precise definition of intelligence is. One of those challenges comes from developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, who has proposed what author Marie Winn (1990) calls "by far the most intuitively satisfying of the current approaches" (p. 28), the theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner postulates that there are at least seven discrete kinds of intelligence as he defines the word and that schools must find ways to nurture all seven in every individual child.
Gardner's initial interest in understanding intelligence came through observing severely ill patients in the late 1970s at the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center who tested high on standardized IQ tests but who could not function in society. At around the same time, he was recruited by Nelson Goodman to help start an experimental program in arts education at Harvard's Graduate School [dubbed Project Zero since, as Gardner (1989) quotes Goodman, "we know nothing about this" (p. 65)]. The project gave him an intensive firsthand opportunity to study early childhood development and watch the way children learn: "I looked at the development in ordinary children of style sensitivity, metaphoric capacity, rhythmic ability, and story-telling skills" (Gardner, 1989, p. 68). His experiences established the primary direction for his academic career.
Gardner began to develop his own definition of intelligence. One of his mentors, Robert J. Sternberg (1985), writes, "Intelligence is a concept we invented in order to provide a useful way of evaluating and, occasionally, ordering people in terms of their performance on tasks and in situations that are valued by the culture" (p. 336). Gardner (1986) himself notes that "the concept of intelligence arose because of a perceived need to rank individuals on a dimension judged of importance for scholastic achievement" (p. 73). He came to realize that this artificial concept did not provide him with a useful vocabulary for u...