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Howard Gardner

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A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory Kindle Edition

by Howard Gardner (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 59 ratings

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The influential author and eminent authority on the human mind reflects on his groundbreaking work and the many forms of intelligence--including his own.

Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenon--a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as by educators, this influential book laid out Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. It debunked the primacy of the IQ test and inspired new approaches to education; entire curricula, schools, museums, and parents' guides were dedicated to the nurturing of the several intelligences. In his new book, A Synthesizing Mind, Gardner reflects on his intellectual development and his groundbreaking work, tracing his evolution from bookish child to eager college student to disengaged graduate student to Harvard professor.

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273 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

September 29, 2020
File size

5321 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"An insightful memoir from an eminent psychologist."
– Kirkus Review

"In a world where brains and neurons have too readily been exploited as explanations for human behavior, Howard Gardner’s much awaited memoir takes us in a different direction: into the life of the mind. More impressively still, this deeply reflective text opens up to every reader’s inspection the extraordinary mind in the life of one of the greatest and most frequently cited intellectuals of modern times."
– Andy Hargreaves, Research Professor, Boston College; author of Moving: A Memoir of Education and Social Mobility

"This is a personal yet objective account of the evolution of a peerless scholar. Howard’s reflective storytelling and his insightful narration of the events that shaped him are a joy to read, giving us an intimate insight into how multiple, often seemingly disparate threads intertwine to shape an exceptional mind."
– Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder, The Riverside School and Design for Change

"It’s been quipped that theories in psychology are true of those who propose them, and that’s certainly the case with Howard Gardner: creative, openminded, artful, disciplined, and in command of multiple intelligences. It’s a cause for celebration that one of our most influential living psychologists has trained his insight onto his own life and work."
– Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; author of How the Mind Works and Enlightenment Now

"Read this book for Gardner’s self-reflection — a mind that synthesizes ideas writing about how it came to be a mind that synthesizes ideas — and for what he has to say about the changing academic and intellectual world around him. Are we narrowing our focus when we most need open minds?"
– Sherry Turkle, Professor, MIT; author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

"Howard Gardner has done what scholars dream of doing but rarely accomplish: he had a powerfully original idea which he developed in a way that changed an entire field, reaching well beyond the academy and affecting our nation’s social policy and collective understanding. A Synthesizing Mind is an illuminating account of how such a breakthrough came about, a thick description of the life trajectory and the intellectual formation that led to this enduring achievement."
– Stephen Greenblatt, author of Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

About the Author

Howard Gardner is John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known as the originator of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he is the author of thirty books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences; Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed; and The App Generation (with Katie Davis).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We can’t do the experiment, but I am convinced that I would not be writing this memoir, and would not have achieved a certain degree of notoriety if I had chosen some other noun: seven capacities; or seven competences; or seven kinds of minds, recalling the book that I had outlined some years earlier; or seven talents or seven gifts, or even, to use a phrase I detest, seven learning styles. No, with little doubt, it was by virtue of the decision to beg, borrow, seize, or steal the word intelligence that I caught the attention of so many readers, including the then all powerful members of the so-called chattering classes.
Ever since Alfred Binet (1857–1911), a great French psychologist, the use of the word “intelligence” and the instrument called the “intelligence quotient test” or the “IQ test” has taken on a special, even sacred meaning in much of the Western world. We want to be intelligent ourselves; we want to know and befriend people who are intelligent; and above all, we want our children to be intelligent.
How best to convey that capacity to the world? Take a short-answer, multiple-choice style test, tote up the right and wrong answers, and compare your performance with that of peers. If you do about as well as others in your cohort, you’ll be called average. If you do better, say by a standard deviation, you’ll be called smart; and if you don’t do as well as your peers, you’ll be called dull, dumb, or, to be more politically correct, a bit on the slow side or “very nice.” And if you are two or three standard deviations away from the mean of the group, you’ll be hailed as a “genius” at one end of the bell curve or dismissed as an “imbecile” or an “idiot” at the other, less happy end of the curve. The devising and administration of the intelligence tests turns out to be a notable achievement of psychological measurement, but also a perilous one.
As a scholar, having settled on a noun, I also needed a definition of what constituted an intelligence. Over the years, I have tinkered with the exact wording of that definition. But in Frames of Mind, first published in 1983, I put forth my thinking in informal terms: “A human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving—enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters, and, when appropriate, to create an effective product—and must entail the potential for finding or creating problems—hereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge” (62).
Looking back nearly four decades, I am relieved that I was appropriately modest in my claims for the definition and the criteria of an intelligence: “Ultimately it would certainly be desirable to have an algorithm for the selection of an intelligence . . . at present, however, it must be admitted that the selection (or rejection) of a candidate intelligence is reminiscent more of an artistic judgment than of a scientific assessment . . . where my procedure does take a scientific turn is in the making public of the grounds for the judgment, so that other investigators can review the evidence and draw their own conclusions” (Frames of Mind, 63).
I had thrown down the gauntlet: Goodbye, or even good riddance, to a single intelligence as probed by the ubiquitous IQ test; greetings to multiple intelligences, modes of assessment yet to be determined. I would soon see how the world would react to the words and claims in the new and perhaps daring synthesis that I was putting forth.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B084V7Y546
Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press (September 29, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 29, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5321 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 273 pages

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4.5 59 ratings

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Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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Evelyn C

A fascinating read for those who love learning

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2020

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Any person with even a passing interest in psychology, cognitive science, education or academia is likely to be familiar with Professor Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. In fact, you may yourself be a product of some application of multiple intelligences (or as likely, mis-application)--I remember in my own elementary school classes being scored along the "musical-rhythmic", "verbal-linguistic", and other modalities. Of course now I know that anecdote illustrates the many things that can go awry when a groundbreaking and alluring idea takes on a life of its own! For fans of multiple intelligences, this memoir is a lively, playful peek into the life and mind of the theory's curious creator. Beyond multiple intelligences, this book recounts the many winding paths of the ideas that Prof. Gardner pursued and their implications for fields ranging from journalism to the arts to K-12 classrooms. Through it all, Prof. Gardner's gift for self-reflection recalls the oft-quoted adage, "the unexamined life is not worth living."

Beyond serving as an entertaining survey of Prof. Gardner's multifaceted works, A Synthesizing Mind is also a call to action. While subjects like politics are given a gentle touch (and the book may have been enhanced by further exploration here), it is impossible to absorb the central tenets of the "synthesizing mind"--which I understand to be an openness to new ways of thinking and ordering one's world, and the wherewithal to exercise one's creativity to advance how we think and act--without musing on the implications of what happens when we do not have synthesizing minds. If we do not synthesize, what remains of our ability to perceive art, culture, history; and what of our capacity to hold human conversations? How do we overcome our respective dogmas in a society that encourages polarization without this capacity to fertilize and cross-fertilize new ways of thinking?

This is a book for curious thinkers and lifelong learners. But it is also a book for those seeking to make sense of the vast data that modern life produces. It may inspire you to cultivate your own synthesizing mind, too.

7 people found this helpful

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April

Wow!

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2021

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Wow, wow, and wow! This book is layered with complexity but written in a way to trick you into thinking that it is a simple book. Oh, but it is not. It is filled with sage advice that is a gold mine for young scholars seeking to make a difference in this world. I strongly believe that his status as a retired professor when writing this book gave him the liberty to share exactly how he feels about the field - its trials and tribulations - as well as its immense rewards. Writers have the APA or Chicago style handbook. This book should be in that category for scholars. I have not even finished the book when its writing has inspired me to make leaps and bounds in my own career. -Not only because I identified with the raw experiences and opinions expressed in the book but because it outlines in great detail the process on how to become a successful scholar - a work that is unparalleled.

5 people found this helpful

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Annie Paul

a fascinating exploration of "the synthesizing mind"

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2020

Howard Gardner, who has done so much to illuminate the “kinds of minds” possessed by the rest of us, explores the nature of his own mind in his captivating new book. In particular, he examines what he calls “the synthesizing mind”—which is, he writes, “the capacity to take in a lot of information, reflect on it, and then organize it in a way that is useful to you and (if you are skilled and fortunate) that also proves useful to others.” Gardner quotes the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann saying that “in the twenty-first century, the most important kind of mind will be the synthesizing mind,” and Gardner himself makes a strong case for the truth of this statement. Today we face an overwhelming onslaught of information; we desperately need people who are able, as Gardner puts it, “to arrange and rearrange those data, until they find a solution that is adequate, accurate, communicable, and, as a bonus, aesthetically pleasing.” The author shares some intriguing speculations about the origins of the synthesizing mind—pointing, in his own case, to his interest in and facility with music (he sees writing as akin to “the creation of a symphonic composition”), and to his “naturalist” impulses to label and classify the phenomena he observes around him. Most interesting of all, to me, are his reflections on “educating for synthesizing”—that is, how we might train students in this essential skill. Instructors could model the act of synthesizing for their students; direct students to analyze successful syntheses, as well as those that fail; and assign “challenges of synthesis” so that students can have the experience of synthesizing for themselves. By plumbing the depths of his own mind, Gardner has produced an enlightening and inspiring account of a capacity we can all work to cultivate in ourselves.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

A Good Read

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2022

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If you want something done right, do it yourself! Many years ago, Howard gave an assignment to his students: Trace the development of a creator's work. In this volume, he has done exactly that in a way nobody could have done better! In 1987, my attempt would only have been half-completed!

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2021

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Bought this for my son, he’s a school teacher. Said it was okay, his only criticism was the other does not miss an opportunity to self-promote, and he said that was irritating, yet there is good info in hear.

2 people found this helpful

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