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

by Howard Gardner

I would pick out these elements: exhibiting wide curiosity; assimilating and remembering mounds of facts and figures; raising questions but also attending carefully to answers, whether obtained from books, nature, mechanical experimentation, other persons, or one’s own imagination; putting together these preliminary answers (in a nondisciplinary though not undisciplined manner) and seeing how they work—or don’t work; and importantly, setting the answers down in some kind of symbolic system.

all others had elected to stay home. I was all but certain that the Rabbi would cancel the service. Why bother to go through an hour or more of prayer, chanting, reading of Torah, and delivering a sermon for one dutiful preadolescent? But Rabbi Herman went through the entire service. Afterward when I asked him why he had bothered to do so for a single young congregant, he responded simply and memorably, “God does not count the house.”

become a severe critic of tests, particularly of the multiple-choice tests that were widely featured at that time. I cherish the quote attributed to the commentator William F. Buckley: “To get the right answer on one of these tests, you don’t have to know what the right answer is. You just have to ferret out what the test-maker at the Educational Testing Service thinks is the right answer.”

One can approach them only if one is open to material from several disciplines and sources of knowledge, and also is willing, playfully yet determinedly, to put them together in ways that make some sense for those involved—be they professors, middle school teachers, recent college graduates,