Howard Gardner - The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand

Also by Howard Gardner

A Synthesizing Mind

The App Generation

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed

Responsibility at Work

Five Minds for the Future

Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons

Changing Minds

Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet

The Quest for Mind

The Arts and Human Development

The Shattered Mind

Developmental Psychology

Artful Scribbles

Art, Mind, and Brain

Frames of Mind

The Minds New Science

To Open Minds

The Unschooled Mind

Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice

Creating Minds

Leading Minds

Intelligence: Multiple Perspectives

(with Mindy Kornhaber and Warren Wake)

Extraordinary Minds

To my parents, Hilde and Ralph Gardner

my wife, Ellen Winner

my children, Kerith, Jay, Andrew, and Benjamin

and the generations to come

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Copyright 1999, 2021 by Howard Gardner

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Interior design by Deirdre C. Amthor

Cover design by Tristan Offit

Cover artwork by Ambassador806/Getty Images

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows:

Gardner, Howard.

The disciplined mind/Howard Gardner. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p .) and index.

1. EducationPhilosophy.2. Learning, Psychology of.

3. Comprehension. 4. Multiple intelligences. I. Title.

LB885.G37W45 1999

370 .1dc21 98-43544

CIP

ISBN 978-0-6848-4324-7

ISBN 978-1-9821-4221-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-9821-7695-2 (ebook)

In The Disciplined Mind, I seek to synthesize over thirty years of research in the cognitive and biological sciences, and over fifteen years of involvement in precollegiate education. A great many individuals have contributed to my thinking, and several institutions have generously supported my research; there is, alas, no way in which I can single each out for the thanks that are due.

I do want to express my appreciation to the several colleagues and friends who have read and commented substantively on earlier drafts of this manuscript: Thomas Armstrong, Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Patricia Bolanos, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon, Patricia Graham, Thomas Hatch, Fred Hills, Thomas Hoerr, George Klein, Mindy Kornhaber, Mara Krechevsky, Tanya Luhrmann, Joanna Martin, Arthur Powell, Barbara Powell, Carlina Rinaldi, Eric Schaps, Theodore Sizer, Margot Strom, Frank Sulloway, Ike Williams, Ellen Winner. I am also indebted to my two hardworking and dedicated assistants, Lisa Bromer and Alex Chisholm (Alex skillfully prepared the Mozart score reproduced as an appendix). Thanks to Jolanta Benal, the talented copy editor at Simon & Schuster. I want to thank, as well, the members of the Pew Forum on Educational Reform. Finally, I want to express appreciation to the many colleagues who have worked with me in the ATLAS Communities Project and the ATLAS Seminar; and to the New American Schools organization and the MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Spencer Foundations, which have supported the ATLAS enterprise. Without our seven years of work and discussion, I could not have written this book.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

January, 1999

Its been a quarter of a century since I began working on The Disciplined Mind, and more than twenty years since it was first publishedan appropriate time to reflect on the book, its origins, its claims, what I got right, what I would alter today.

I was trained as a developmental psychologistand my initial research examined childrens cognitive development, particularly in the arts. I became well known outside the scholarly community in the mid-1980s because of a theory that I had developed about different kinds of intelligence (Gardner 1983). And even though MI theory was designed to address my fellow psychologists, it found a larger and more receptive audience among educatorseducators of all stripes, and in many corners of the world.

At first, questions about the intelligences were largely about how to define and measure them. But soon people began to ask, and I began to ponder my views about education more generally. And by the mid-1990s, I was seenand had begun to see myselfas a thinker and researcher on education, particularly during the years of schooling.

Raised in a coal-mining town (Scranton, Pennsylvania) in the 1950s, I had received a quite conventional education. But as a result of my work with psychologist-turned-educational-thinker Jerome Bruner, and the school experiences of my own children, I had become a convert to progressive educationloosely, the variety of education that focuses on the raising of good questions; the mastery of discussion, analysis, and argument; an appreciation of the arts and creativity; and the signal importance of community and citizenship.

Accordingly, I felt it was time for me to define my own educational philosophy. In doing so, I drew on the best current thinking from the cognitive and behavioral scienceswhat we know about how the minds (and brains) of children develop, what ideas they begin with, which ones prove refractory to change, which modes of thinking are possible to develop, and how they should be nurtured.

While sympathetic to progressive education, I also wanted to make it quite clear that I did not favor anything goesthe excessive laissez-faire attitude that John Dewey himself inveighed against. I am a believer in rigorous thinking, and in building on the modes of thought and analysis that human beings have developed over the centuriesoften against more natural ways of thinking. (See my argument in Gardner 1991.) In shorthand, I favored mastery of the chief disciplines that we have come to value worldwide: history, mathematics, philosophy, the sciences, the arts.

Most of us who write in a scholarly vein acknowledge that we are also writing against certain perspectives. In addition to being critical of hyper-progressivism, I was also critical of a belief in the importance (indeed the necessity) of a canoncertain key texts that everyone should readand in a list of items, names, places, elements, that everyone should know. Not only can those items be readily found, even before the era of search engines, but they are really a measure of memorynot of thinking and analysisand they do little to nurture discussion, reflectiveness, creativity.