Advanced Search

Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner teaches psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, is Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. (April 2002)

IN THE REVIEW

Too Many Choices?

The Other Boston Busing Story: What's Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line

by Susan E. Eaton

Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement

by Mitchell L. Stevens
A century ago, fewer than 10 percent of young Americans went to high school and only 2 percent received degrees. Except for the handful who received a “classical education” in Latin and Greek, most students simply learned reading, writing, and arithmetic in the proverbial one-room schoolhouse before going to work …

Paroxysms of Choice

Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education

by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Bruce V. Manno and Gregg Vanourek

When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale

by Edward B. Fiske and Helen F. Ladd
The decade of the 1950s in the United States can seem eerily familiar to us now. It was also a period of unparalleled prosperity for most Americans, a time when America seemed the unquestionable master of the world. Americans showed little interest in international affairs or in politics generally, preferring …

The Enigma of Erik Erikson

Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson

by Lawrence J. Friedman
Like the major topics that he addressed, the psychoanalyst Erik Homburger Erikson came into his own in the America of the 1960s. From his newly created position as professor of human development at Harvard, Erikson claimed that there were major psychological differences between men and women, a view that was …

Do Parents Count?

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

by Judith Rich Harris, with a foreword by Steven Pinker
We all want to know how and why we got to be who we are. Parents have a special interest in answering the “how” and “why” questions with respect to their own children. In addressing the mysteries of human growth, traditional societies have invoked God, the gods, the fates, with …

Thinking About Thinking

The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science

by Steven Mithen
Before Darwin, many scholars wrote about the origins of man and the beginnings of mental life. Such writings, however, were frankly speculative: there were few agreed-upon facts, nor was there a comprehensive theoretical frame within which to situate facts and suppositions. Darwin’s epoch-making writings changed forever the status of human …

Green Ideas Sleeping Furiously

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science

by Annette Karmiloff-Smith
As a rule, a book review in an obscure journal by an unknown scholar rarely attracts attention. Noam Chomsky’s lengthy review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, published in the journal Language in 1959, is a striking exception. At the time Skinner was the most respected experimental psychologist in the world …

The Bilingual Blur

Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism

by Kenji Hakuta
Today there are perhaps four thousand spoken languages, about thirty times as many languages as there are countries in the world. Over half the world’s population is at least to some extent bilingual. These facts help to insure that bilingualism remains—as it has long been—an intellectually provocative and a socially …