Howard Gardner Quotes

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.

And Einstein stood out among natural scientists in his abiding curiosity about children's minds. He had once declared that we know all the physics that we will ever need to know by the age of three.

Less happily, many who are capable of exhibiting significant understanding appear deficient, simply because they cannot readily traffic in the commonly accepted coin of the educational realm. For instance, there is a significant population that lacks facility with formal examinations but can display relevant understanding when problems arise in natural contexts.

Consistency: How concerned is this person with consistency? Does this person care about whether stated beliefs, attitudes, and actions are consistent with one another? If so, how can one help this person deal with any inconsistencies? Stance on conflict: How much is this person bothered by the give-and-take of argument? Does this person like to match wits, or is it preferable to avoid sharp exchanges? If one has gone too far, how does one restore calm or equilibrium?

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

More broadly speaking, the milieus in which children spend their early years exert a very strong impact on the standards by which they subsequently judge the world around them. Whether in relation to fashion, food, geographical environment, or manner of speaking, models initially encountered by children continue to affect their tastes and preferences indefinitely, and these preferences prove very difficult to change. Closely related to standards of taste are an emerging set of beliefs about which behaviors are good and which values are the be cherished. In most cases, these standards initially reflect quite faithfully the value system encountered at home, at church, and at preschool or elementary school. Values with respect to behavior (you should not steal, you should salute the flag) and sets of beliefs (my country, right or wrong, all mommies are perfect, God is monitoring all of your actions) often exert a very powerful effect on children's actions and reactions. In some cultures, a line is drawn early between the moral sphere, where violations merit severe sanctions, and the conventional sphere, where practices are evaluated along a single dimension of morality. Even — and perhaps especially — when children are not conscious of the source and of the controversy surrounding these beliefs and values, unfortunate clashes may occur when they meet others raised with a contrasting set of values. It is assuredly no accident that Lenin and the Jesuits agreed on one precept: Let me have a child until the age of seven, and I will have that child for life.

"What is true of physics at its best may pertain as well to papers about physics. It is only on the surface, suggests Gerald Holton, that Einstein's papers of 1905 appear disparate. Three epochal papers, written but eight weeks apart, seem to occupy entirely different fields of physics: an interpretation of light as composed of quanta of energy; an explanation of Brownian motion that supports the notion of the atomic nature of matter; and the introduction of the "principle of relativity," which reconfigured our understanding of physical space and time. However, Holton idicates that all three papers arise from the same general problem-fluctuations in the pressure of radiation. Holton also notes a striking parallel in the style of the papers. Einstein begins each with a statement of a formal asymmetry, eliminates redundancy, and leads to one or more empirical predictions."

He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.

When Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate this subject in as many different ways as possible and to present it so that it would be comprehensible to people accustomed to different modes of thought and with different educational preparations.

Extraordinary individuals are distinguished less by their impressive “raw powers” than by their ability to identify their strengths and then to exploit them.

Discover your difference — the asynchrony with which you have been blessed or cursed — and make the most of it.

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.

Jean Monnet: “I regard every defeat as an opportunity.

Moreover, if one can present a topic in several ways, two important outcomes ensue. First, one reaches more students; after all, some students learn better from narrative entry points and others from social or artistic entries. Second, one conveys to students the idea that disciplinary experts readily conceive of topics in more than one way. There is no royal road to disciplinary understanding.

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