Howard Gardner - Career

Career

Most of Gardner's post secondary education has taken place at Harvard University. He was inspired by his readings of Jean Piaget to be trained in developmental psychology; he also studied neuropsychology. Gardner has also worked closely with the psycholinguist Roger Brown and during his undergraduate years worked with renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Gardner studied for an bachelor of arts degree in social relations at Harvard (1965) with thesis titled The retirement community in America and read philosophy and sociology at the London School of Economics from 1965 to 1966. He was awarded a doctor of philosophy degree in social and developmental psychology from Harvard in 1971 for thesis titled The development of sensitivity to figural and stylistic aspects of paintings.

In an effort to synthesize his two lines of work, one dealing with cognitive and symbol using capacities of normal and gifted children and the other dealing with brain damage in adults, he developed and introduced his theory of multiple intelligences in his 1983 book Frames of Mind. He began teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1986. While he is widely traveled and has conducted research in China throughout the 1980s, his entire adult career has been spent in Cambridge. The focus of his work for the past fifteen years has been in the Good Work Project. Gardner's work is often described as "an effort to understand and explicate the broadest and highest reaches of human thought, with a particular focus on the development and breakdown of intellectual capacities, broadly construed." By choice, Gardner has not undertaken any major editorial or professional roles. He sees himself as an independent scholar and a public intellectual.