Howard Gardner
The Man: The professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education taught us why IQ is not everything; broadened the focus of the educators, and changed the way children are taught in American schools—even as he introduced the idea of multiple intelligences in the field of psychology. He tells us the meaning of truth, goodness and beauty in an age of twitter.
The Oeuvre: Spans psychology, education and arts; He drove research in learning thinking and creativity through Project Zero; co-founded GoodWork Project to identify and encourage work that’s excellent in quality, socially responsibile and meaningful to its participants.
X-Factor: He is trying to explore the broadest and highest reaches of human thought.
The Message: How do we find truth, beauty and goodness when everything is brief and every assertion is repeated as if it’s true even if there’s no evidence for it? People have to care and I don’t know if there’s any other way of getting people to care than good education.
The Hypothesis
People gravitate towards those who agree with them. Earlier, even if you are looking for people who agreed with you, you couldn’t avoid the ones who disagreed with you. You had to turn the newspaper page, you had to watch the television news, listen to the radio news. But now, it’s easy to find those you agree with and have your own prejudices reinforced.
So What?
It is much better to live in the world when you really
know what’s going on rather than fooling yourself. So the whole idea is to look at yourself honestly, with your eyes wide open, and not squinting to make sure you cut out all the wrinkles and ask other people, ‘do you see what I see in myself?’
Forty or fifty years ago, in the United States, even if people didn’t want to be exposed to the news, they couldn’t help but be exposed. There were only three channels, and if you turned the television on at certain hours, there was the news. And the news was almost identical on the three channels. As far as newspapers were concerned, even if all you were interested in was sports or amusement, you had to open up the front page first to see what was going on.
Now, of course, you don’t have to turn the page; you can just go to a website. And there are hundreds of cable channels, so if you’re only interested in wrestling, you don’t have to see what Walter Cronkite says.
The mirror effect, the silo effect, is that people tend to go to sites that agree with them and they tend to hear people who agree with them. In previous times, even if you were just looking for people who agreed with you, you couldn’t avoid the ones who disagreed with you. You had to turn the newspaper page, you had to watch the television news, listen to the radio news. But now, it’s too easy just to go the sites you want, with people you agree with and just have your own prejudices reinforced.
I think I’m a pretty good discerner of news because I have fifty or sixty years of experience following through which publications and writers do due diligence and which ones don’t, and everything I read I’m initially sceptical of. But those habits of mind didn’t come cheaply. It came from lots of practice and lots of mistakes that you make, that you eventually correct.
So, I have definite views in education, but I made it a point to read the other publications which disagree with me.
One unfortunate way to overcome the silo effect is to have a crisis. When there is a crisis, people want to know what’s really going on. After 9/11, when people were worried they were going to get blown up, they paid more attention. In Israel people listen to the news very carefully because they’re afraid of having some kind of a crisis. Or it could be nature: A typhoon, a tsunami, an earthquake.
Single Page View
Page 1 of 2
» Next Page
