like ENEM, and I'm rarely asked to use my creativity or improve my different types of intelligence.

In conclusion, the Brazilian School system does not encourage Its students to develop their multiple inteligencies, limiting their capacity, therefore making less diverse and capable professionals in the future.