He Created the ‘Theory of Multiple Intelligences.’ What if Howard Gardner Were U.S. Education Secretary?

This article originally appeared in the "Washington Post"

Posted October 1, 2016
By Howard Gardner

A new president will take the oath of office early next year and will likely appoint a new secretary of education (though the current man with the job, John King Jr., could be tapped). We can only speculate on who each presidential candidate could pick, but for now, let’s pursue another thought experiment. Author C.M. Rubin has asked six people prominent in the world of education what they would do if they had the job, and this is the third of six posts that will reveal their answers.

The first interview, conducted by author C.M. Rubin, was with Andy Hargreaves, author and Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. The second was with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in the country. This, the third, is with Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and creator of the famous theory of multiple intelligences.

The other three people being interviewed by Rubin are Diane Ravitch, education historian, best-selling author and co-founder of the Network for Public Education; Charles Fadel, author, inventor and the founder and chairman of the Center for Curriculum Redesign; and Julia Freeland Fisher, author and director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

Gardner revolutionized the fields of psychology and education more than 30 years ago when he published his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” which detailed a new model of human intelligence that went beyond the traditional view that there was a single kind that could be measured by standardized tests....