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 consid… - Howard Gardner

Why, one may ask, should we care about erasing these gaps? And, in particular, why is it important that natural or scholastic understandings give way to disciplinary understandings? To my mind, the answer is simple: The understandings of the disciplines represent the most important cognitive achievements of human beings. It is necessary to come to know these understandings if we are to be fully human, to live in our time, to be able to understand it to the best of our abilities, and to build upon it. The five-year-old knows many things, but he cannot know what disciplinary experts have discovered over the centuries. Perhaps our daily lives might not be that different if we continue to believe that the world is flat, but such a belief makes it impossible for us to appreciate in any rounded way the nature of time, travel, weather, or seasons; the behaviors of objects; and the personal and cultural options open to us.

The less a person understands his own feelings, the more he will fall prey to them. The less a person understands the feelings, the responses, and the behavior of others, the more likely he will interact inappropriately with them and therefore fail to secure his proper place in the world.

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.