HOWARD GARDNER - Co-director of The Good Project - Author of A Synthesizing Mind & Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

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.

"The barriers to climate change are largely political: individual countries and countries working together. We need to keep carbon down and have people lead lives in ways which are less destructive to our environment. And I don't have a great deal of faith that our political system can do that. I'm not religious myself, but I think that we need to have a new religious leader in the world. I always say Gandhi is the most important person of the last thousand years because he understood that if we tried to fight with weapons, we would just destroy one another. We have to disagree peacefully. And I think we need that kind of figure who can mobilize people across different nations and different attitudes on the question. Where I think I do have something to say, is I think in the schools of the future, we're going to focus much more on what it means to be human beings on our planet. I think that's the best chance for the planet to survive, which is the question of climate change, but also to thrive, which is a question of good work and good citizenship."

www.howardgardner.com
http://thegoodproject.org
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542838/a-synthesizing-mind

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