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No less than human beings, human institutions exhibit constraints. Schools or factories or offices may be malleable, but they are not infinitely so. … - Howard Gardner
" "No less than human beings, human institutions exhibit constraints. Schools or factories or offices may be malleable, but they are not infinitely so. Economies of scale, vexations of human relations, bureaucratic histories, diverse and changing expectations, and pressures for accountability burden all significant human institutions. In the past, serving a smaller and less diverse clientele, schools faced certain problems; today, in a rapidly changing world, where the schools are expected to serve the multiple needs of every young individual, the limitations of this institution are sometimes overwhelming. If one wishes to bring about change in schools, it is important to understand their modes of operation no less than one understands the operations of individuals within them. Accordingly, following the investigation of constraints on human knowing, I consider some limits governing educational institutions, most especially schools. A focus on children and schools brings us face-to-face with a third dimension: the question of which knowledges and performances we value. If one considers school strictly as a place in which certain criteria are to be met (say, for the purpose of certification), it matters not what use one can subsequently make of the skills and knowledge acquired there. One could readily tolerate schools where understanding was considered irrelevant or even noxious. But if one wishes to argue that school should relate to a productive life in the community, or that certain kinds of understanding ought to be the desiderata of education, then the research results I have described are consequential.
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About Howard Gardner
Howard Earl Gardner (born July 11, 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.
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Howard Earl Gardner
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Additional quotes by Howard Gardner
For the most part, performances of young children fall under the rubric of rote, ritualized, or conventional patterns of behavior, but children sometimes go beyond the models that they have seen, and their performances may embody genuine understandings. In such cases children are able to utilize symbol systems to create performances that reveal sensitivity to a variety of perspectives or express their own feelings or beliefs about a state of affairs. As psychiatrist Robert Coles has shown, children caught in political or social crises are especially prone to exhibit their understandings through works of literary or graphic art, and these works may reflect both a rounded sense of a controversial issue and the creator's personal response to it.
Some leaders seek power for its own sake; some leaders seek power in order to increase their own resources or those of family, friends, and close associates. Those are not the leaders whom I admire, nor are they the leaders that young people should emulate. As I make clear in the pages that follow, the key to effective leadership is amoral: The skills that I describe can be used for the ends of a Nelson Mandela, or for the ends of Osama bin Laden. But once we turn from description to prescription, it is clear that, as individuals and as members of broader communities, we should do all that we can to increase the incidence of good leaders — individuals who are engaged, excellent, and dedicated to the pursuit of ethical ends.
"In biology, the most basic assumptions of evolutionary theory elude otherwise able students who insist that the process of evolution is guided by a striving toward perfection. College students who have studied economics offer explanations of market forces that are essentially identical to those preferred by college students who have never taken an economics course. Equally severe biases and stereotypes pervade the humanistic segment of the curriculum, from history to art. Students who can discuss in detail the complex causes of the First World War turn right around and explain equally complex current events in terms of the simplest "good guy-bad guy" scenario. (This habit of mind is not absent from political leaders, who are fond of portraying the most complicated international situations along the lines of a Hollywood script.) Those who have studied the intricacies of modern poetry, learning to esteem T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, show little capacity to distinguish masterworks from amateurish drivel once the identity of the author has been hidden from view."
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