Essential Howard Gardner

A dozen or so framed letters are hanging on the walls of Professor Howard Gardner’s office on the second floor of Longfellow Hall. Some are handwritten, others are typed. A few are from people you might expect, like fellow psychologists Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget. There’s one from Susanne Langer, the first woman to be professionally recognized as an American philosopher, and another from one of Gardner’s former professors at Harvard, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. There are even a few surprise senders, like comedian Groucho Marx and Supreme Court Justice David Souter. The longest letter is nine pages single spaced and typed, from MIT Professor Noam Chomsky. 

In many ways, the collection of letters offers insight into Gardner’s long professional career, which started in an elementary school in 1969 while he was getting his Ph.D. at Harvard in social psychology, and is still going strong, despite his official “retirement” back in 2019. Gardner’s newest books, The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind and The Essential Howard Gardner on Education, offer that same insight, and more, in part because Gardner didn’t write the books as simple collections of his “greatest hit” essays. Instead, the books are an attempt to explain what he was thinking, and who was influencing his thinking, at various times in his life. 

“The new books are not just two sets of 25 articles each, nor are they the ones which I think are the most profound,” Gardner says, “but rather the ones that tell a story about my own intellectual development. As a psychologist, that’s what the mind is about. And as an educator, that’s what the real world is about.”

His wife, Ellen Winner, a senior research associate at Project Zero (where Gardner was a founding member) and professor emerita at Boston College, also sees the books as the “story” of Howard Gardner.

“My wife and I work very closely together, and she reads everything I write, but she hadn’t looked at the new books until they came out,” Gardner says, “and she was shocked. She said, this is really a story. I talk in each book about why I did this and what it led to.”

In The Essential Howard Gardner on Education, for example, Gardner begins by telling the story of his early interest in learning, which started as a preschooler in Aunt Eunice and Uncle Gar’s school for 3- and 4-year-olds in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and then as a young child who, not yet knowing what college was, “fanaticized” about being a K–12 schoolteacher. Throughout the book, within sections, he reprints pieces he’s written or co-written and offers updated thoughts. The section topics are varied, reflecting the multidisciplinary interests that Gardner has focused on throughout his career. 

“In A Synthesizing Mind, my memoir — which is not these two books — I talk about how I loved being in college, but I hated being in graduate school because once I got to graduate school, they tried to make me into a research psychologist. They tried to pigeonhole me,” Gardner says. “They were trying to train professors, and professors are supposed to be excellent in one thing and to write in that area. But I really remained interested in history, sociology, anthropology, and so on. What I’ve tried to do in my career, I’ve tried to be a good scholar, but I focus on whatever interests me. If you thumb through the table of contents in the two new books, you’re going to read stuff about the brain, you’re going to read stuff about language, you’re going to read stuff about my times in China, about my times in Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy.” There are sections on higher ed, early art, and the app generation.

In a section in the education book called “Influences,” Gardner shares an essay about getting a summer job with psychologist Bruner after graduating from Harvard College. It was a job, he writes, that “would change both my personal and professional life.” (It’s how he met his first wife, a fellow Bruner researcher, and was introduced to influential scholars in the field.) He also includes pieces on Piaget and Project Zero founder Nelson Goodman, described as one of his “intellectual fathers,” and a story about first discovering the field of psychology.

“I never knew anything about psychology, but I had a wonderful uncle, Uncle Fred, and when I was 16, he gave me a psychology textbook,” Gardner says. “I’d never heard of the field of psychology. My parents didn’t go to college. They weren’t academic. My uncle sensed I was interested in psychology. What blew my mind is when I looked at this textbook — we’re talking 1950 — they had colorblind tests and I’m colorblind. It never occurred to me that there were scholarly explanations for what happens when you can’t see colors.”

He writes that “it was hardly a surprise that when I got to college, after a flirtation with the study of history, I elected to concentrate in a field called social relations” after discovering Erikson’s work. “He was a psychoanalyst, very well-known 50 years ago. Erikson had never gone to college, but he was writing about psychology and history. He wrote a book called Young Man Luther about Martin Luther and then he wrote a book for which he won lots of prizes, Gandhi’s Truth, about Mahatma Gandhi. Erikson’s interest in psychology got me interested in the field of psychology.”

Social relations, or Soc Rel as it was known, was a combination of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. “It was absolutely right for me because I was interested in human beings and how we think and what we do,” he says. “As a Soc Rel major, I was able to look at all those different things.” That interdisciplinary approach helped when it came time to write his undergraduate thesis, a field study of Leisure Village, one of the first retirement communities in the United States.

Readers eager to hear more about the area Gardner is perhaps most known for, his theory of multiple intelligences (MI), will find sections in both Essential books, including reflections and essays tackling everything from the myth of MI to classroom uses and future applications to what constitutes an intelligence.

Describing his “intelligences,” Gardner says, “My own mind, I have a fairly standard academic mind. I'm good in language. I’m reasonably logical. I’ve got musical intelligence, but that's a bonus. Nobody cares that I play the piano.” (He still plays nearly every day.) He says that if his mind is considered distinctive, it’s because he likes to examine lots of different things, from lots of different sources, drawing back to his undergraduate years as a Soc Rel concentrator. “I have a synthesizing mind. And that means I like to collect information. I’m curious about many things. And then I try to put it together in a way that makes sense to me, but also to other people.”

This includes advice, which he offers in both Essential books.

“The last essay in the education volume is my advice to young researchers in education,” he says. “Rather than talk about my work, I tried to talk about what I would say to a student, probably an Ed School student who was interested in research. The 12 lessons that I thought they should absorb.

“And then in the mind book — and this only came to me this past summer in 2024 when the book was just going to press — I said to myself, ‘I’m old. I could drop dead tomorrow. I might not, some of my teachers lived a long time.’ But I remembered a line from Andrew Marvell, the poet: ‘Had we but world enough, and time.’ And so, I called the last essay, ‘Had I But World Enough and Time.’ It’s a look at my past. It’s a statement of my present. But both of those book endings are for the future: What I think I would say to my students, and in the other case, what I would say to researchers all over the world, what issues I think that they should pursue.”

One thing that Gardner does now with his time is stay active on his blog.

“What’s important to me is to be able to continue to work as much as I can. Anybody who’s in his ninth decade, he or she knows they’re not as sharp as they were when they were in their fourth decade. Anybody who doesn’t think that is just fooling themselves,” he says. “I don't think I'm ever going to write another book, but I have probably written several hundred blogs in the past five years. What I do is I have an idea, and I write a thousand words about it.” A recent two-part essay on fiction looks at why, despite writing almost daily, he’s never considered trying his hand at the genre. 

Reflecting on his two new Essential books, Gardner says that there were some surprises along the way.

“When I was a young researcher, I spent 15 years from the time I got my Ph.D. as a full-time researcher until I became hired here as a professor,” he says. “I did straight research with children, particularly in the arts and with brain damage patients, trying to understand the breakdown of their capacities under various kinds of brain damage. I wrote a book called The Shattered Mind, and I wrote a textbook on developmental psychology. I found that it was very difficult in the books to summarize my empirical work, because when you're describing experiments, you have to describe why you did the experiment, how you set it up, how you did the data analysis, how you discuss things, and how you concluded. And that takes many pages. I shortchanged my empirical work in those books. …So, a surprise with the Essential books was that it’s difficult, unless you want to reprint a whole article, to summarize research in a compelling way. But I did my best. 

“What else was a surprise?” he says. “I think I was pleasantly surprised, as it was to my wife, about how easy it was to take my intellectual trajectory and tell it as a story. And I am the best person to do that since I went through all those different steps.”