The Unschooled Mind Quotes

“All children everywhere will become more skilled in those pursuits that engage their interests and their efforts and that are valued by adults and peers in their environment. Skill develops not only in areas of vocation and avocation but also in the simple activities of living—telling stories, estimating large numbers, handling disputes, instructing a younger person. Which areas show the most improvement, and how rapidly the improvement occurs, will reflect the accidents of culture and individual, but a steady improvement, at least for a while, can be counted upon.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“Until now, most schools in most cultures have stressed a certain combination of linguistic and logical intelligences. Beyond question that combination is important for mastering the agenda of school, but we have gone too far in ignoring the other intelligences. By minimizing the importance of other intelligences within and outside of schools, we consign many students who fail to exhibit the "proper" blend to the belief that they are stupid, and we do not take advantage of ways in which multiple intelligences can be exploited to further the goals of school and the broader culture.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“In biology, the most basic assumptions of evolutionary theory elude otherwise able students who insist that the process of evolution is guided by a striving toward perfection. College students who have studied economics offer explanations of market forces that are essentially identical to those preferred by college students who have never taken an economics course. Equally severe biases and stereotypes pervade the humanistic segment of the curriculum, from history to art. Students who can discuss in detail the complex causes of the First World War turn right around and explain equally complex current events in terms of the simplest "good guy-bad guy" scenario. (This habit of mind is not absent from political leaders, who are fond of portraying the most complicated international situations along the lines of a Hollywood script.) Those who have studied the intricacies of modern poetry, learning to esteem T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, show little capacity to distinguish masterworks from amateurish drivel once the identity of the author has been hidden from view.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“In this book I contend that even when school appears to be successful, even when it elicits the performances for which it has apparently been designed, it typically fails to achieve its most important missions. Evidence for this startling claim comes from a by now overwhelming body of educational research that has been assembled over the last decades. These investigations document that even students who have been well trained and who exhibit all the overt signs of success—faithful attendance at good schools, high grades and high test scores, accolades from their teachers—typically do not display an adequate understanding of the materials and concepts with which they have been working.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“Nearly all cultures have evolved specific ideas about education, although only in modern times does education prove to be virtually coterminous with formal schooling. Ultimately, the natural paths and forms of development place many children in a difficult bind, as students begin to address the quite different agenda of the schoolroom and the particular structure of the scholastic domains.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“To begin with, the child of five, six, or seven is in many ways an extremely competent individual. Not only can she use skillfully a raft of symbolic forms, but she has evolved a galaxy of robust theories that prove quite serviceable for most purposes and can even be extended in generative fashion to provide cogent accounts of unfamiliar materials or processes. The child is also capable of intensive and extensive involvement in cognitive activities, ranging from experimenting with fluids in the bathtub to building complex block structures and mastering board games, card games, and sports. While some of these creations are derivative, at least a few of them may exhibit genuine creativity and originality. And quite frequently in at least one area, the young child has achieved the competence expected from much older children. Such precocity is particularly likely when youngsters have pursued a special passion, like dinosaurs, dolls, or guns, or when there is a strain of special talent in areas like mathematics, music, or chess or simply a flexibility, a willingness to try new things.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“By the time the child has reached the age of seven or so, his development has become completely intertwined with the values and goals of the culture. Nearly all learning will take place in one or another cultural context; aids to his thinking will reside in many other human beings as well as in a multitude of cultural artifacts. Far from being restricted to the individual's skull, cognition and intelligence become distributed across the landscape.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“Children not only think better as they mature; they also become capable of thinking about their own mental processes. Memory capacity may not expand in any real sense, but children (and adults) learn how to boost their recall by various strategies, ranging from the ways in which they group or store things to the kinds of tally systems they utilize on paper or in their heads. Children also learn to think about their own problem-solving activities: How can I best handle a new challenge? Which system or which tool would be useful? Who can I turn to for help? What is relevant and what is irrelevant to a problem I am trying to solve or a principle I am seeking to discover or master? Often these lessons are learned by watching others reflect on their memories or their thinking processes, by mastering practices common in the culture, or by following oft-repeated adages; even left pretty much to their own devices, however, in seems reasonable to assume that nearly all youngsters will improve somewhat in the "metacognitive" areas between the age of seven and adulthood (which itself begins at markedly different ages across cultures).”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“More broadly speaking, the milieus in which children spend their early years exert a very strong impact on the standards by which they subsequently judge the world around them. Whether in relation to fashion, food, geographical environment, or manner of speaking, models initially encountered by children continue to affect their tastes and preferences indefinitely, and these preferences prove very difficult to change. Closely related to standards of taste are an emerging set of beliefs about which behaviors are good and which values are the be cherished. In most cases, these standards initially reflect quite faithfully the value system encountered at home, at church, and at preschool or elementary school. Values with respect to behavior (you should not steal, you should salute the flag) and sets of beliefs (my country, right or wrong, all mommies are perfect, God is monitoring all of your actions) often exert a very powerful effect on children's actions and reactions. In some cultures, a line is drawn early between the moral sphere, where violations merit severe sanctions, and the conventional sphere, where practices are evaluated along a single dimension of morality. Even—and perhaps especially—when children are not conscious of the source and of the controversy surrounding these beliefs and values, unfortunate clashes may occur when they meet others raised with a contrasting set of values. It is assuredly no accident that Lenin and the Jesuits agreed on one precept: Let me have a child until the age of seven, and I will have that child for life.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“For the most part, performances of young children fall under the rubric of rote, ritualized, or conventional patterns of behavior, but children sometimes go beyond the models that they have seen, and their performances may embody genuine understandings. In such cases children are able to utilize symbol systems to create performances that reveal sensitivity to a variety of perspectives or express their own feelings or beliefs about a state of affairs. As psychiatrist Robert Coles has shown, children caught in political or social crises are especially prone to exhibit their understandings through works of literary or graphic art, and these works may reflect both a rounded sense of a controversial issue and the creator's personal response to it.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“If we cannot today implement an education that yields full understanding, we can certainly do a much better job than we have done up to this point. The process of achieving such an education ought to be challenging and enriching, far more so than the implementation of the less ambitious education with which we have been saddled—even in places where students are required to work on their assignments until the wee hours of the morning. Important clues for the achievement of such an education come from venerable sources such as the traditional apprenticeship; equally important clues come from new sources of evidence, ranging from recently developed technologies like videodisks to newly evolving institutions such as children's museums.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“No less than human beings, human institutions exhibit constraints. Schools or factories or offices may be malleable, but they are not infinitely so. Economies of scale, vexations of human relations, bureaucratic histories, diverse and changing expectations, and pressures for accountability burden all significant human institutions. In the past, serving a smaller and less diverse clientele, schools faced certain problems; today, in a rapidly changing world, where the schools are expected to serve the multiple needs of every young individual, the limitations of this institution are sometimes overwhelming. If one wishes to bring about change in schools, it is important to understand their modes of operation no less than one understands the operations of individuals within them. Accordingly, following the investigation of constraints on human knowing, I consider some limits governing educational institutions, most especially schools. A focus on children and schools brings us face-to-face with a third dimension: the question of which knowledges and performances we value. If one considers school strictly as a place in which certain criteria are to be met (say, for the purpose of certification), it matters not what use one can subsequently make of the skills and knowledge acquired there. One could readily tolerate schools where understanding was considered irrelevant or even noxious. But if one wishes to argue that school should relate to a productive life in the community, or that certain kinds of understanding ought to be the desiderata of education, then the research results I have described are consequential.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“Less happily, many who are capable of exhibiting significant understanding appear deficient, simply because they cannot readily traffic in the commonly accepted coin of the educational realm. For instance, there is a significant population that lacks facility with formal examinations but can display relevant understanding when problems arise in natural contexts.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“Why, one may ask, should we care about erasing these gaps? And, in particular, why is it important that natural or scholastic understandings give way to disciplinary understandings? To my mind, the answer is simple: The understandings of the disciplines represent the most important cognitive achievements of human beings. It is necessary to come to know these understandings if we are to be fully human, to live in our time, to be able to understand it to the best of our abilities, and to build upon it. The five-year-old knows many things, but he cannot know what disciplinary experts have discovered over the centuries. Perhaps our daily lives might not be that different if we continue to believe that the world is flat, but such a belief makes it impossible for us to appreciate in any rounded way the nature of time, travel, weather, or seasons; the behaviors of objects; and the personal and cultural options open to us.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach

“What is going on here? Why are students not mastering what they ought to be learning? It is my belief that, until recently, those of us involved in education have not appreciated the strength of the initial conceptions, stereotypes, and "scripts" that students bring to their school learning nor the difficulty of refashioning or eradicating them. We have failed to appreciate that in nearly every student there is a five-year-old "unschooled" mind struggling to get out and express itself. Nor have we realized how challenging it is to convey novel materials so that their implications will be appreciated by children who have long conceptualized materials of this sort in a fundamentally different and deeply entrenched way.”
― Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach