This is a summary of Multiple Intelligences After Twenty Years
Howard Gardner, Invited Address, American Educational Research Association, April 2003
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Gardner uses this address to trace where the theory of multiple intelligences came from and where it stood twenty years after “Frames of Mind”.
The theory’s roots
He starts with the theory’s roots. As a young pianist deeply involved in the arts, Gardner noticed that academic psychology largely ignored artistic ability. Finding a place for the arts in psychology became an early professional goal, which led him to co-found Project Zero at Harvard in 1967, an organization he ran for 28 years.
A second influence came from studying neurologist Norman Geschwind’s research on stroke and brain-damaged patients. Gardner was struck by cases where damage produced counterintuitive symptom patterns, such as patients who lost the ability to read words but kept the ability to read numbers.
This pulled him into 20 years of work on a neuropsychological unit studying how abilities are organized in the brain. His 1975 book “The Shattered Mind” documented these findings. He then sketched an outline in 1976 for an unwritten book on the psychology of different human faculties, tentatively titled *Kinds of Minds*. That outline sat forgotten for years before eventually becoming “Frames of Mind”.
Origin of MI theory
The direct origin of MI theory traces to 1979, when Harvard researchers received a large grant from the Bernard Van Leer Foundation to study human potential. Gardner’s assignment was to write about what biological and behavioral science had established about human cognition.
That assignment became the research program behind multiple intelligences. He and his colleagues spent years combing genetics, anthropology, neuropsychology, and brain-damage literature to build a taxonomy of human capacities, essentially merging what he learned about brain damage in the morning with what he learned about child cognitive development in the afternoon.
Several turning points
Gardner identifies several turning points in that process. First, choosing the word “intelligences” instead of “abilities” or “talents.” He believes this word choice, more than the content itself, drove the book’s impact, since it put him in direct tension with the psychological establishment’s attachment to IQ testing, though he pushes back on the idea that he set out to attack IQ testing itself.
Second, developing a formal definition of intelligence along with eight criteria for what counts as one, a part of the work he considers among its most original contributions, though one that’s received little attention in later discussion.
Third, though he was writing primarily as a psychologist, he added a chapter on educational implications at the Van Leer Foundation’s request. That decision proved pivotal: educators, not psychologists, ended up being the audience most drawn to the theory. His core claim rejected a single general intelligence (g) in favor of a set of relatively autonomous intelligences, including linguistic, logical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.
Frames of Mind
“Frames of Mind” was published in 1983 without unusual fanfare, similar to his earlier books. But within months, Gardner noticed real buzz building, speaking invitations poured in, and people showed up already familiar with the theory. He became known, for better or worse, as the father of multiple intelligences.
For the first decade after publication, Gardner held two roles. As an observer, he watched schools adopt MI theory into their practice, including the Key School in Indianapolis, the first school built explicitly around the theory, while consistently maintaining that as a psychologist, not an educator, he wasn’t positioned to dictate classroom practice.
As a researcher, he led Project Spectrum with David Feldman and others, building fifteen tasks to assess young children’s intellectual profiles. He also worked with Robert Sternberg on a middle school curriculum and with the Educational Testing Service on arts assessment tools.
New activities
By the 1990s, Gardner shifted into three new activities. He wrote case studies of exceptional individuals, producing “Creating Minds”, “Leading Minds”, and “Extraordinary Minds”. He extended the theory itself, concluding during a 1994-95 sabbatical that evidence supported adding a naturalist intelligence and possibly an existential intelligence, and he clarified three distinct uses of the term “intelligence”: a universal human property, a dimension of individual difference, and a way of executing a task toward a goal.
He also began actively correcting misuses of the theory, including its conflation with learning styles and its troubling application to characterizing racial or ethnic groups. He grew more involved in educational reform, both practically through Project Zero’s school partnerships and scholarly work on disciplinary understanding, arguing that meaningful learning requires probing a few topics deeply rather than covering material broadly, an approach where multiple intelligences become genuinely useful tools.
Looking ahead
Gardner closes by looking ahead. He notes ongoing proposals for new intelligences, from emotional to spiritual to digital, and acknowledges that deciding what counts as an intelligence is ultimately a judgment call, not an algorithm.
He flags two priorities he’d pursue with more time: understanding how culturally constructed domains and disciplines relate to the intelligences themselves, and updating the theory’s biological grounding given twenty years of advances in genetics and neuroscience since 1983. He ends by acknowledging that MI theory now has a life of its own beyond his control, comparing it to releasing an idea, or a child, into the world.