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.

"And what scholars my age do is we write about these things. We talk about these things, but we hope our students will carry it through. So I've been trying to organize a network on synthesizing, which now has people from several different countries involved. And my team on The Good Project is working with schools and dozens of countries. And the curriculum has been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, and it's about to be translated into Japanese. And that's how we hope these ideas will make a difference. Now, if you are a pessimist by nature, as I am. You're going to say, 'Well, what can a bunch of scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts, possibly do that's going to change the way the world is?' And the answer is we can't do it ourselves. We have to find partners and like-minded people all over the world and do blogs and podcasts and write. And I don't do social media, but my colleagues do and try to come out with more positive ways of thinking about things. Because there's plenty of depressing news and examples in the world. And I like to say, I'm a pessimist by nature, but I try to live my life as an optimist.”

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

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