I was recently looking for something in my bookshelves, and came across my battered copy of Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. A thought popped up in my mind, so I turned to the copyright date, and realized that it's the 25th anniversary of the publication of a book that's sparked a quarter of a century of educational exploration and controversy. Not many books have done that, so Happy Birthday Multiple Intelligences (or MI for short)!

I reread my 440-page copy—heavily underlined and with many margin notes. We've come a long way in our understanding of our brain and cognition in 25 years, but the basic vision was there at the beginning. I googled the topic Multiple Intelligences and discovered it now lists 3,350,000 entries!

The book had an immediate impact on me when I read it upon publication. We educators were then boxed into a unitary perspective of intelligence, and yet many felt that the prevailing beliefs about IQ didn't match what we observed in students. Here was a fresh perspective, and most of what Gardner wrote made sense to me, even though I didn't completely understand it at the time.