Howard Gardner Quotations

Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences.

I'd rather see the United States as a beacon of good work and good citizenship, rather than as #1 on some international educational measurement.

Kids go to school and college and get through, but they don't seem to really care about using their minds. School doesn't have the kind of long term positive impact that it should.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.

If we were to abandon concern for what is true, what is false, and what remains indeterminate, the world would be totally chaotic. Even those who deny the importance of truth, on the one hand, are quick to jump on anyone who is caught lying.

By nature, I am not an optimist, though I try to act as if I am.

The countries who do the best in international comparisons, whether it's Finland or Japan, Denmark or Singapore, do well because they have professional teachers who are respected, and they also have family and community which support learning.

The biggest communities in which young people now reside are online communities.

My belief in why America has been doing so well up to now is that we have been propelled by our immigrants and our encouragement of technical innovation and, indeed, creativity across the board.

Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too.

A lot of knowledge in any kind of an organization is what we call task knowledge. These are things that people who have been there a long time understand are important, but they may not know how to talk about them. It's often called the culture of the organization.

While I've worked on many topics and written many books, I have not abandoned my interest in multiple intelligences.

If I know you're very good in music, I can predict with just about zero accuracy whether you're going to be good or bad in other things.

Stories are the single most powerful tool in a leader's toolkit.

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.

Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.

I am knowledgeable enough about the world of prizes to realize that there is a large degree of luck - both for the recognitions that you receive and those that you did not.

I think tolerating a certain degree of failure-not because it's good for you but because it's a necessary part of growth-is a very important part of the message the leadership can give.

Over time and cultures, the most robust and most effective form of communication is the creation of a powerful narrative,

I often find that entrepreneurs think my theory is great. My interpretation is that they are people who weren't considered that smart in school because they didn't have good notation skills-you know, moving little symbols around.

Being fast and not very spatial doesn't make you any better in spatial kinds of things; you probably just get the wrong answer more quickly.

Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless.

There are clear differences between child and adult artistic activity. While the child may be aware that he is doing things differently from others, he does not fully appreciate the rules and conventions of symbolic realms; his adventurousness holds little significance. In contrast, the adult artist is fully cognizant of the norms embraced by others; his willingness, his compulsion, to reject convention is purchased, at the very least, with full knowledge of what he is doing and often at considerable psychic cost to himself.

To ask "Where in your brain is intelligence?" is like asking "Where is the voice in the radio?"

No individual can be in full control of his fate-our strengths come significantly from our history, our experiences largely from the vagaries of chance. But by seizing the opportunity to leverage and frame these experiences, we gain agency over them. And this heightened agency, in turn, places us in a stronger position to deal with future experiences, even as it may alter our own sense of strengths and possibilities.

Hitler didn't travel. Stalin didn't travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn't want to have their orthodoxy challenged.

We are natural mind changing entities until we are 10 or so. But as we get older...then it is very hard to change our minds

It may well be easier to remember a list if one sings it (or dances to it). However, these uses of the 'materials' of an intelligence are essentially trivial. What is not trivial is the capacity to think musically.

Fundamentalism is a kind of decision not to change your mind about something...Many of us are fundamentalists...because it worked pretty well for us.

Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.

If Confucius can serve as the Patron Saint of Chinese education, let me propose Socrates as his equivalent in a Western educational context - a Socrates who is never content with the initial superficial response, but is always probing for finer distinctions, clearer examples, a more profound form of knowing. Our concept of knowledge has changed since classical times, but Socrates has provided us with a timeless educational goal - ever deeper understanding.

Education is at a turning point

Intelligence is the ability to find and solve problems and create products of value in one's own culture.

Part of the maturity of the sciences is an appreciation of which questions are best left to other disciplinary approaches.

If you think education is expensive, try estimating the cost of ignorance.

Perhaps, indeed, there are no truly universal ethics: or to put it more precisely, the ways in which ethical principles are interpreted will inevitably differ across cultures and eras. Yet, these differences arise chiefly at the margins. All known societies embrace the virtues of truthfulness, integrity, loyalty, fairness; none explicitly endorse falsehood, dishonesty, disloyalty, gross inequity. (Five Minds for the Future, p136)

In roughly the last century, important experiments have been launched by such charismatic educators as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Shinichi Suzuki, John Dewey, and A. S. Neil. These approaches have enjoyed considerable success[...] Yet they have had relatively little impact on the mainstream of education throughout the contemporary world.

Now intelligence seemed quantifiable. You could measure someone's actual or potential height, and now, it seemed, you could also measure someone's actual or potential intelligence. We had one dimension of mental ability along which we could array everyone... The whole concept has to be challenged; in fact, it has to be replaced.

What we want... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.

The ability to solve problems or to create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings.

One must exploit the asynchronies that have befallen one, link them to a promising issue or domain, reframe frustrations as opportunities, and, above all, persevere.

No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three people in our field.

Most people (by the time they have become adults ) can't change their minds because their neural pathways have become set... the longer neural pathways have been running one way the harder it is to rewire them.

An individual understands a concept, skill, theory, or domain of knowledge to the extent that he or she can apply it appropriately in a new situation.

We've got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage... You've got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.

Teaching which ignores the realities of children will be rejected as surely as any graft which attempts to ignore the body's immune system.

Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do... Ultimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves.

Creativity begins with an affinity for something. It's like falling in love.

We need to focus on the kind of human beings we want to have and the kind of society in which we want to live

Young children possess the ability to cut across the customary categories; to appreciate usually undiscerned links among realms, to respond effectively in a parallel manner to events which are usually categorized differently, and to capture these ori

Kids make their mark in life by doing what they can do, not what they can't... School is important, but life is more important. Being happy is using your skills productively, no matter what they are.

Being creative means first of all doing something unusual... On the other hand, however unusual it may be, the idea also has to be reasonable for people to take it seriously.

While we may continue to use the words smart and stupid, and while IQ tests may persist for certain purposes, the monopoly of those who believe in a single general intelligence has come to an end. Brain scientists and geneticists are documenting the incredible differentiation of human capacities, computer programmers are creating systems that are intelligent in different ways, and educators are freshly acknowledging that their students have distinctive strengths and weaknesses.

Teachers must be encouraged - I almost said 'freed', to pursue an education that strives for depth of understanding.

You learn at your best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure in being engaged in.

The Goal of Education is to Help People Use Their Minds Better

I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place

If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave.

It's not how smart you are that matters, what really counts is how you are smart.

But once we realize that people have very different kinds of minds, different kinds of strengths -- some people are good in thinking spatially, some in thinking language, others are very logical, other people need to be hands on and explore actively and try things out -- then education, which treats everybody the same way, is actually the most unfair education.

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts and cultivate these. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.

The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all students as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way.