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 garden that makes up one's mind is always to some extent the flowers and trees that we get from our families genetically, but also we get from our families culturally.

I actually finished my mulitiple intelligences work 40 years ago. And since then, I've been focused with colleagues on what we call good work and good citizenship. And our study of good work, we studied nine different professionals dealing from law and medicine to journalism to teaching. And we found out people who were admired and to find out why these professionals were admired. And we found out they were admired for three things. One, how excellently they carried out their work. And of course, that's important. Number two, how engaged they were. To what extent do they really like their work, want to do it, and feel good about being at work rather than dreading it? And three, and what you're touching on, did they carry out the work in an ethical way? Now, when it's absolutely clear what to do in a situation, then you don't call it ethical. Ethical is what do you do when a situation is complicated? Let's say you're a lawyer and you find that the client lies to you. Do you let the client lie on the stand? Or do you say, 'No, I'm not going to be your lawyer if you're going to lie.' If you're a doctor, and there are two people who have the same injury and one is a relative and the other is a stranger, what do you do? If you're a journalist, and you're covering a story and you see a crime occurring, should you remain a journalist and cover it? Or should you call the police and become an accessory? So we're very, very interested in how people deal with ethical issues. Now, as you are anticipating. The issues of excellence, engagement, and ethics, they have to be reexamined in an era when there are computational systems which are clearly as excellent as any human being can do, maybe more excellent.”

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

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