Scranton ran on anthracite, and by the early 1940s the coal was running out. The mines closed one after another. Money left the valley. On July 11, 1943, in this fading Pennsylvania city, Howard Gardner (b. 1943) was born to a couple who had come over five years before with little money and a great deal they kept to themselves.
Ralph and Hilde Gardner had lived as comfortable members of the German middle class until Hitler took power in 1933. They left for Italy, then for the United States, reaching New York in 1938 with most of their world behind them. Around them in Scranton gathered other cultured exiles, a small transplanted Europe in a coal town. Hilde had trained as a kindergarten teacher and never took a paid job, yet she ran civic organizations and was named the city’s woman of the year. Ralph kept track of scattered relatives across the postwar diaspora and helped where he could, keeping a running account of who was where.
A framed photograph of a boy stood in their home. When Howard asked who it was, his parents told him the child came from the neighborhood. He half believed them. At ten or eleven he found newspaper clippings and learned the boy was his brother, Erich, born in 1935, killed in a sledding accident months before Howard’s birth. His parents had lived through the loss and never spoke of it, just as they never spoke of the relatives who did not get out. Gardner’s first response was not grief but irritation that something this large had been hidden from him. He came to understand later why they could not say it.
He read. He played the piano, and played it well enough to think about a life in music before he set the idea aside. He taught piano from his teens into his late twenties. The Gardners wanted Phillips Academy for him; he chose Wyoming Seminary, closer to home. He did the math and the science without trouble, but he loved history, literature, and the arts.
Harvard changed the scale of his world. In his first week he stood on the steps of Widener Library and felt that everything lay open to him. He found people who knew more than he did, who played better than he did, and he took this as good news. A big fish in Scranton, he understood, stays big only in Scranton. He concentrated in Social Relations, a department that mixed psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and he studied with Erik Erikson (1902-1994), the sociologist David Riesman (1909-2002), and the psychologist Jerome Bruner (1915-2016). He audited courses by the dozen, more, he liked to claim, than anyone in the college’s history.
A single lecture turned him toward the brain. Norman Geschwind (1926-1984), the neurologist, described what happens to a mind after injury, how a stroke can take language and leave music, or take faces and leave words. Gardner sat with the implication. If the brain can lose one capacity and keep another, the capacities might be separate things.
He took his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1971, working with Bruner, the psychologist Roger Brown (1925-1997), and the philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1998). On his honeymoon he traveled to Geneva to meet Jean Piaget (1896-1980), whose work then dominated developmental psychology; Piaget’s English and Gardner’s French both failed, and they spoke through an interpreter. Gardner called Piaget the single biggest influence on his thinking, then spent much of his career departing from him, since Piaget had charted the growth of logical and scientific thought and cared little for the arts.
Goodman gave him room to care. In 1967 the philosopher founded Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, naming it for how much firm knowledge then existed about learning in the arts: zero. Gardner joined as a founding research assistant alongside David Perkins. In 1972 the two became co-directors, and Gardner stayed at the center’s helm for twenty-eight years. He spent two decades on a parallel track at the Boston Veterans Administration hospital, studying patients whose injuries had pulled their abilities apart, the living evidence of what Geschwind’s lecture had suggested.
The two streams, gifted children on one side and damaged adults on the other, ran together in the late 1970s. The Bernard van Leer Foundation funded a Project on Human Potential and asked a simple, enormous question about what science knew of human capacity. Gardner wrote his answer in 1981 and published it in 1983 as Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. He proposed that intelligence is not one thing measured by one number but a set of relatively independent capacities, and he set out criteria a candidate had to meet: a basis in the brain, a developmental course, isolation by injury, among others. He named seven: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. He added an eighth, the naturalist, in 1999, and turned over a possible ninth, the existential, without committing to it.
That same year, 1981, he received a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant.
He had written half a dozen books by 1983 and expected the new one to sell modestly and pass. Within months he knew it had not passed. Teachers took it up. Schools rebuilt curricula around it. Parents learned the vocabulary. The idea that a child might be strong in music or movement or in dealing with people, and that these counted as intelligence rather than mere talent, answered something educators had felt without language for it. Gardner later said he had come into psychology like a bull in a china shop.
The psychologists were colder. The strongest and longest-running objection holds that the theory rests on no experiment Gardner ran and no test he built, and that the data point instead to a single general factor, g, that the standard measures capture. Robert Sternberg (b. 1949), who shared Gardner’s distrust of the old IQ model and built his own rival account, pressed the point in print. Other critics argued that musical and bodily skill are talents, not intelligences, and that calling them intelligences stretched the word past use. Cognitive neuroscience has not found the separate, brain-based modules the theory pictures; tasks draw on overlapping networks and correlate with one another. Gardner answered that his case rested on empirical evidence rather than experimental evidence, since no experiment can do the work of synthesis, the drawing together of findings from many fields into one picture. He also spent years objecting to what the schools made of him, above all the conflation of his intelligences with “learning styles,” a move he rejected.
By his own account he is a synthesizer, not an experimentalist. He has said he holds a fairly standard academic mind, good with language, reasonable with logic, musical as a bonus nobody pays for, and that what sets him apart is appetite: he collects from many sources and arranges the pieces so they make sense to him and to others. The traits that pushed him inward as a boy fit the description. He is color blind. He has monocular vision. He is prosopagnosic and struggles to recognize faces, a condition his daughter shares and that he suspects his father had. A man who does not read faces learns to live in his mind.
After Frames of Mind, his curiosity kept moving. He studied creativity through seven modern masters in Creating Minds. He studied leadership. Since 1995 he has run the Good Project with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021) and William Damon (b. 1944), asking what makes work excellent, engaging, and ethical at once. The ethical question had teeth for him, and one chapter of his life tests it. He met Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) at a dinner party in the 1990s. Epstein funded some of his research and connected him to other prominent figures. After Epstein’s 2006 arrest Gardner told him he would take no more of his money, yet the two stayed in contact until 2019. In a 2007 email, with Epstein facing jail, Gardner offered him reassurance about getting through the period ahead. The correspondence sits beside the public work on good work, and a full account of Gardner holds both.
He married twice. His first marriage, to the developmental psychologist Judith Krieger Gardner, ended in divorce; she died in 1994. He has three children from that marriage, Kerith, Jay, and Andrew. In 1982 he married Ellen Winner, a psychologist of art and a longtime colleague at Project Zero whom he met there around 1973; they adopted a son, Benjamin, from Taiwan. He calls bringing Winner into his life, first as researcher and then as wife, the smartest decision he ever made.
He stopped teaching in 2019 and stepped back from Project Zero’s committee in 2023, staying on as senior director. In 2020 he published an intellectual memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, and in 2022, with Wendy Fischman, The Real World of College. He still writes. He still plays the piano most days. Nobody, he notes, cares that he plays, and he plays anyway.
Stephen P. Turner draws a line between two questions that look like one. Is a belief true, and why is it held. Most of the time we treat the second answer as the first. People hold a belief because it is true, or because the evidence pushed them to it. Turner watches for the cases where the two come apart, where the support runs thin and the belief thrives anyway. When that happens, the persistence has another source. The belief survives because of what it does for the people who hold it. He calls these convenient beliefs. The convenience, not the evidence, carries the weight. A convenient belief can even be true. Its truth is not what keeps it alive.
Multiple intelligences is the cleanest case in education. The theory rests on no experiment Gardner ran and no test he built. Cognitive science has not found the separate, brain-based capacities it pictures; the tasks draw on overlapping networks, and the general factor g survives every assault. Psychologists doubt it. Yet walk into a school of education, a teacher workshop, a curriculum guide, a parent-teacher night, and the theory is everywhere, settled, assumed. Turner’s question follows at once. Not whether it holds up, but why so many hold it. The answer is in what it does.
Start with the teacher. The old picture handed her a bell curve and a hard floor. Some children sit at the bottom, and there is a limit to what she can move. Multiple intelligences lifts the floor. Every child has a strength somewhere on the list. The child who cannot read becomes a child strong in movement or music or in working with people. Failure turns into mismatch. The deficit becomes a profile. The theory protects the teacher’s sense that she can reach any child and the child’s dignity in the same stroke, and it asks her to give up nothing she wanted to keep.
Move up to the profession. Schools of education, test designers, consultants, and the degrees that train them all need a program and a language that sounds like science. Multiple intelligences supplies both. It licenses differentiated instruction, new assessments, redesigned curricula, the workshops and the books and the credentials that run on them. Turner ties convenience to expertise here. A belief that widens a profession’s jurisdiction and dignifies its daily work is held twice over, once for the comfort and once for the authority. The field has standing because there are eight intelligences to address. Drop the eight and some of the standing goes with them.
Then the parents. No mother wants to hear her child placed last on a single scale. The theory hands every parent a strength to name and a reason to believe the school has seen the child whole. That is a service, and parents pay for it in loyalty to the idea.
Beneath all of this runs the deepest convenience. The IQ tradition and the g factor carry a long history of sorting, ranking, and shutting people out, of tests used to bar and to grade human worth. The educator already holds the moral conviction that this sorting is unjust. Multiple intelligences lets him treat the hierarchy as an artifact of narrow testing rather than a fact about minds. The science now agrees with the morality. The kind world and the true world line up. A belief that performs that reconciliation is the most convenient belief of all, because it spares its holder the choice between what he wants to be so and what is.
When the modules fail to appear and the general factor keeps its predictive grip, the schools do not put the theory down. A convenient belief outlasts its refutation, Turner argues, because surrender costs more than persistence. To give up multiple intelligences, a teacher walks back into a room where some children are simply harder to teach and she can do less for them. The cost of the truth is high and lands on her. The cost of the belief is low and lands on no one she can see. So the belief stays, refutation and all.
Gardner has spent years fighting the uses the schools made of him. He rejects the slide from intelligences to learning styles. He says the theory was never a license to label a child and shelve him. The schools keep the convenient version and set his qualifications aside, because the convenient version is the one that serves them. He can disown the use. He cannot take the belief back. Turner’s frame reads this as the rule, not the exception. A convenient belief belongs to the people who find it useful.
Notes
The Scranton coal town setting, the German middle class family life, the flight by way of Italy, Hilde as the family’s connector and later “Woman of the Year,” Ralph tracking the diaspora, the Widener Library steps, the “big fish in a small pond” line, and the auditing claim all come from Gardner’s own telling in the Harvard Gazette interview.
The brother presents a small source conflict. Wikipedia and Kiddle say Erich died at age seven. Grokipedia says he was born in 1935 and died in 1943, making him eight. The Harvard Gazette has Gardner saying the family arrived with a child born in 1935 and that he found newspaper clippings about his brother when he was ten or eleven. I wrote “months before Howard’s birth” and gave the age range for Howard’s discovery rather than fixing Erich’s age at death.
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gardner
The Norman Geschwind lecture that turned Gardner toward neuropsychology comes from Encyclopedia.com, which describes it as a lecture Gardner attended while still a student.
The twenty years at the Boston VA and the postdoctoral work with Geschwind are documented in Wikipedia and HandWiki.
The Jean Piaget honeymoon meeting and the interpreter detail come from two different sources. The honeymoon meeting appears at PsychologyFor.
https://psychologyfor.com/howard-gardner-biography-of-the-american-psychologist/
The interpreter and Gardner’s description of Piaget as the “single biggest influence” come from the 2013 Harvard Gazette article on his mentors.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/10/the-mentors-of-howard-gardner/
I supplied Geneva as the location because Piaget worked there, but that is an inference rather than something explicitly stated in the source.
Project Zero’s founding, the “zero knowledge” explanation for its name, Nelson Goodman, David Perkins, the 1972 co-directorship, and Gardner’s twenty-eight years leading the project come from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Gardner’s own history of Project Zero.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/17/10/askwith-essentials-what-project-zero
https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/pz-history-9-10-13.pdf
The van Leer Foundation’s Project on Human Potential funding of Frames of Mind, the point that the book was written in 1981 and published in 1983, and the talents versus intelligences critique come from Infed.
https://infed.org/dir/welcome/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-and-education/
Gardner’s description of himself as a “bull in a china shop” and his defense that the theory was empirical rather than experimental come from Genius Revive.
The neuromyth critique concerning overlapping brain networks and general intelligence comes from Structural Learning.
https://www.structural-learning.com/post/multiple-intelligences-howard-gardner
Gardner’s own account of his surprise at the reception of Frames of Mind appears in his essay “The First Thirty Years.”
https://www.taolearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Howard-Gardner-frames-of-mind_30-years.pdf
The description of himself as a synthesizer and the remark that “nobody cares that I play” come from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/24/11/essential-howard-gardner
His color blindness, monocular vision, prosopagnosia, and the stories involving his daughter and father come from Gardner’s own blog post on the Festschrift and from The Creative Process interview.
The sentence “a man who does not read faces learns to live in his mind” is my extrapolation, not a sourced quotation. The interview supports the underlying connection, but that wording is mine.
The Jeffrey Epstein paragraph is drawn from the Wikipedia account, which cites the dinner party meeting, the funding, the continuing contact through 2019, and the 2007 email. I kept the discussion measured and proportionate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gardner
Gardner’s marriages and children are documented in several sources. Encyclopedia.com covers his divorce from Judith Krieger Gardner and her death in 1994.
Practical Psychology and Kiddle discuss Ellen Winner, their meeting in 1973, their marriage in 1982, and the adoption of Benjamin from Taiwan.
https://practicalpie.com/howard-gardner/
The “smartest decision” toast comes from Gardner’s response published in the Festschrift.
https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/gardner%20mind,%20work,%20and%20life.pdf
