Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Howard Gardner

I am trained as a psychologist, and I think of all human issues in terms of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary theory.

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.

Contradictory precepts that have guided me for as long as I can remember: 1: I will live forever. 2: I will die tomorrow.

When we teach in pluralistic ways, there are two wonderful dividends. First of all, we reach more students, because some learn best through stories, some through works of art, some through role play etc. Second of all, we show what it is like really to understand something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Truth is about propositions. When it comes to determining truth, it is vital to understand the methods used by individuals in asserting propositions.

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

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.

For many, perhaps most, Americans, markets are sacrosanct. Most people in the United States cannot even envision a society that doesn't revolve around an untrammeled market.

Since we all have different cognitive profiles, educators should take those individual differences very seriously.

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

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

If you understand something well, you can represent it, describe it, embody it in several ways. Indeed, if you can only present it in one way, then your own mastery is likely to be tenuous.

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.

For most, the school is the first model of a community, and it can be a very powerful one. We need to ensure that young people are raised in educational communities that they admire and that they will seek to emulate or re-create for the rest of their lives.

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 want to have good workers and good citizens, we need to create common spaces in which individuals can talk about the moral and ethical dilemmas that they have faced and how they resolve them.

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.

I am basically a supporter of Barack Obama - it is not easy to be a post-partisan president in a hyper-partisan era.

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

The problems in our educational system are indissociable from broader malignant trends in our society, and they can't be solved by lots of testing and by punitive actions against schools that are not performing well.

Since the dawn of civilization, markets have been ubiquitous. Many of us have benefited from their focus and efficiency. Yet two widely held beliefs - that markets are best left unregulated and that markets are inherently benign - are naive and outdated.

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

As history unfolds, as cultures evolve, of course the intelligences which they value change.

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.

Much of education can and should take place in schools and other formally designated community institutions. But the world beyond the schoolhouse is crucial to education, and both traditional and new media are more important than ever.

I make fun of Mensa. I don't know a great deal about Mensa - that's the high IQ group - but I say, 'To get into Mensa, you have to have a high IQ, and once you get in, you spend your time congratulating people who are in Mensa with you.' To me that's a pretty stupid way to spend your life.

The accumulation and cross-generational transmission of wealth in the United States has gone way too far. When a young hedge-fund manager can take home a sum reminiscent of the gross national product of a small country, something is askew.

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.

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.'

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.

It's important to underscore that it is not mediocre test scores that have caused the major problems in the U.S. It has been unnecessary wars, ranging from Vietnam to Iraq, and unfair financial practices on Wall Street. And these were brought about by 'the best and the brightest,' many of whom were educated at my own institution.

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.

I favor a system where students in publicly funded institutions make a commitment: if they do well in the private sector, they will revert a certain percentage of their income to the education sector; and if they devote some years to public service, their debt will be forgiven.

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.

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.

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.

In a large country like the United States or India, families differ significantly on their own education values, and I don't believe it is necessary to put everyone through the same curricula and assessments.

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

Intelligences are enhanced when a person is engaged in activities that involve the exercise of that intelligence. It helps to have good teachers, ample resources, and personal motivation. Anyone can improve any intelligence; but it is easier to improve the intelligence if those factors are available and if you have high potential in that intelligence.

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

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

All human beings have all of the intelligences. But we differ, for both genetic and experiential reasons, in our profile of intelligences at any moment.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.