While we may continue to use the words smart and stupid, and while IQ tests may persist for certain purposes, the monopoly of those who believe in a … - Howard Gardner

"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.

By introducing these elements at the outset, I wish to stress that all creative activity grows, first, out of the relationships between an individual and the objective world of work and, second, out of the ties between an individual and other human beings.

"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."