Multiple Intelligence Theory

howard gardner, multiple intelligences and education

Howard Earl Gardner's (1943- ) work has been marked by a desire not to just describe the world but to help to create the conditions to change it. The scale of his contribution can be gauged from following comments in his introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Howard Gardner's classic work Frames of Mind. The theory of multiple intelligences:

In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings - initially a blank slate - could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early 'naive' theories of that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. (Gardner 1993: xxiii)

One of the main impetuses for this movement has been Howard Gardner's work. He has been, in Smith and Smith's (1994)