The Development and Education of the Mind

The Selected Works of Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134210664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Leading American psychologist and educator Howard Gardner has assembled his most important writings about education. Spanning over thirty years, this collection reveals the thinking, the concepts and the empirical research that have made Gardner one of the most respected and cited educational authorities of our time.

Trained originally as a psychologist at Harvard University, Howard Gardner begins with personal sketches and tributes to his major teachers and mentors. He then presents the work for which he is best-known – the theory of multiple intelligences – including a summary of the original theory and accounts of how it has been updated over the years. Other seminal papers featured include:

• education in the arts
• the nature of understanding
• powerful ways in which to assess learning
• broad statements about the educational enterprise
• how education is likely to evolve in the globalised world of the twenty-first century.

PART 1

INFLUENCES

CHAPTER 1

THE PATHBREAKING WORK OF JEAN PIAGET

This chapter is a re-edited version of two articles published by The New York Times: ‘Getting acquainted with Jean Piaget’, January 3, 1979; and ‘Jean Piaget: The psychologist as Renaissance man’, September 21, 1980.

At the age of 21, Jean Piaget, the renowned student of human development, wrote a prescient work entitled Recherche (Exploration). In this personal journal, presented in the form of a novel, the hero Sebastian resolves an adolescent religious crisis by adopting an “unshakable faith” in science. Inspired by his studies in biology, Sebastian dreams of “a course synthesizing the sciences of life” with a privileged niche for psychology and the theory of knowledge. Through his fictional shadow, Piaget explored for the first time the possibilities of a biological explanation of mental processes, even introducing equilibration – his fundamental mechanism for explaining cognitive changes.

When Recherche was published the following year in 1918, Piaget was a precocious young biologist who had already made a name for himself as an investigator of terrestrial and aquatic mollusks. But shortly thereafter, inspired by the dream of a biological account of human knowledge, Piaget made an epochal career shift from malacology to the still fledgling field of psychology. Using the simple technique of asking children questions and analyzing their errors, Piaget launched the research on children’s thought processes which made him famous while still in his twenties and the pre-eminent psychologist at the time of his death.

In charting the minds of children, Piaget invented the field of cognitive development. Those who wish to understand Piaget’s contributions must therefore engage the problems that he set for himself in the early 1920s. What do children know at birth? What mechanisms are at their disposal to acquire new knowledge? What forms of knowledge do they possess at various stages in childhood? And how can one describe the knowledge of the mature adult?

Spurning the once widespread notion that the child’s mind is simply a miniature version of the adult’s, Piaget’s major contribution was to describe the forms of knowledge characteristic at each stage of development. Over many years, he carried out hundreds of clever experiments with youngsters in Geneva, Switzerland; he reported them in an imposing series of monographs, several featuring his own three children. Many of the studies probed specific forms of knowledge – the child’s conception of number, of space, of causality – but, taken together, they yield a general picture of the child’s mind at key points during childhood.

The general public thought of Piaget solely as a child psychologist who illuminated the ways in which children’s thinking differs from that of adults. With Sigmund Freud and B.F. Skinner, he stood among the most influential figures in twentieth-century psychology. If his difficult writing style and lack of concern with the emotional side of human nature made him less of a household name than the other two scholars, his position within the mainstream of contemporary psychology is perhaps more secure. And his focus on cognition seems more attuned to the future course of psychology than Skinner’s concern with overt behavior or Freud’s preoccupations with motivation, personality, and the unconscious.

But Piaget did not consider himself a psychologist. A biologist by training and a synthetic thinker by inclination, Piaget viewed himself as founder of a new field of knowledge – that of genetic epistemology. The goal of this field was to illuminate the nature of the basic categories of scientific thought, through study of the origins (or genesis) of this knowledge. The task was inherently inter-disciplinary and Piaget labored for decades, first alone and later with colleagues, in an effort to lay out the core aspects of our conceptions of number, logic, space, time, causality, and other building blocks of knowledge. Key to this effort were experts from each field of science as well as genetic psychologists: experimental researchers trained by Piaget to uncover the origins and developments of basic scientific concepts in the young child. Also part of the research team were philosophers, who defined the concepts, and historians of science, who chronicled the growth of knowledge over the centuries within each scientific field. When the insights from this team of scholars were put together, they would yield the fullest possible account of the particular scientific concept in question.

No one can question the grandeur – or the hubris – of this undertaking. Piaget sought no less than a great chain of mental being, which proceeded from the elementary functioning of genes and nerve cells, through the actions of young children upon the physical objects of the world, to the internal operations of thought in the minds of normal adults and innovative scientists, a chain which culminated in fundamental changes in the structure of science. How matter could give rise to new – and valid – ideas: this was Piaget’s guiding passion, one as synoptic as those of Freud and Skinner and, indeed, reminiscent of the vision of the greatest thinkers of the past.

While many others might have doubted the feasibility of this enterprise, both from a scientific and philosophical point of view, Piaget kept any misgivings under control, set up his experiments, and forged ahead. Displaying the discipline, energy, and organizational capacity associated with genius, he produced dozens of books and countless papers, revisiting the same core patterns in the light of his most recent findings. In the middle 1950s he founded an International Center of Genetic Epistemology, and, aided by an energetic group of students and collaborators, raced until the end against time to sketch out the principal lines of his vision. And it seems to me that it is in the light of this vision – first fathomed as a teenager and never deviated from thereafter – that Jean Piaget would wish to be assessed.

But such an undertaking is far too vast for most contemporary scientists and so the bulk of commentary on Piaget has focused on his work in developmental psychology. In assessing how the program of 1920 stands up in the purview of 1980, psychologists have focused on three dimensions: the robustness of the empirical phenomena first described by Piaget; the cogency of the key theoretical concepts by which he explained these phenomena; and the viability of his overall image of the mind of the child.

In his capacity to perceive new and important phenomena through the observation of children (including his own), Piaget remains without peer. Essentially working without technical apparatus, he exhibited a respect for his subject, and an empathy for his subjects, which permitted him to enter totally into children’s own views of the world. Many initially skeptical scientists have eventually attested to the existence of the phenomena of non-conservation, where preschool children refuse to believe that matter can change its form and still remain the same quantity; childhood egocentrism, where youngsters are unable to conceive how the world looks to other observers; the impermanence of objects, where infants act as if objects fail to exist when they are no longer in sight. These and dozens of other equally intriguing phenomena now form the mainstay of research in cognitive development. To be sure, it is often possible to discover the roots of these behaviors at an earlier time than Piaget claimed, particularly if the tasks are “stripped down” to their essentials. But, surviving the acid test of scientific validity, the fundamental phenomena continue to be confirmed.

Piaget’s terminology and concepts have survived less intact. Many suffer from imprecise or shifting definitions. The stages and structures in which he so firmly believed have been consistently attacked and, while they retain their suggestive quality, cognitive development is now seen as smoother, less stage-like, and less structurally integrated than Piaget had indicated. Piaget’s lifelong attempt to explain the causes of intellectual change through the mechanism of equilibration has had comparatively little influence and, though Piaget would have winced at the thought, his embracing of biological terminology has had for others a Lamarckian and even, at times, a Bergsonian air about it.

If Piaget’s “middle-level” concepts have not fared well, his overall model of the child as an active problem-solver – a hypothesis-testing scientist in his knickers – has carried the day. Piaget not only put the serious study of the child on the scientific map, but also moved the child’s cognitive powers to the forefront, where they have firmly remained. His sense of what the child is like suffuses the writings of even his harshest critics. In the manner permitted only to the most revolutionary scientists, he changed the way in which future researchers will undertake their studies.

To be sure, there have been shifts in the temper of child study, shifts which left Piaget at the end as a bit of an anachronistic figure. The biological metaphor which he cultivated was increasingly replaced by the metaphor of the computer; his careful descriptions of behaviors were supplanted by series of boxes which detail hypothetical “stages of information processing.” And the areas of the child’s life which he underplayed – the child’s personality, his social and affective life, his artistic gifts – have become, mostly by virtue of the fact that Piaget had not already addressed the major issues, rallying grounds for contemporary students of child development. By what he ignored, as much as by what he illuminated, Piaget set the research agenda for the field which he brought to life. His contribution continues to dominate the texts of child study and, in more than a few cases, Piaget is the text.

But what had kept thousands of psychologists throughout the world busy for over a generation was still but a chapter in the book of science that Piaget was writing since the time of Recherche. As has happened with other lifelong efforts in the behavioral sciences – and particularly ones as self-avowedly inter-disciplinary – few individuals can even read the entire corpus, let alone evaluate it. In an age of fragmented specialization, Piaget was indubitably a Renaissance man. Nowhere is this more poignantly evident than in Logic and Scientific Knowledge, an encyclopedic tome that he planned, edited, and largely wrote, and which surveyed all of the sciences from the perspective of genetic epistemology. To prepare for this massive work, Piaget held seminars with experts from every field of knowledge, often collaborating with them for upwards of a year, rose early each morning and stayed awake evenings tutoring himself in the disciplines of that year, and ultimately mastered at least the basic conceptual issues in each. Undertaking such assignments of synthesis was Piaget’s method of bridging his own science with every other one. Indeed, it was his way of pursuing his own religion – the passion for truth, the search for the totality of knowledge.

But this Herculean effort has as yet had little impact. An encyclopedia largely from the hand of one man, no matter how brilliant, seems a throwback to a Johnsonian age. The flaws are too evident. Piaget did not have the necessary firsthand familiarity with the phenomena of other sciences, nor the sympathy with the history and cultural background of other disciplines, nor the sophistication in the philosophical analysis of concepts, which he had for the snails and children of Geneva. Yet what slips through in the 1,250 odd pages is the sense of wonder and exploration which gives rise to knowledge. Till the end, the child – and the adolescent – in Piaget were never stilled. Like Sigmund Freud, he was by temperament a passionate speculator and integrator, who sought ruthlessly to suppress his speculative nature, but – fortunately – never wholly succeeded in doing so.

As with Freud, portions of Piaget’s research program and many of his particular concepts will be – and in cases already have been – supplanted by less problematic formulations. Yet the central core of the program – Piaget’s portrait of the mind of the child – is as likely to last as Freud’s insights into the human personality. Just as Freud extended our knowledge of human nature as it had previously inhered in literature and in clinical medicine, Piaget advanced our understanding of the mind, not only as it had been set forth by his psychological predecessors, but also, and perhaps especially, as it had been elucidated by Descartes and Kant. Though not by contemporary standards a philosopher, he was a philosopher in the traditional sense of the term, and far more than any contemporary psychologist, he wrote works which philosophers of the future will have to examine carefully. Alone among his contemporaries, he took the great epistemological issues seriously and contrived new ways of approaching them. The vision of youthful Sebastian will endure.

Acknowledgment

Copyright © 2005 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted with Permission.

CHAPTER 2

JEROME S. BRUNER AS EDUCATOR

Palmer, J.A and D.E. Cooper (eds), Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education. London: Routledge, 2001.

In the late 1980s I attended an international conference on education in Paris. One evening I found myself having dinner with half a dozen persons, none of whom I had met before, representing half a dozen different nations. As we spoke, a remarkable fact emerged. All of us had been drawn to a life in education because of our reading, years before, of psychologist Jerome Bruner’s remarkable volume The Process of Education (1960).

At some point in their professional lives, many psychologists become involved in educational issues. Such engagement is especially likely in the United States, where educational theory and practice have been heavily influenced by contemporary work in psychology. It is possible that psychologists like B.F. Skinner or E.L. Thorndike have had more influence on specific educational policies, such as testing, but when it comes to enlarging our sense of how children learn and what educators could aspire to, Jerome Bruner has no peers.

Born in New York City in 1915, Jerome Bruner’s professional life has been that of a prolific and versatile psychologist. Trained at Duke and Harvard universities, his first paper, published in 1939, was on “the effect of thymus extract on the sexual behavior of the female rat.” During the Second World War, Bruner participated as a social psychologist, investigating public opinion, propaganda, and social attitudes. Thereafter, as one of the leaders of the post-war “cognitive revolution,” his focus has been chiefly on human perception and cognition.

During the half century since the war, Bruner investigated in turn a series of loosely related topic areas. In his work on the “new look” in perception, he emphasized the role of expectation and interpretation on our perceptual experiences. Maintaining this focus on the active role of the subject, he turned next to the role of strategies in the processes of human categorization. Becoming increasingly concerned with the development of human cognition, Bruner and colleagues at Harvard’s newly formed Center of Cognitive Studies undertook a series of studies of the modes of representation used by children.

In 1970 Bruner moved from Harvard to Oxford University. There he continued his developmental studies of infant agency and began a series of investigations of children’s language. Following his return to the United States a decade later, he showed a heightened concern with social and cultural phenomena. Rejecting the excessive computationalism of the cognitive perspective that he helped to found, he directed attention to human narrative and interpretive capacities – most recently in the law. And he helped to launch yet a third revolution in psychology – one centered around the practice of cultural psychology.

It is important to sketch Bruner’s contributions as a psychologist because they frame his involvement in educational issues. Reflecting his catholic research interests and his own wide learning, Bruner has approached education as a broad thinker rather than as a technician. He has considered the full range of human capacities that are involved in teaching and learning – perception, thought, language, other symbol systems, creativity, intuition, personality, and motivation. He construes education as beginning in infancy, and, especially in recent writings, has emphasized the role assumed in education by the gamut of cultural institutions. He has drawn on our knowledge of early hominids and has consistently viewed education from a cross-cultural perspective. (In the 1990s he began to work regularly with the preschools of Reggio Emilia and other Italian communities.) Indeed, in his most recent writings on cultural psychology, Bruner has proposed education as the proper “test frame” for constructing a full-fledged cultural psychology.

In the late 1950s Jerome Bruner became explicitly involved in precollegiate education in the United States. At that time, following the Russian launching of the satellite Sputnik, many Americans felt that a greater proportion of national resources must be devoted to education, particularly in science, mathematics, and technology. This interest occurred at the very time that the cognitive revolution, partly under the charismatic leadership of Bruner, had been launched. The influential National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation called a meeting of scientists, other scholars, psychologists, and educators at Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts, in September 1959. Bruner was the obvious chair for this meeting.

In his landmark book The Process of Education (1960) Bruner eloquently sketched the chief themes that had emerged at the conference. Against the widespread notion that youngsters should be learning facts and procedures, the conferees argued for the importance of the structure of scientific (and other) disciplines. If a student understood the principal moves in a subject area, he or she could go on to think generatively about new issues. (“Knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it” (Bruner, 1983, p. 183).) Against the view of the child as an assimilator of information, and as a little adult, the conferees (inspired by the work of Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder) put forth a still unfamiliar view of the child: the child as an active problem-solver, who had his or her own ways of making sense of the world. Against the notion that certain subjects should be avoided until secondary school or later, the conferees argued for a spiral curriculum, in which topics were introduced in appropriate ways early in school and then revisited, with added depth and complexity, at later points in schooling. This argument inspired the most quoted (and most controversial) line in the book: “We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (1960, p. 33).

The response to the Bruner report was swift and electrifying. The book was praised as “seminal,” “revolutionary,” and “a classic” by a range of scholars and policy leaders. It was translated into nineteen languages and was f...