The Essential Howard Gardner on Education

During his long and distinguished career as scholar and teacher, Howard Gardner has made vast contributions to our understanding of learning and how to create environments that support growth in all learners across their lifespans. In this compelling collection of his writings, Gardner lays out his principal ideas about education. While known primarily for his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner’s work in education includes substantial contributions in the areas of early childhood, K-12, and postsecondary education. In this volume, Gardner provides readers with a lifetime’s worth of insight into creating purposeful curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, ideas developed at Harvard Project Zero (where he has been a leader and principal investigator for over half a century), as well as in collaborations with educators from around the world, ranging from preschools in Reggio Emilia (Italy) to art classes in China. Gardner includes a timely focus on education in a global era, influenced by continuing technological innovations, yet still grounded in the pursuit of fundamental human values. This is the single most comprehensive survey of Howard Gardner’s writing and thinking about education.

Book Features:

• Offers an unparalleled survey of the principal concerns of a major educational thinker in our times.
• Draws on decades of experience as a teacher, researcher, and public intellectual to present a vision of how quality education can best be achieved for all students.
• Reviews the principal strands of the world-renowned theory of multiple human intelligences, including timely explanations and updates.
• Makes the case for an education that foregrounds and cultivates an appreciation of truth, beauty, and goodness.
• Situates concepts and recommendations within the broader progressive tradition.
• Addresses authentic assessment, the importance of interdisciplinary thinking, the fostering of creativity, the capacity to synthesize powerfully and convincingly, the centrality of deep understanding, and--crucial for our times--the cultivation of an ethical mind.

Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Among his numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, the Grawemeyer Prize in Education, a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Prince of Asturias Award in the Social Sciences, and the American Educational Research Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award.