ABSTRACT
Howard Gardner published six books and over 100 scholarly articles in cognitive development and neuropsychology prior to gaining much recognition from educators in the field or researchers outside the realm of arts education. Gardner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1943 to parents who had fled, penniless, from Nazi Germany. He entered Harvard planning to study history in preparation for a law career. Gardner's experimental work in human cognition was spurred by his exposure to the work of Jean Piaget during the Bruner project. Through the remainder of his graduate education to the present day, Project Zero has been at the centre of Gardner's intellectual life. At Project Zero, Gardner initially pursued studies of children's development in the visual arts, music and figurative language. By the mid 1970s, Gardner began to construct a theory of human cognition that ran counter both to Piagetian theory, with its pre-eminent scientist, and to psychometric theory, with its keystone of general intelligence.
