Howard Gardner says age-old virtues can still guide us, despite the tumult and truthiness of the 21st century
From the Fall 2012 edition of Colloquy.
This fall, just as a new class of freshmen was unpacking bags and postering their walls, a cloud descended over Harvard Yard, dimming the seasonal glow of optimism. The university announced that 125 students — an almost incomprehensible number — were being investigated for cheating in a single government class held the previous spring. It was the biggest cheating scandal in Harvard’s history.
To Howard Gardner, the famed cognitive psychologist, the incident was depressing, distressing, shocking — but not surprising. In countless interviews and conversations with hundreds of students over the last 15 years — part of a body of work that has increasingly focused on ethics and integrity in professional life, in the classroom, and in the media — Gardner has detected a pronounced shift in the value structure of many young people.
The students that he encounters — at Harvard and elite high schools and universities around the country — are bright, talented, lovable, articulate, and compassionate. They want to be ethical; they want to be good. But first, they want to be successful. On every step of their journey from childhood to the cusp of adulthood, these students have carried the stiff expectation that they will, and must, meet the benchmarks of our age: high test scores, robust extracurriculars, spotless grades, and elite colleges. That striving, toward success narrowly defined, continues once they’ve grabbed the brass ring of the “good school.” As they look around, into the selfaggrandizement that pervades both popular culture and many of their virtual networks, many young people see two things: the rewards that await them, and the race that others seem to be running to get there first. “It becomes a case of what’s next,” says Gardner, AB ’65, PhD ’71, the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “What is the next project — is it Goldman Sachs, is it McKinsey, is it the staff of an influential representative or senator?” When it comes to landing that coveted “next,” cutting ethical corners is sometimes necessary, students say. After all, everybody else does, and they’ll be left behind if they’re playing by different rules. There is a “hollowness at the core” of many ambitious young people today, Gardner has written — too much evidence of what he calls a “thinning of the ethical muscle.” Reversing this atrophy is at the heart of his new body of work, most broadly captured in his latest book, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed. The book, released in paperback this fall with the subtitle “Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter,” explores the question of how our global, technologically connected society can redefine and adapt the traditional virtues so that they can guide us reliably today. In a culture of emoticons, hashtags, and “reality,” how can we promote an authentic model of moral living, one that honors personal responsibility and mutual accountability?
In some ways, Howard Gardner is particularly well positioned to think about the underside of the culture of success. In 1983, after toiling away in what he says was relative anonymity as an experimentally oriented psychologist, he wrote a book that revolutionized pedagogical thinking and brought him wide acclaim. But the satisfaction of seeing his theories embraced was accompanied by the discomfort of watching as applications arose whose motives he distinctly didn’t endorse. The book was Frames of Mind, and it launched Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which proposed that instead of being smart or not smart — a boiled-down way to state the common perception of cognitive powers — people can possess significant intellectual capacities across a number of distinct areas. From the point of view of educators, the theory was a profoundly optimistic one, signaling potential in even the hardest to reach students.
As he saw the impact the work was having — there are now schools based on multiple intelligences theory all around the world — he made a couple of unexpected discoveries about his own identity as a researcher. One was that although much of his influence had been positive, yielding rich lines of inquiry in research and pedagogy, he was at risk of being held accountable for results he’d never intended. After one particularly egregious example in Australia in the mid 1990s, when programs were springing up based on which intelligence each ethnic and racial group had and lacked, “I said, this has gone too far. I was seeing my own work abused, and I realized that if I didn’t take responsibility for the distortions I couldn’t expect anybody else to.”
He realized that he wanted to clarify his own educational principles. One result was The Disciplined Mind (2000), arguing that the underlying purpose of education is to “give us the tools to determine what’s true and what’s not, what’s beautiful and what’s not, and what’s good and what’s not,” as he recently told C. M. Rubin in the Huffington Post. He quarreled both with the contemporary fetish for standardized testing and with the relative smallness of most conversations about improving our system of education. (Vouchers? Charter schools? Unions?) A good education — or, good educations — ought to be built on rich examples of human achievement — for good or ill — in the realms of truth, beauty, and morality, he wrote, offering three such examples that could fuel a curriculum: the theory of evolution, the music of Mozart, and the Holocaust.
His thinking dovetailed in important ways with work he was doing on ethics and integrity in professional life, under the umbrella of Harvard’s Project Zero, the innovative education- research think tank founded by Nelson Goodman and led by Gardner (with David Perkins) for nearly three decades. In collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, he launched the Good Work Project in 1995 to study leadership and professionalism — exploring what it means to do work that is “excellent, engaging, and ethical.”
With colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman at Project Zero and across the Harvard campus, Gardner then turned attention to young people. They devised a series of reflection sessions with students at Harvard and elsewhere to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among these potential future leaders. And the Project Zero team, co-led by Carrie James, has begun a thorough immersion into the ethical questions that arise in the use of new and emerging digital media.
Gardner is finally bringing all of this work — variously carried out under the related Good Play and Good Participation monikers — together. He has just launched a website for what is now called the Good Project (www. thegoodproject.org), a large-scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work across a variety of fields and life stages.
The classical virtues of truth, beauty, and goodness are in flux and under attack, Gardner readily admits. They face an external challenge from postmodernism, which disputes the very legitimacy of such constructs. And they face a slippery-slope challenge from within, as our beliefs about the essential meaning of these ideas are undermined by the digital world’s pastiche of “claims and counterclaims,” samples and borrowings, hackings and Photoshoppery. But the virtues remain essential touchstones, Gardner argues; even as we view them with a new skepticism, we must not abandon them.
Although he acknowledges that the recent election cycle showed that “truthiness is more powerful than I would have liked to believe,” Gardner insists that truth seekers have a powerful arsenal to combat it. “Our potential to ascertain what is really going on, whether it is about a foreign policy mishap, the misbehavior of a political figure, or the manipulation of financial transactions, is greater than ever before,” he says. “It is just not possible to hide material evidence, as it was in times past.”
If online culture can be a reinforcer of truth and a purveyor, within its distinct communities, of the kind of digital citizenship that Gardner argues for, it also represents one of the biggest threats to our collective ethical compass. “The digital world is at present a Wild West in the ethical realm,” Gardner says. “We need to recompute what it means to create and respect intellectual property, to retain a sense of privacy, to determine trustworthiness, to participate in a community, and to create a meaningful, authentic identity online. There are no convincing models for doing this, and in a sense we have to start from scratch.”
And yet digital culture is “a great boon for experiences of beauty,” Gardner says. “We can have access to the greatest works of art, experiences of music, performances of theater, and wonders of nature. And each of us can create his or her own portfolio of beauty and observe how it changes over time.” Gardner relishes the individuality of beauty, and — as any Pinterest browser would agree — he rejects a canonical definition. “It doesn’t matter one whit whether your portfolio is like or unlike portfolios of other people,” he says. “While we need a common view of truth, and need to develop a universal ethic, every one person can have a completely unique roster of beauty. Beauty can occur in any and every sphere of life.”
The scandal at Harvard is still playing out, and it seems clear that fewer than 125 students will be found to have cheated. But how to deal with those who did — or with the numbers of noncheaters who saw no real lapses in this incident, or with those whose horizon is being shaped almost entirely by the desire to get ahead? Gardner proposes the creation of what he calls “commons,” a space where community members can come together to talk honestly about pressures and problems, holding each other and themselves responsible for enforcement.
He has spent 50 years at Harvard, so when he critiques it, he does it the way only a family member could. He says that space for such conversations is in short supply on campus today. “I think we have dropped the ball over recent decades. We’re not giving students any real messages other than the message of success,” he says. “When you’re not asking yourself the hard questions about what you’re doing and why, when you’re not looking into the mirror and saying, what kind of person am I, what influences am I having on others — that’s when bad things can happen at an institution.
“I’ve got nothing against success. But at what cost?”