clipped from: www.infed.org   
picture: howard gardner 2004, taken by Esthr/posted as public at flickrI want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place. Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do... Ultimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves. The performance of understanding that try matters are the ones we carry out as human beings in an imperfect world which we can affect for good or for ill.

Howard Earl Gardner's (1943- ) work has been marked by a desire not to just describe the world but to help to create the conditions to change it. The scale of his contribution can be gauged from following comments in his introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Howard Gardner's classic work Frames of Mind. The theory of multiple intelligences: