Gardner, Howard

Howard Gardner's career trajectory as a developmental psychologist parallels that of his age cohort in some ways, while deviating from the canonical pattern in others. Attracted to developmental psychology by his reading of Jean Piaget and his meeting Jerome Bruner, he soon gravitated to cognitive development, with a special interest in human symbolic capacities. Following postdoctoral work in neurology and neuropsychology, he pursued parallel empirical research programs in cognitive development and neuropsychology. His regular production of research articles for the scholarly community was complemented by a steady stream of books directed principally at the general reader and at college and graduate students. Around 1980, Gardner's empirical work culminated in the positing of the theory of multiple intelligences, for which he is best known. In the 1980s, like many of his colleagues, he moved in a more applied direction, focusing particularly on issues of teaching, learning, and school reform. In the 1990s, he joined forces with two other developmentally oriented psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, to investigate issues of professional ethics—what he and colleagues term “good work.”

Gardner is part of the third wave of individuals affected by the rise of fascism in Europe. His Jewish parents, Ralph and Hilde Gardner, fled from their native Nuremberg, Germany, arriving in America on the infamous Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938. Gardner was born on July 11, 1943, and grew up in Scranton, a mediumsized former coal mining city in northeastern Pennsylvania. He was an excellent student and a promising pianist. Gardner quit formal study of music at the start of adolescence but continued to play and teach sporadically, and music remains important in his life. He attended local schools in the Scranton area but claims that his education began in earnest when he arrived at Harvard College in September 1961. There he studied history, sociology, and psychology and audited a record number of courses that spanned the curriculum. He also decided to become a scholar rather than pursue one of the standard professions that his family had in mind for him—the first in his family to attend college.

As an undergraduate, Gardner worked with the noted psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. After spending a postgraduate year as a Harvard Knox Fellow at the London School of Economics, where he read philosophy and sociology, Gardner decided to continue graduate studies in developmental psychology at Harvard. In addition to his ties to founding cognitivists Piaget and Bruner, Gardner also worked closely with the psycholinguist Roger Brown and the epistemologist Nelson Goodman. After completing his doctoral studies, Gardner had the opportunity to work with Norman Geschwind, a brilliant and charismatic neurologist, and he was able to pursue empirical work in both developmental psychology and neuropsychology for the ensuing two decades. Maintaining his Harvard connection throughout, Gardner avoided the usual tenure ladder and became a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1986. Thus, while he has traveled widely and conducted field research in China in the middle 1980s, his entire adult career has been spent in Cambridge.

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