Quotes from Howard Gardner

Every child needs to become literate in one or more languages, and every child should become comfortable in the major scholarly disciplines - historical, scientific, mathematical, and artistic-humanistic thinking. Beyond that, I am not in favour of a uniform system. I think there should be some choices.

We are not going to get rid of the digital media - nor should we want to - and so our challenge is to use the media to determine the truth, rather than to let the media obfuscate matters.

It's absolutely clear to me that Obama has enormous intrapersonal intelligence. His book, 'Dreams from My Father,' is an amazing book, and it's obvious to everybody he has lots of intrapersonal intelligence.

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.

Students should learn about the long-standing values of truth, beauty, and goodness, think hard about them, and interrogate them skillfully.

I think that I am strongest in linguistic and musical intelligence, and I continue to work on my interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.

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

On the basis of research in several disciplines, including the study of how human capacities are represented in the brain, I developed the idea that each of us has a number of relatively independent mental faculties, which can be termed our 'multiple intelligences.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed, knowledge that one will be judged on some criterion of "creativeness" or "originality" tends to narrow the scope of what one can produce (leading to products that are then judged as relatively conventional); in contrast, the absence of an evaluations seems to liberate creativity.

Nearly all cultures have evolved specific ideas about education, although only in modern times does education prove to be virtually coterminous with formal schooling. Ultimately, the natural paths and forms of development place many children in a difficult bind, as students begin to address the quite different agenda of the schoolroom and the particular structure of the scholastic domains.

given that many items reported by the "establishment press" turn out to be false, and that the same establishment press misses many important stories altogether, why should we attribute any special status to journalists? Why should we hallow, or expect, journalistic truths?

at a time when ethical lapses and blatant crimes pervade the political and economic and clerical landscapes (and has there ever been a time when, or a place where, such malfeasance was absent?), well-trained investigative journalists are essential for the survival of democratic institutions.

Having demonstrated the importance of sexuality in motivating human behavior in general, Freud called attention to the sexual factors that undergird a creative life. In Freud's view, creative individuals are inclined (or compelled) to sublimate much of their libidinal energy into "secondary" pursuits, such as writing, drawing, composing, or investigating scientific puzzles. He would have found many data of interest in the seven cases presented here.

Between the conception of the idea of this special relativity theory and the completion of the corresponding publication, there elapsed five or six weeks. But it would be hardly correct to consider this as a birth date, because earlier the arguments and building blocks were being prepared over a period of years, although without bringing about the fundamental decision.

They reflect common sense or—as my mentor Nelson Goodman used to quip—common nonsense.

Influential thinkers in the West have done an admirable job of cleaving apart excellence in technique from distinction in morality. We appreciate that a person can be highly skilled without being moral in the least; that a person can be ethical without having the requisite competence; and that many of us stand out neither in terms of excellence nor social responsibility.

With this generic view of mind changing as background, I teased out a number of crucial dimensions. These can serve as a checklist when one is considering candidates for mind changing:

CHANGING MINDS THROUGH REPRESENTATIONAL REDESCRIPTION