Howard Gardner

The man whose research and theories are said by some to be revolutionizing American psychology started his professional life as a painter in Hungary. A diplomat's son, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interspersed his painting exhibitions with work as a correspondent for the French daily Le Monde. He learned English by singing American folk songs and reading Pogo comics. In 1956--the year Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution--he came to this country. He was 22.

Two decades ago, many people believed that you had better start early working on children's brains if you wanted to help them succeed in life. It was the era of flash cards in the crib and Stravinsky under the pillow. One acquaintance, who earnestly wanted her child to be smart, ate a lot of liver in her third month of pregnancy, the time of brain formation. The child eventually graduated from an Ivy League college and is now, of course, scrambling to find stable employment.

California Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin is promoting a marvelous idea: A garden in every school. As coordinator of the Naturalist Academy at North Hollywood High School, I have had the opportunity to see the educational effects of ecological horticulture, a.k.a. organic gardening, on our students. If, in fact, we cannot build schools for the children of Los Angeles, let's tear up the concrete and the asphalt and grow gardens!

The preschool years are a time of great discovery. For many tots, that discovery includes a computer and the wonders that it can present. Some kids even consider the computer a house for their favorite characters. So it's important to choose preschool software carefully. There is a ton of preschool software on the market. But some, instead of enthralling children, may actually frustrate them.

If kids today knew who Gen. Francis A. Walker was, they just might build an altar to exalt his name. A Civil War hero turned Boston school board president, Walker thought math homework harmed children's health. So he pushed the panel to ban it in 1900. His move was part of a nationwide anti-homework frenzy.

Ted Sizer, a former prep school headmaster and Harvard University dean who built an education reform movement that has endured for two decades despite its unfashionable opposition to government- imposed standards and emphasis on deep learning over memorization and regurgitation, has died. He was 77. Sizer died Wednesday at his home in Harvard, Mass., after a long battle with cancer, according to a statement by the Coalition of Essential Schools, the organization of 600 private and public schools he founded at Brown University in 1984 with the goal of restructuring the American high school.

Harvard educator Howard Gardner and others have recently suggested that intelligence is more than scholarly or book knowledge. There may be seven kinds of intelligence, Gardner and others believe. In last week's column, I summarized what Gardner has dubbed the "multiple intelligences": linguistic, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, logical-mathematical, interpersonal and musical.

It's after school, but about a dozen Jackson Elementary School students are prepared to stay as long as it takes to get this assignment done. Dome, dum, dum a bass drum sounds. They bob their heads, their knees bending at the sound of each beat. They grin and glance at one another as their teacher, Scott Sayre, looks on. For this day, their Altadena classroom has been turned into a recording studio. "Gandhi!"

Christian Tupou is a student-athlete. He plays football, and more specifically he plays defensive tackle. The combination of these simple traits traps USC's Tupou in a series of stereotypes that thrust him to the bottom of the intellectual scale at a top-tier university. But listening to Tupou talk and watching him work with other players muddies the water. The starting redshirt senior has boatloads of athletic intelligence in addition to school smarts. With fall camp fast approaching, he's studying Pacific 12 Conference centers and guards to see which hand they use to snap the ball, and to see how far apart their feet are. In games he'll use his off-season studying to help him shoot his gaps.

For two months, a young Latina named Alicia sat in her second-grade classroom, rarely asking questions and dutifully completing her work. Her teacher saw nothing extraordinary about her. But Alicia's classmates did. They nominated the quiet, dark-eyed girl for her school's gifted and talented program. Pink questionnaires distributed to the students had asked: Who is the most curious? Who knows a lot? Who has good ideas? Who can always think of more than one way to do things?