Howard Gardner : the myth of Multiple Intelligences

How did the idea of multiple intelligences come about?

We have seen that there are problems in making sense of Gardner’s project, because
he fails to give us reasons why he makes this move or that move. We don’t know the
process whereby a candidate intelligence passes the first test - the prerequisites test -
or, if it passes the first test, the process by which it passes the second test - the criteria
test. It isn’t very clear what an intelligence is. We know that Gardner believes there
are innate abilities in a range of areas which unfold into more and more mature forms.
We know that symbol systems play a part in the story. But it’s all still pretty obscure.

I think the only way of making it any clearer is by looking at how it all came about.
Even if this might not justify the theory, it should at least help to explain it .

Gardner’s early work on a developmental theory of learning in the arts

In the 1960s Gardner began his career as a developmental psychologist, profoundly
influenced by Piaget. Right at the start of his career, then, Gardner was working
within a certain structure of thinking - that in different areas of understanding, to do in
Piaget’s case with mathematics, logic, science and morality, you can trace
developmental stages from innate seeds to full-blown social forms. Gardner has
always been interested in the bridge between the biological and the cultural. On the
cultural side he was also influenced by Levi-Strauss in anthropology.

The young Gardner was also „a serious pianist and enthusiastically involved with
other arts as well’ (2003:1).

No surprise, then, that when I first began to study developmental psychology, I
was soon struck by certain limitations in the field. The child was seen by
nearly all researchers as an exclusively rational creature, a problem-solver
....While a first-year graduate student, I elected to direct my own research
toward a developmental psychology of the arts. (1982: xii)

This is key to understanding Gardner’ s project. He decided on extending Piaget’s
approach from areas like logic and mathematics that Piaget worked on, to the arts.
Most of his work before 1979 was on that project.

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