Howard Gardner was recently interviewed for the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) Social Impact Review by R. Bruce Rich, Chairman of EL Education and 2020 ALI Fellow. In the interview (click here for link) Gardner discusses among other things, his new intellectual memoir, how writing a book about the theory of multiple intelligences changed his life, the goals of education, and what it means to be good and do good work.
The interview is reproduced in full below.
Professor Howard Gardner Discusses His Memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, with 2020 Harvard ALI Fellow R. Bruce Rich
By R. Bruce Rich
Howard Gardner, the John H. and Elizabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has had a distinguished career as an innovative educator and psychologist. His teaching and scholarship have influenced generations of researchers, education practitioners and students. Professor Gardner recently agreed to be interviewed for the Harvard ALI Social Impact Review about his recently published memoir, A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory.
Bruce Rich: What motivated you to write your memoir?
Howard Gardner: As I reflected on my work in the spheres of psychology and education, and considered preparing an intellectual memoir, I became interested in how my own mind works. It turns out that I have a synthesizing mind. And so, in A Synthesizing Mind, I have tried to describe the workings of such a mind and to suggest some broader educational lessons.
Rich: What are the attributes of a synthesizing mind?
Gardner: Synthesizers decide on a topic or problem of interest - often of general interest (like intelligence or leadership or creativity, to mention three topics that I have investigated). Synthesizers read, survey, and study broadly and deeply - they might well carry out surveys or interviews. They (or we!) constantly put forth charts, diagrams, equations, metaphors, poems - any expression in any medium - that helps to organize the vast amounts of material. With time, the synthesis is viable enough to test on other knowledgeable or interested persons. And so, the process of critique and revision begins.
Synthesis is neither science nor journalism. But ultimately, the synthesis needs to be tested publicly - and if it is accepted, it may well change how individuals think, and even how they behave. I think that is what has happened with the “theory of multiple intelligences” (MI theory) I developed - far more than with other topics that I have explored and then written about.
What I do, as a social investigator - or, if you will, a “soft” social scientist - is tackle a large problem (or issue) and put together the best account or solution of that problem (or issue) that I can. But to the extent that I am successful, I may change the way that people think and behave in the future, thereby invalidating some of my findings.
Rich: You approvingly quote Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann as stating: “In the twenty-first century, the most important kind of mind will be the synthesizing mind.” Why the importance to society of developing more such minds?
Gardner: While henceforth much of intellectual activity can and will be done by computational devices, synthesis is a hard nut for programmers or algorithmic creators to crack. That’s what Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann had in mind when he identified and particularly valorized synthesis. We don’t do much in education to help people become better synthesizers - and I hope that my book is a modest contribution to that educational effort.
Rich: You have never characterized your work as falling neatly within the confines of one or another social science discipline. Why is that?
Gardner: I don’t accept the sharp division between disciplines like psychology, sociology and anthropology. I believe that they blend smoothly into one another. Yet academic disciplines have very strong identities and tight “codes of behavior” and interdisciplinary work seldom survives, let alone triumphs, on most university campuses. As a result, the accumulation of knowledge is slowed down and perhaps even distorted.
Rich: You recount that from an early age, you’ve been fascinated with how we handle ethical and moral challenges - leading to a twenty-five-year focus in your work on what it means to be good. How did you become sensitized to those considerations and why they have remained such powerful forces in your ongoing work?
Gardner: It is up to others to judge whether I myself have lived a moral and ethical life. I have tried though by no means have I always succeeded.
But I know for sure - and my relatives and family friends can confirm this - that my parents, who escaped Nazi Germany, had very strong moral and ethical values and grounding (as did their own parents) and I was raised with a very strong superego. In my memoir, I also tell about the powerful example that my mother showed in protesting injustice, and I could have added dozens of stories about other family members in other circumstances - as well as some negative examples, from which I tried to learn as well.
In my early scholarly work, I was not particularly concerned with moral or ethical issues. But then I saw how some of my own ideas - particularly those of multiple intelligences - were misused. And so, with colleagues Mihaly (Mike) Csikszentmihalyi and William (Bill) Damon, I began to focus on “good work” - what it is, how it can be nurtured and achieved. And that’s the major issue that my colleagues and I have pondered for the last 25 years.
Of course, over the centuries, many great scholars, thinkers, and reflective persons have been concerned with these moral and ethical issues. But even the most brilliant among them could not have anticipated the current world - global, massively interconnected, with powerful and uncontrollable social media, and the threats of climate change and nuclear war - the list goes on! And so, every generation needs to re-engage such crucial issues for its time - and for the nurturing of future citizens - our children and their children.
Rich: The psychology of the arts, especially as relates to music, has formed a critical part of your research and scholarship. What has made this so enduring?
Gardner: My family was not highly educated - Hitler took care of that - but my parents and grandparents - as citizens of Weimar Germany - respected the arts, and they were happy to have me play the piano, read literature, go to museums and festivals. I was very fortunate in that regard. In college, I took some courses in the arts and then, during my post graduate year in England (1965-1966) I devoted more time to the arts than I have been able to do during any other time in life. I went to theater or concerts or museums almost every day!
Then occurred one of those incredible coincidences that change one’s life. As a beginning graduate student in developmental psychology, I had the opportunity to be a founding member of an organization called Project Zero. The purpose of the organization - founded by Nelson Goodman, a brilliant philosopher - was to carry out systematic research - philosophical but also empirical on the nature of artistic learning and achievement. (The name “zero” reflected Goodman’s sardonic assessment of how much reliable knowledge existed on the topic!)
In my formal studies I had already noted that most developmental psychologists thought that full development meant “being a scientist” or at least “thinking like a scientist.” I knew that was a narrow perspective, and so I elected - as a second-year doctoral student - to become a scholar on the development of artistic capacities. And, indeed, for the first fifteen years of my scholarship, that’s what I focused on. I very much doubt that I would ever have developed “MI theory” without that immersion in the nature and development of artistry… as well as its disintegration under conditions of damage to the brain.
Rich: You co-directed Project Zero from 1972-2000 and you are still the head of its Steering Committee. How has the nature of its work evolved over time?
Gardner: Briefly, Project Zero began its empirical work with psychological investigations of the nature and development of artistic capacities. But over the 53+ years of our operations, we have broadened our perspective greatly. We now focus on the full range of human capacities, working with children as young as preschoolers and adults as wizened as corporate executives on all kinds of skills and capacities. We have written thousands of articles and many dozens of books - my over half century involvement with Project Zero is my proudest scholarly achievement. I encourage readers to visit pz.harvard.edu, read our materials, and perhaps attend one of our courses or gatherings in person or online.
I like to say that “at Project Zero, we develop ideas and give them a push in the right direction.” We don’t run schools or museums, but we influence their activities around the globe.
Rich: What are some of the principal findings over the lifespan of this project?
Gardner: This puts me on the spot. We have had well over 100 projects, perhaps even 250(!), and even now we have dozens of ongoing projects. But here’s what I personally am proudest of:
The arts are not simply entertainment. They are rigorous intellectual activities, which individuals can master, and they enrich our world as much as do the sciences, though of course in complementary ways.
Understanding is key to learning. And understanding is not simply parroting back what you have heard and memorized - it is the ability to explain and to make sense of material that is not familiar but where your skills and schemas of knowledge are appropriate and applicable.
The scholarly disciplines are precious human inventions. Interdisciplinary work is important, difficult to achieve (as I’ve alluded in discussing “Soc Rel”), yet crucial both to understanding and to solving important problems in our world.
The professions are also precious human inventions. Unless we preserve them and honor their precepts, we risk going back to the dark ages. We cannot take them for granted and we have to reinvent them to some extent in every passing generation… and especially during periods of rapid change, such as the present era.
Good work is work that is excellent in quality, personally engaging, and carried out in an ethical way. Such work is more important than ever, and yet the challenges to ethical thought and behavior are profound and need constantly to be understood and resisted.
Play and creativity are precious human achievements. They cannot be taken for granted. They need to be cultivated and preserved, as crucial to human achievement and well-being. But creation needs to be wedded to a sense of moral responsibility - what we have termed “humane creativity.”
Knowing how to do something is not enough - one needs to have the disposition to use that knowledge - and to do so in a way that is moral and ethical.
THE LIST COULD BE DOUBLED OR TRIPLED. And that’s just my list. Others at Project Zero would have their own equally valid lists. Having the opportunity to spend time with Project Zero has been transformative for thousands of persons - educators, leaders, citizens, over the years.
Rich: You write that publication of your book about the theory of multiple intelligences “changed your life forever.” What, in a nutshell, is the theory of multiple intelligences?
Gardner: It’s the following claim: The single word "intelligence” implies that we are either smart with everything, average with everything, or dumb with everything. By implication, there’s just one computer that constitutes the mind-brain. Period.
That’s just not true. And my “synthesis” of the evidence suggests that humans are better described as having 7-10 separate mental computers - ranging from linguistic and logical (captured pretty well by standard IQ tests) to musical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, bodily, etc. - which are not well captured by standard one-shot tests. You can’t tell from a multiple choice or short answer test whether someone has a good understanding of himself, herself, or of others.
Rich: How was this work life changing?
Gardner: I don’t think that I changed, but my life did. I got many invitations to speak on many platforms; I became more of a public intellectual and was expected to have opinions on many topics - including ones about which I was ignorant. I tried to meet these expectations as best I could without interfering with my desire to carry out further research, wherever my curiosity and skills took me. I hope that I have succeeded.
Rich: How has the work you and your colleagues have done in the area of brain science aided your understanding of multiple intelligences?
Gardner: Neuroscience became a particular interest of mine. For twenty years I worked at the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center on a neurology ward, with special attention to aphasia - the disturbance of language as a result of brain damage. I also focused on the loss or diminution of other abilities, especially those in the arts, under conditions of brain damage. I would never have developed the theory of multiple intelligences without twin experiences: studying brain injured adults each morning, and then working with regular and sometimes gifted children in schools and in the experimental lab, in the afternoon.
Each day I observed individuals - brain-injured veterans and ordinary (and occasionally extra-ordinary children) - who were fine in one area, average in a second, while impaired to some extent in a third. And that’s the essence of MI theory. Knowing that someone is smart in one way simply does not predict whether they’ll be smart in other ways.
Where the synthesis came in was surveying in depth several fields of knowledge (from anthropology to genetics), developing the defining feature of an intelligence, and then evaluating many candidate capacities on whether they met, or failed to meet, the eight criteria for an intelligence.
And so, while the theory itself can be summarized in a sentence - that’s its strength and its weakness - there’s a 400-page book, Frames of Mind, with hundreds of references, in support of its claims.
Rich: You write about your disappointment at the misuse of certain of your ideas about intelligence. What did you experience?
Gardner: Contrary to the thrust of any of our own research, learning or writings in the field, certain educators began mis-portraying our findings as supporting an unfounded claim: that different racial and ethnic groups had different profiles of intelligence. That practice (more properly, that malpractice), too, was life changing. I went public to denounce these unfounded claims. And I decided to devote much of the rest of my scholarly career to the study and promotion of good work - which would include constructive use of MI theory along with awareness that the theory could also be misused, misapplied.
Rich: Which takes us to your collaboration beginning in the mid-1990s on the Good Work Project. What is that about?
Gardner: In brief, the goal of the Good Work Project has been to understand the kinds of work that individuals in different professions admire and why; and then to create materials and practices that encourage the development of good work, and that help to avoid the incidence of compromised or bad work.
In the initial Good Work Project (1995-2006), my colleagues and I interviewed over 1200 individuals from a range of professions - medicine, law, journalism, theater, as well as K-12 and higher education. That mammoth project - ten books, a dozen new projects, hundreds of articles and blogs - yielded a simple and I hope elegant formulation of good work: it is carried out excellently; it is personally engaging; and, crucially, it is carried out in an ethical way. (See thegoodproject.org) Now, the Good Work Project is as active as ever and has benefited over the years from interactions with members of the Harvard ALI cohort.
We show this via graphic - three intertwining Es - which in English constitutes a triple helix.
Rich: Can you describe your view that education, beyond providing basic literacies, should have three principal goals: inculcating truth, beauty, and goodness?
Gardner: I think that education needs to inculcate the basic literacies, in the early years of schooling, and to prepare individuals for a life of work, in college or professional schools.
But there are 5-10 years in between the literacies and the livelihoods where I think we should master major ways of thinking - historical, artistic, philosophical mathematical, scientific - which help us to understand our world. These disciplines are the nonintuitive tools that human beings have developed over the centuries in order to determine what is (and what is not); what we should do (and what we should not do); and what experiences are worth pursuing in greater depth and why.
Rich: You say that your most important contribution to experimental science has been your work on nonliteral language and the brain. Can you describe that work?
Gardner: With colleagues Ellen Winner (to whom I am happily married), Hiram Brownell, and other researchers, I demonstrated the important role that the right cerebral hemisphere plays in understanding nonliteral language. While syntactic and phonological capacities are facilitated primarily by the left hemisphere (in right-handed persons), the understanding of metaphor, satire, humor, adages, etc., involve structures and connections located primarily in the right hemisphere.
The details nowadays are much more complicated but the participation of both hemispheres in linguistic production and understanding is now broadly accepted by the scientific community.
Rich: You have been a prolific and highly influential author of some 30 books. Do you have a favorite?
Gardner: It was most fun to write Creating Minds - I had the chance to enter the minds of seven great thinkers and doers and try to understand their minds better: Einstein (logical mathematical); T.S. Eliot (linguistic); Pablo Picasso (spatial); Igor Stravinsky (musical); Martha Graham (bodily-kinesthetic); Sigmund Freud (intrapersonal); Mahatma Gandhi (interpersonal). I could well have chosen other persons - indeed, in other books, I entered the worlds of musician Wolfgang Mozart and of writer Virginia Woolf - but the opportunity to look at first hand data and try to imagine how these persons undertook the adventure and took the risk of breaking new ground was truly enveloping and exciting.
Though there were of course enormous differences among these creators, I was struck by a few commonalities: they all came from relatively stable home environments; it took each a decade to develop expertise; at times of creation, they were often quite fragile and needed psychological support; and once they had worked through a major project, they would move on quite briskly to another, thereby having a series of breakthroughs over the course of a lengthy life.
In another lifetime, I’d like to study other such “great minds,” especially persons with talent who chose to use those talents for the betterment of our world.
Most people would say that Frames of Mind was my most important book. But I think that in the future, many will look to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter and for guidance in what to focus on in education, how to convey it, and how to determine whether that education has had its desired effect.
Rich: What drives Howard Gardner to keep searching for new fields to conquer?
Gardner: That’s a delicate question. At age 77 a risky and likely proclivity is to repeat yourself - typically without knowing it. That’s a reason I like to work on new issues with persons who are younger and not afraid to challenge me - and that includes my own children and, I hope before too long, my grandchildren as well. And of course, I learn every day from my cherished wife, Ellen Winner, a distinguished scholar, and a wonderful mother and grandmother, whom I met at Project Zero almost fifty years ago.
About the Author:
Bruce Rich is a 2020 ALI Fellow. He served as partner for over 35 years at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a global law firm where he headed the intellectual property/media practice, which spans litigation and counseling in areas of copyright, trademark, First Amendment, and antitrust law. Bruce is also the chairman of EL Education, a nonprofit working to improve the quality of K-12 public school education in under-served communities.