How do we define intelligence? What is the point of creativity and intelligence if we are not creating good in the world? In this age of AI, what is the importance of a synthesizing mind?
Howard Gardner, Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an author of over 30 books, translated into 32 languages, and several hundred articles, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In the last few years, Gardner has been studying the nature of human synthesizing, a topic introduced in his 2020 memoir, A Synthesizing Mind.
For 28 years, with David Perkins, he was Co-Director of Harvard Project Zero, and in more recent years has served in a variety of leadership positions. Since the middle 1990s, Gardner has directed The Good Project, a group of initiatives, founded in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. The project promotes excellence, engagement, and ethics in education, preparing students to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society. Through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, The Good Project seeks to help students reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life and give them the tools to make thoughtful decisions.
"I had two close colleagues, both psychologists: William Damon, a student of moral development, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, recently deceased, probably known to many of your audience because he developed the notion of flow, which is that psychological state where anxiety and boredom are mediated by something that really involves and engrosses you. And the three of us were able to spend a year together at a research center, and the question we came up with was: Can you be creative and humane at the same time? Creative means having your mind go free, think about all sorts of things, try them out. Nothing is taboo, nothing is off limits. But at the same time, can you do it in a way that's humane and ethical and avoids, for example, creating the Einstein equation, which was a brilliant physics explanation, but also led to nuclear weapons.
And similarly with cracking genetic code in any way. And we thought this was a good question, but we weren't wise enough to come up with an answer. So that's why we spent 10 years, roughly from 1995 to 2005, interviewing about 1, 500 people from nine different professions. And it was from that very intensive and extensive study that we came up with the three E's of good work. Excellence, engagement, and ethics. Since then, my research group at Harvard has called this The Good Project. And The Good Project is looking at the development of a moral and ethical stance as young as the age of three or four, preschool, all the way to professions and middle life. And we have a website thegoodproject.org where you can read dozens of blogs and various papers on this topic. And, as Mia indicated, there were also our books in which there's one book called Good Work, and another book called Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Refrain, where we describe our current thinking. And, you know, I think the study would have been different if we had done it in the age of ChatGPT."
www.howardgardner.com
http://thegoodproject.org
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542838/a-synthesizing-mind
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