Howard Gardner Quotes

"What is going on here? Why are students not mastering what they ought to be learning? It is my belief that, until recently, those of us involved in education have not appreciated the strength of the initial conceptions, stereotypes, and "scripts" that students bring to their school learning nor the difficulty of refashioning or eradicating them. We have failed to appreciate that in nearly every student there is a five-year-old "unschooled" mind struggling to get out and express itself. Nor have we realized how challenging it is to convey novel materials so that their implications will be appreciated by children who have long conceptualized materials of this sort in a fundamentally different and deeply entrenched way."

"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."

if you think you know what is going on, you haven’t got a clue about what’s going on.

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

Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes.

I readily admit that the theory (of multiple intelligences) is no longer current. Several fields of knowledge have advanced significantly since the early 1980s.

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:

Students of extraordinariness lack strong models that can be crisply tested.

Extraordinary individuals fail often and sometimes dramatically. Rather than giving up, however, they are challenged to learn from their setbacks and to convert defeats into opportunities.

Few things in life are as enjoyable as when we concentrate on a difficult task, using all our skills, knowing what has to be done.

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

"Einstein felt that he did not have great mathematical gifts and deliberately chose not to take courses and to continue in that area.

The fact that I neglected mathematics to a certain extent had its causes not merely in my stronger interest in science than in mathematics but also in the following strange experience....I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us....In physics, however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

This capacity to pick out important issues dovetailed with Einstein's search for the most general possible conception. "In a man of my type," he declared, "the turning point of the development lies in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages itself to a far reaching degree from the momentary and the merely personal and turns toward the striving for a mental grasp of things.

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.

He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.

In a typical approach, historiometric investigators like Simonton review large bodies of data to determine the decade of life in which creative individuals are most productive. Such studies have led to the findings that maximal productivity typically occurs between ages thrity-five and thirty-nine, but that profiles differ appreciably across disparate domains of knowledge: thus, poets and mathematicians reach an apogee in their twenties or thirties, while historians or philosophers may peak decades later.