A decade ago, the name Howard Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences (MI) were barely known in this State. Today, if people remain unfamiliar with his name, many of them will almost certainly be aware of his theory. Wherever you go in the education sector - in the universities and ITs, in first and second-level schools and in adult education - at some point or other, someone is bound to refer to the MI theory.

Some time ago, I attended a conference on adult education organised by the Dublin Adult Learning Centre. The centre offers basic education adults from the inner-city who, for one reason another, left school without acquiring elementary educational skills.

That morning, the ballroom in a city centre hotel was packed with ordinary men - but mostly women - who had left school early and in adulthood had returned to education to pick up where they had left off. The keynote speaker had cried off at the last moment and one of the organisers stepped in to fill the breach.

The audience sat enthralled as the theory of multiple intelligences was explained to them. They were fascinated - buoyed up, even - to learn of the logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodykinaesthetic, inter-personal and intra-personal intelligences identified by a Harvard professor - Dr Howard Gardner - and that the particular mix of intelligences in which they were strong affected the way they learned.

Gardner's book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which was first published in 1983, has had a significant effect on schools throughout the US.

Just 12 days ago, Gardner was in UCC to receive an honorary doctorate. His links with Cork go back some years - Dr Aine Hyland, professor of education, there, established a project based on the MI theory back in 1994. She is now a member of faculty at the Project Zero Summer Institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Project Zero is the name of a research group established in 1967 to strengthen arts education.

Gardner has been with Project Zero since his postgraduate days, when he was a student of the cognitive and educational psychologist, Jerome Bruner. From 1972 until July last year, Gardner was a co-director of the group. He remains chairman of Project Zero's steering committee, professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. Today, Project Zero is one of the US's leading educational research centres.

Its focus has spread to include research on learning, thinking and creativity across disciplines, age groups and educational settings. Its annual summer school - the Summer Institute - attracts educators from all over the world. Recently, Project Zero has launched online courses on the MI theory and teaching for understanding.

Invariably described as "rumpled" and "tousled-haired", on the day he's receiving his honorary degree, Gardner is academic-smart in navy. The shock of hair - black peppered with grey - remains. Despite his punishing schedule - Boston-London-Prague-Cork in as many days - he looks a decade younger than his 58 years.

Growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Gardner had never considered psychology as a career. His parents were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany in 1938. By the time Gardner was born, they had already lost an eight-year-old son, Eric, in a sledging accident. This loss, not discussed at home, overshadowed Gardner's childhood. He was over-protected, banned from rough sports and indeed only learned to cycle as an adult. "They saw me as a replacement for Eric," he says, "and I saw myself as a replacement". Does he resent that? No. "It's easy for me to put myself in my parents' place. I grew up like a first born."

There was, though, pressure for him to succeed. "I was lucky enough to able to meet that challenge," he says. "Eric was very good at school and so was I." In another time and another place Gardner might have become a musician. An excellent piano player, he gave it up in high dudgeon when he was 12 - his teacher had told him to practice for three hours every day.

If you'd asked the teenage Howard Gardner what he wanted to become, he would have said "a lawyer, because if you're an academically strong Jewish child from a family with no tradition of higher education, you become a lawyer or a doctor." Gardner went to Harvard to study history - but switched to psychology - and also took pre-med and pre-law courses. "I wanted to show I could do the professions if I needed to, but having proved I could, I felt I no longer needed to do them."

For Gardner, Harvard was a liberating experience. "It was the first time I was stretched intellectually," he recalls. "It was extremely important, since it opened up the whole world of scholarship." As a postgraduate student and later as a researcher, Gardner says he unconsciously modelled himself on his mentor, Jerome Bruner, who was both a distinguished academic and an adept people-manager. "It's not often realised that if you go into science research, you need to be able to select and motivate people as you do in business," he says. "Bruner was good at that and I learned by watching him."

In the early days at Project Zero, Gardner studied children's development in the visual arts and music. Later he worked with brain-damaged people and began to realise that a person's being strong in one area of performance was no guarantee of similar strengths in others.

Although the multiple intelligences theory is making waves in places as far apart as Sweden, Bangladesh, South Korea and Latin America, it is not without its critics. "In every jurisdiction some people like what I do," Gardner says. However, "most academics don't like my ideas - but as soon as they have a child with learning difficulties they become interested."

According to Gardner, teaching people in different ways to ensure understanding is much fairer than a uniform school system where everyone is treated in the same way. "The uniform school picks out one mind - the law professor's logical-mathematical mind. I say: "Let's find out as much as we can about each learner and craft an education that makes it possible for that person to learn and enjoy learning." People should be able to show their understanding in ways that suit them, he adds.

Gardner is also opposed to education systems which are based on fact-cramming. He favours a system in which students study fewer topics in greater depth. "My answer to the fact-craze is this," he declares, pulling a Palm Pilot from his breast pocket. "Why bother to spend time memorising facts? I argue that there's no point in training people to do things that machines can do. In the US, we have a wonderful system of education for the 19th century. If your mind is crammed with facts for an exam, without the cramming you could fail the same exam the following year. What's important, Gardner stresses, is understanding, critical thinking, the ability to analyse and ask good questions. If you don't know something - you should know how to find out about it.

For Gardner, "education must ultimately justify itself in terms of enhancing human understanding". He admits, however, that the work of Project Zero "is going very much against the grain of national trends in the US. "Today, education is focused on very basic skills and our system is totally oriented to fact-based multiple-choice tests. We (Project Zero) are keeping alive the flame of a very different view of education," he says. "We don't doubt that this view of education will come back into favour."

Howard Gardner has spent most of his adult life at Harvard. In 1995, he took a year out at Stanford University in California. There, he joined two close colleagues - Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (of the Drucker School of Management and author of the best seller Flow ) and Stanford professor William Damon - to talk about creativity and leadership.

"It was at the time that Newt Gringrich and the Republicans had taken over Congress. They saw government as the problem and said that we should be regulated by the market rather than by government. We three were convinced that there were many spheres, including education and the arts, where it would be disastrous to leave things to the market."

As result of their musings, Gardner and his collaborators were prompted to examine how people could be both creative and humane in the workplace. To do so, they established the Good Work Project. "We define good work as being excellent in quality, responsible, ethical and moral," Gardner explains.

"We have been studying different professions to understand the nature of good work in these professions. We're looking at how people who want to do good work succeed or fail in doing so at a time when things are changing very quickly - when market forces are very powerful and where there are really no strong counter-forces and our whole sense of time and space is being radically altered by the Web and other technologies."

The project is ambitious, Gardner says. It will examine good work in 12 professions, among people at different ages from 10 to 80 years, in different cultures. It will also examine the educational interventions that can be made to encourage a good work ethic. "Good work is hard to do," Gardner comments. "It's much easier to make a lot of money than to do it in a responsible way."

The project's first volume, Good work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books), is due to appear in the autumn. This book examines the professions of journalism and genetics in the US. Their studies have higlighted professional unhappiness among US journalists, who feel their profession's golden age is behind them. Geneticists, on the other hand, are currently living through their golden age and "can't wait to get to work in the morning".

For the future, Gardner hopes he will be involved in the Good Work Project for many years to come. "My major goal is to keep Good Work going," he says. Given his expertise, his life's mission is now to focus on the question of how good work is done and how it can be promoted.

The Summer Institute at Project Zero is a place where teaching practitioners, school management and government personnel come together as equals to talk about children's learning, says the institute's director, Dr Lois Heltand. Some 20 per cent of the annual intake of 260 are foreign nationals. The rest come from the US - mostly from a mixture of public, private, wealthy and poor schools, she says.

Project Zero website: www.pz.harvard.edu