Howard Gardner: ‘A Blessing of Influences’
We all owe our lives to someone, starting with mother and father and then outward along a spreading tree of life going back in time. For those who make a living in the academic realm, a second tree of life is entwined with the first: a branching series of mentors and intellectual influences. “We are the sum of whoever we worked with,” said developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, a celebrated, wide-ranging scholar based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). For him, that sum includes a few names everyone knows. Erik Erikson and David Riesman were both at Harvard when Gardner was an undergraduate. Jean Piaget and Claude Levi-Strauss corresponded with the young scholar before he earned his Harvard Ph.D. in 1971. (The two men were soon the subjects of his first trade book.) In 1970, by chance, each of these iconic revolutionaries in the realm of ideas — one a theorist...