Howard Gardner:
Keep your eyes open for that iconic class who isn’t just destructive but is trying things out that are really different because ultimately that can be very precious commodity. When the Arthur Fellows were studied, these are people who are considered creative. Most of them didn’t fit in very well with school because they weren’t doing exactly what their teachers and parents wanted them to do. So having some gives give some slack to child trying something, not doing it like everybody else.

Cyndi Burnett:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
This is the fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood:
Goal to help fuel the more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
So let’s begin. Today we have a very special episode of the fueling Creativity and Education podcast, and I will start by saying, when Matt and I started this podcast two years ago, we made a dream guest list and one of the names at the top of that list was Dr. Howard Gardner. So we are ecstatic to welcome Dr. Howard Gardner for our first ever fueling creativity episode special. Dr. Gardner is the John H. And Elizabeth A.

Cyndi Burnett:
Hobbes Research professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also an adjunct professor of psychology at Harvard University and senior director of Harvard Project Zero. Dr. Gardner has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial foundation. In 2020, he received the distinguished contributions to Research and Education Award, the premier honor from the American Educational Research association, in recognition of his contributions to both academic theory and public policy. He has received honorary degrees from 31 colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and Spain. I could go on and on.

Cyndi Burnett:
He is also the author of 30 books translated into 32 languages and several hundred articles. Dr. Gardner 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. Since the middle 1990s, Gardner has directed the Good Project, a group of initiatives founded in collaboration with psychologists Mahali Chicksamahai and William Damon that promotes excellence, engagement, and ethics in education. In 2020, Gardner wrote his intellectual memoir, a Synthesizing mind, which was published by MIT Press. Dr. Gardner Howard, welcome to the show.

Howard Gardner:
Thank you. I appreciate the generous introduction so we.

Cyndi Burnett:
Want to start with your perspective of creativity. Can you share your perspective on creativity with our audience? And how has this view changed over your career?

Howard Gardner:
I don’t think anybody would have been listening to this podcast if they weren’t interested in creativity, and I’ve certainly been interested in it for many, many years, in fact, dating back to my years as a graduate student, which was over half a century ago. But I’m going to be somewhat iconic, classic, because while we’re all interested in creativity and we want to foster it, first point I want to make is that creativity is really not very popular around the world. If you look at most of history, people have tried to do things differently, have been punished, maybe executed, maybe hanged. If you go look at the world today, which is very authoritarian, doing something offbeat out of the ordinary is more likely to get you in jail than get you some kind of a prize. And even in a supposedly democratic country like ours, there are large segments of the population which want to have stuff done just the way it was done before, which don’t want to have experimentation going on in school. And if I haven’t offended everybody, I would say that both the left and the right wants certain kinds of creativity, but not others. So while I wouldn’t say it’s an endangered species, this is not something where we should just have a hooray for creativity. Let’s get on with it.

Howard Gardner:
Having said that, I also have a bias, and that is that when you want to understand something, you should look at the least controversial examples. And after I put forth my theory of multiple intelligences, which I think most listeners would have an intuition for, people said, well, what about creativity? So I said, well, if there’s a bunch of intelligences, maybe there’s a bunch of creativities, too. I’m not sure that hypothesis was correct, but what I did in a book called creating Minds is I studied people who everybody would agree if they had any concept of creativity at all, would be creative. And this included Albert Einstein, the physicist, Martha Graham, the dancer, Mahandas Gandhi, the political leader, and people where there was really no ambiguity. And the reason I studied that is because I said, if you want to understand ordinary creativity, what I would call little c creativity, it’s good to start with an unambiguous example. So that’s a kind of a long winded introduction to my perspective, but please fire away.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, let’s talk about creating minds. What did you learn from these eminent creators, and how can it be applied to the average person?

Howard Gardner:
The first thing I learned is that people can be creative in very different domains or sectors. And the fact that somebody is creative in one area doesn’t at all mean that they’re going to be creative in other areas. So, for example, Einstein was one of our great physicists, was really an example of logical mathematical intelligence. He also loved to play the violin, but nobody listens to his recordings of the violin. He was an ordinary amateur, if you will. Pablo Picasso was great visual artist, very, very good in spatial thinking. But he was not a particularly good student. He wrote plays which nobody paid any attention to.

Howard Gardner:
So people tend to be creative in one or two domains, one or two areas, one or two media. And when we hold up somebody like Leonardo, and maybe the first thing to say is, there’s nobody else like Leonardo. Leonardo is probably unique in human history because Leonardo da Vinci was clearly good in the visual area and painting, and he was very good in understanding the body, understanding certain principles of nature. He was an adequate writer. I wouldn’t say he was a great writer. We don’t know much about how he was dealing with other people, but most people are creative in one or possibly two sectors or domains. And here we get to a really important facet of my view of creativity is that people use creativity as kind of a word that you can apply anywhere. But I only think it makes sense to talk about creativity if you say you’re creative in a particular domain, a particular medium, a particular thing that you work with.

Howard Gardner:
So let’s take kids. A ten year old, a ten year old might be creative in the poems that he or she writes, but that doesn’t all say that the music will be any good, or that if you give a difficult math problem, that they’ll figure out how to do it. So creativity is largely medium or domain specific. I did find that most of the people whom I studied, I mentioned seven creators of the modern era, were good in more than one intelligence, but only one of them, and this was the composer Igor Stravinsky, seemed to be good across the board. He wasn’t Leonardo by any means, but he was good with language and knew several languages. He trained to be a lawyer, so he clearly had some mathematical logical ability. Most of his music was for dance, so that suggested a kind of bodily kinesthetic intelligence. But most of the other creators whom I’ve studied, who I know something about, were strong with one domain, one medium, and it didn’t matter how well they were in other areas.

Howard Gardner:
It didn’t matter if Leonardo couldn’t tie his shoe in. That’s not a major thing. The other thing I would say, we can’t say anything is creative or not by itself. We have to say creativity has to be judged by individuals who know something about that domain, about that medium. So if somebody writes a new opera or somebody writes a poem, or somebody comes up with a mathematical equation or a mathematical concept, what I think about that doesn’t matter. It has to be judged by somebody who’s knowledgeable. And this led to one of the most profound statements about creativity. You mentioned in the introduction, Mihai Chiksent Mihai, a wonderful scholar who many people know because of his work on flow, Mihai said, we shouldn’t ask, what is creativity? We should ask, where is it? Creativity is always the meaning of a particular product creation, if you will, in some kind of a domain or area.

Howard Gardner:
We might say a discipline, and it’s how it’s judged by knowledgeable people. I’ll give an example, which I think people will find interesting. Almost everybody knows about Freud, the great psychoanalyst. But if I ask my students 20 years ago about Freud, they say, oh, he’s been disproved. And if you talk to a lot of therapists, they say, well, we don’t really believe Freud anymore. He was wrong about this. And that. Just today, we’re talking in March of 2023, there’s a big art of the New York Times about how Freud is now back in fashion again, and lots of things he said about edip complex and about sexuality and so on, people think is very true.

Howard Gardner:
Now, now, Freud didn’t change, but the judges, the people who make decisions change. And by the same token, Bach. Everybody knows the composer Bach. Bach was ignored for two centuries. And then Felix Mendelssohn, who lived in the 19th century, so to speak, discovered Bach. And ever since that, we think he’s a great composer. And everybody who’s listening to this knows that in many sectors, we didn’t recognize that women could be good mathematicians or good scientists or good painters or good musicians. And now we’re discovering that when we look at work that was created in its time, we can say, my God, this is very good.

Howard Gardner:
And I’ll give a concrete example. I listen to classical music all the time. And about two years ago, I heard somebody say, this person is really good. And I found nobody knew who this person is. Since then, she’s become totally famous. Her name is Florence Price. She lived roughly from 1875 to 1950. She was a black from the south, came to Chicago, actually studied in Boston at the Newland Conservatory.

Howard Gardner:
And people in Chicago knew who she was. But her pieces were never performed by a major orchestra. And very poignantly in the 1940s, when she was in her 60s, she wrote a letter to Serge Kusovitsky, the great conductor of the Boston Symphony, and said, I’m a composer. Nobody knows who I am. I’m a woman. I’m a black. That’s two strikes against me, but I would love for you to listen to my music anyway. There’s no record that Kusovitsky ever answered.

Howard Gardner:
He probably didn’t, but now every orchestra is playing Florence Price the music isn’t any different than when she wrote it in the 1920s, but the field that makes the judgment says this person is really good. And anybody who studies any domain knows there are all sorts of people who admired in the 18th century, 19th century, we don’t find of any interest at all. Their work hasn’t changed, but our tastes and what we value has changed. So I don’t want to forget about students in classes, because I imagine anybody who hasn’t turned off the podcast by now is saying, well, what does this mean for me? The first thing is if we talk about creativity with a small c, not the kind of giants I’m talking about, but sort of ordinary creativity. Any child who lives in a society which isn’t repressive, which isn’t authoritarian, is going to try out new things. And some things that the child tries out, the child will find neat. And sometimes parents or teachers or friends will find it neat, too. Sometimes they’ll be appalled.

Howard Gardner:
And we can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong. We might call that the creativity of the ordinary six year old. However, once you get to be ten in our society, it’s very different. When ten year olds don’t want to try new things, by and large, they want to do things the way other people do things. We call that the literal stage. They want to write like everybody else, they want to draw like everybody else, they want to sing like everybody else, they want to do math like everybody else. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s in the process of getting better at something.

Howard Gardner:
So their writing gets to be better, their painting gets to be better, that that’s the time when they can begin to do some experimenting. And that’s what we call little or middle sea creativity comes into fashion. There’s a famous quotation from Picasso. He said, it took me four years to paint like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to paint like a child. And what he meant was, you have to overcome the steps that everybody has to go through to become a master of a medium before you can do something new. And the best way to think about that is every parent in the west puts their child’s scribbles when they’re three or four on the refrigerator. Those things aren’t held in museums. My wife, Ellen Winner, who is an expert in this, and her student Jen Drake, have actually studied young children who are very precocious in the arts.

Howard Gardner:
Precocious, however, doesn’t mean that they become great artists. It means they master the medium more quickly than their peers. And this can be done. This is very new. That hasn’t been published yet. It can be done in the area of abstract art as well as representation. So most people listening would say, well, what Howard means, and they’d be correct, is that whereas it takes most kids, until they’re seven or eight, to be able to draw a tree or a person faithfully, there are some kids who can do it at two or three. We would call them precocious.

Howard Gardner:
But those kids don’t become artists. They just become more like boring adults more quickly. And it seems to be rather similar with abstract art, though I don’t want to try to present that before it’s been published. So you might say, well, what are the characteristics of the kids who do master a medium in the way that they need to, to be proficient? That eventually gets them to do something that other people pay attention to, that other people call creativity, with a middle c or even a higher c. And one of the conclusions that came to in my book that you referred to creating minds, is they need to have a tough personality, because when you try to do something new, even in our society, which claims to honor creativity, you get knocked out, you might get flunked, you might get kicked out of art school. We want things to be done in a certain way. And of the seven creators whom I studied in creating minds, six of them had nervous breakdowns or virtual nervous breakdowns before they kind of found that they were accepted because they were doing things which everybody else said doesn’t make any sense of. I forget who the exception was.

Howard Gardner:
I think it may have been Stravinsky. I don’t think he almost had a breakdown, but I don’t remember for sure. It’s lonely to get to try to be a middle c or big c creative. It’s fine to be little c, but that’s going to disappear when you’re eight or nine, unless you’re really reinforced for doing it. And that would be unusual. Some of us including myself, send our kids to progressive schools. And progressive schools, creativity is often allowed more and honored more. But as somebody once joked, it also means the parents are hiring tutors so the kids will do well in their tests and so on.

Howard Gardner:
So progressive education isn’t an easy solution to everything, but it’s a form of education which is more open to middle sea creative than our common core schools, where people are expected to follow a very tight curriculum.

Matthew Worwood:
Just to kind of piggyback on something you had said earlier, the idea that creativity, those that are creative, are challenging the system. They can sometimes be outliers, a nuisance maybe to a field. But then at the same time, there’s also a discussion about the fact that in order to be creative, it has to be recognized by established people within the domain. So it strikes me to a certain extent that as young children growing up, to nurture their creative potential, they have to learn to navigate the system. They have to learn to navigate the players and interact with the audience they’re designing for, perhaps before they go and make a wild change in the direction of that field. Is that fair to say?

Howard Gardner:
I think it moves the discussion along in an important way. I do think, as you’re saying, it’s much easier if you sort of play by the rules. And there are probably some people who play by the rules very well for the 10,000 hours or whatever. It needs to become really good at something and then can manage to break away. One of the things I found in my study when I mentioned that people often had breakdowns, they need some individual support. Him. It didn’t have to be a knowledgeable person. It had to be somebody who just believed in them.

Howard Gardner:
Because the more you go out on a limb, the more you’re going to be, going to be ostracized. What you raised, I mean, if you were a student of mine, I would say this was a good subject for a thesis, is philopathy. The difference between those individuals who could have went through the rules and the processes the way everybody else did and then broke away, as opposed to those people who are kind of more of a pain in the butt all along? I think you would find both trajectories. I don’t think they’ve all been pain in the butt, but I don’t think by any means that they’ve all been good, obedient students. What you said earlier reminded me of one of my attempts to be funny when I talked about creativity. I’ve said you may not be discovered, that you’re creative in your lifetime. Like Bach, it might be. It happens after you’re dead.

Howard Gardner:
So the bad news is that you might not know that you were creative, but the good news is you never know for sure that you’re not creative, because maybe after you die, people will discover it. And I had 15 minutes of fame when I critiqued the word of intelligence and said, it’s multiple. And when I die, if there’s anything in the paper, it’ll say multiple intelligences. But as you both know, I’ve gone on to do 20 or 30 things since then. I’m now completely obsessed with what it means to synthesize, what it means to have a synthesizing mind. I think what I’m doing is terribly original, but so far, nobody else does. And so I have the choice of either quitting or going on with my work and hoping that somebody else will eventually discover it. Or I think, what’s the case? That as long as I enjoy doing and it doesn’t hurt anybody else, I’m happy to continue.

Howard Gardner:
But you both are in the academy, and, you know, in the academy and the university, you get a lot of reward if you’re just a little bit different from other people, but you don’t get much reward if you’re exactly the same. And you certainly don’t get much reward if you’re way out on the limb, unless you happen to get the Nobel Prize. Then people say, oh, yes, well, Darwin knew what he was doing, but Darwin was afraid to put his ideas forward for 30 years because he knew that the whole religious establishment and his wife would reject him. So Darwin just kept. And if he died before Wallace wrote him and said, hey, I think evolution is the explanation. We may not even know who Darwin.

Matthew Worwood:
Is today, but there is something ironic with know universities are charged for generating new knowledge in society, but it does strike me that they are, as an institution, very fixed on the process to how one engages in the creative process and then how one is recognized as well. So I’m just out of curiosity, how have you navigated that? Because you’re also within academia as well. And the reason why I’m saying this, I was really fascinated with your story of how many times you’ve kind of. It was almost as if you was trying to find your home discipline and you couldn’t quite find a discipline where you felt was your home.

Howard Gardner:
Well, I love you this question, and we have to be careful not to have too much just plain academic talk, but I think you’re absolutely right. The rewards in the academy, by and large, for people who want to get a permanent position or want to get tenure are for people who move the dial a bit, but not too much. I was extremely lucky because I didn’t have an academic job, and most people did not know what to make of me. But two things happened. One, I was lucky to get MacArthur Fellowship, which was a seal of approval because you’re supposed to give it to people who are creative. But the other thing, I had a dean. Her name was Patricia Graham, and she had faith in me, and she wouldn’t like me to put it this way, but she basically manipulated the system so that I would get a but. And you can take this for what it’s worth.

Howard Gardner:
Just this morning on my walk, I was thinking about the most original people whom I’ve recommended for tenure at my school. My colleagues have not accepted them, and their names would be known to some of you. And I think it’s a threat. I think people are threatened by somebody who isn’t just a little bit different from everybody else, but is really going out on a limb. And all the people have in mind they don’t need a tenure at Harvard. They’re doing perfectly well. I think it’s a very bad sign that my colleagues didn’t accept it, but they would have their own reasons, and I don’t want to pull the rug out from under them. But yes, what Mike Chickseth Mahay and I would say is there’s much more reward in our society and in our universities for middle c creative rather than for big c creative.

Howard Gardner:
And because you probably know that listeners may know about Thomas Kuhn, who I think wrote the most important book about how knowledge changes the structure of scientific revolutions. It’s now 60 years old, and what he claims is most science, most of the time, uses a paradigm, and people work within that paradigm. And every once in a while, a Darwin comes along or an Einstein comes along, and you could name a Freud or piaget, and they explode the paradigm. And then suddenly everybody’s just kind of out of business if they were in that paradigm. And that’s kind of threatening. But I don’t want to get too far from kids because I think that the message I would give to parents and to teachers is to provide a certain degree of protection for the young person who is courageous enough to try to do something differently, as long as it’s not injurious to himself or to other people. So if you want to get kids to get a high score on the advanced placement test on essays, you tell them exactly how to write an essay, and that’s fine for the high score, but if somebody’s writing an essay and does it in a different way, you should try to understand why they’re doing it that way and acknowledge it and recognize it. Similarly in math, maybe there’s a best way to do a simultaneous equation, whatever that is.

Howard Gardner:
I haven’t done that for 70 years. But if somebody can do it another way and it gets the result, that’s great. Don’t be overjudgmental. Give the young person some slack. I have five grandchildren. I write poetry for them in their birthdays, and sometimes they begun to write poetry back. And of course, it doesn’t always rhyme, but to my mind, that’s not material. If they’re enjoying reads and playing with words, that’s great.

Cyndi Burnett:
You’ve spoken so much about nurturing that creative potential. So my curiosity is, do you think that we can actually teach creativity, and do you think there’s any benefit in teaching kids to be more creative, or do you think it’s just about identifying that creative potential?

Howard Gardner:
I think we’re much better at teaching people how not to be creative than to be. No, I mean, I think what adults model is terribly important. Model how they behave and what they pay attention to. Matt knows because he’s read my autobiography. I had teachers who were quite creative themselves, and they set a good role model for me, and it made me more adventurous than if I had people who just really followed a beaten path. But let me give it an anecdote because I think it’s very revealing. When I was studying intellect, cognitive development, that’s what I studied as a graduate student 60 years ago, everybody was studying what it meant to develop, to be a scientist. And I was very interested in the arts.

Howard Gardner:
My background is mostly in music. And so I said, well, what happens if you think about development? Not toward becoming a scientist, but toward becoming an know, a Leonardo, a Mozart, a basque, and so on. And this was a very iconic, classic view, and most my teachers didn’t take it seriously. So I decided to write about how do people recognize style in works of art? Because I think if you can’t recognize a style, you’re pretty limited in your appreciation of the arts. So I wrote an article for a journal, and it was called style perception and development in children and was rejected by return mail, which means that guy didn’t even send it up. I remember his name, Clifford Morgan. He wrote to me right away. He said, we’re not accepting this article.

Howard Gardner:
And I was sort of disappointed. Six months later, somebody did the same study didn’t copy me. His name was Richard Walk, and it was published in the journal. And I wrote to the editor, and I said how? I probably used, why the something did you publish this article and not mine? And he wrote back an honest answer. He said, we do concept formation. We don’t do artistic styles. So if I’d normally use the buzword concept formation, I could have slipped it in. And probably if my advisor had said, howard, don’t use the word art, because they’d never published thing.

Howard Gardner:
So it’s a question of sticking to your guns, but having people who encourage you. We call those mentors. And then I write a lot about anti mentors tour mentors, people who you don’t want to be like. But my best advice for young people is to be a fragmentor, to take one aspect from one person, a second aspect from a second person, and so on. Don’t be too dependent on one role model. I think that’s a mistake. And in a relatively democratic society like we still have, you can do that in more authoritarian societies. If you have one mentor, nobody else wants to touch you.

Howard Gardner:
You just have to go. If you’re saying a classical german thing, not Germany a day, but Germany 19th century, if you worked with hair professor x, you could not look with anybody else. So having a bunch of different role models and a bunch of different mentors, and you said that your children go to progressive schools. If they have a number of different role models there who experiment in different ways, that’s ideal. And when somebody says that kids go to Montessori schools or even Reggio Amelia schools or to Steiner schools, my question always, is the school doctrinaire, or is the school flexible? Even Freud, whenever you become too much going down one path, that’s the enemy of creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
So I actually want to build on that, because I think some of the things that you’re talking about, I can’t help but say, is this the outcome of a synthesizing mind? It strikes me that there’s so much that we have to master in today’s world. There’s so much information, there’s so much depth of knowledge that we have to acquire in order to really produce creativity within our particular domain. But the synthesizing mind, which comes from the book five minds of the future, which I will do a shout out to my boss. He actually bought that book for all of us when I first started working at the center for 21st century skills. It’s kind of really hard in today’s world to be. To really master so many disciplines given the fact that we have so much knowledge, so how do we do that? How can we develop a synthesizing mind? And the reason why I’m asking you that is because I interact with so many people that seem to be interested and passionate about so many different topics. And we actually touched on this in an episode with Sally Reese when she was talking about the idea of multiple potentialities. And typically what we do, either through the system or us as parents, we kind of start.

Matthew Worwood:
I don’t know if it’s to do with time, but we end up kind of supporting one particular discipline or one particular talent more than others. And when I’m listening and thinking about the synthesizing mind, we’ve got to try and keep the door open to everything. How do we do that when there’s so many things that we have to master?

Howard Gardner:
Well, you’re raising a very profound question, and it’s one that I can’t pretend to have a satisfying answer to. And in fact, I wrestle with it all the time. The first thing that I say may surprise you. I don’t think the synthesizing mind is for everybody. I think that many people are much better off working in one or two areas that they have a penchant for and that they can acquire skills in and going as far as they can in that way. As you know, I actually hated my own graduate school program because it was trying to make me into an expert in one discipline, and that wasn’t my penchant. But the other people who were with me, many of them did quite well pursuing the one thing that they liked and they were good at. You could say, I have a synthesizing mind.

Howard Gardner:
You could also say I have a garbage can kind of mind. I’ve always picked up stuff everywhere. And here’s a crucial thing. I like to mobilize it to answer questions I have. So maybe if I were running a school now, I wouldn’t say we should help everybody develop a synthesizing mind. I’d probably say we should have an eye out for those kids who seem to gather information rather easily from different spheres and like to put it together in new ways, just as we ought to keep an eye for those creative kids who are going down one rabbit hole, but not doing it in the way other people are. I don’t think that there’s a need to make everybody creative or everybody a synthesizer, though when I wrote about that years ago, I said, there’s no real line between creativity and synthesizing. Let’s take the field of economics, economics, has had textbooks for 100 years.

Howard Gardner:
But when Paul Samuelson wrote a textbook 50 years ago, that changed everything. And similarly, after Beethoven, everybody tried to write symphonies like Beethoven, but you didn’t have to do that. You could write it in other kinds of ways. What I worry about, and I think everybody who’s listening is worrying about this, is what sorts of things is Chat GPT going to be able to do so much better than the rest of us that it’s kind of pointless even to try to develop those skills? And I can say without ever having gone to Chat GPT but having read a lot about it, that I’m sure that any issue that I give to Chat GPT, it would do a better synthesis of 95% of people, because that’s what it is. It’s a giant synthesizing machine. And how about, can we make it creative? Well, we could probably write an instruction to, say, take this Mozart symphony and make it 15% different, and it probably did a better job than anybody else. So I think the crisis is not so much, there’s way too much to learn, but rather what’s the distinctive human things that we want to cultivate and that maybe we don’t want AI to do? I mean, I’m not interested in AI making ethical decisions any more than I am in thinking that I want to have apes make ethical decisions. I think that’s a human challenge.

Howard Gardner:
Are we doing it? Well, not often, no. But ultimately, I don’t think we want an algorithm to make those kinds of decisions. I think human beings have to do it. So, I’m sorry, I don’t have a good answer to your question, but I’m sharing what I think, which is the best I can do.

Cyndi Burnett:
So how do you see the role of artificial intelligence playing in having a creative mind?

Howard Gardner:
I guess the answer is whose boss? Even though I don’t think I’m ever going to use these programs, I think people should use them, but they should critique them and see what it is that isn’t done well and maybe train it to do well. Trade just means, gives it more examples. And there’s a lot of writing about this now, there are certain things which it shouldn’t be asked to do, like I wouldn’t want legal decisions to be made simply by an algorithm, because the algorithm can’t understand the human stakes that are involved. Yuval Harvari, who is one of our best thinkers, says this is as fundamental as the invention of language. I mean, when did language get invented? Probably 50,000 years ago. We can’t imagine a society without language. There are thousands of languages around, but this is every bit as profound. And so I think we need to try to understand it, work with it, but decide what is it that we don’t want to allocate.

Howard Gardner:
The scholar who had the most influence in my professional career was a psychologist named Jerome Bruner. People of a certain age would know Bruner, and he actually got me out of history, which is what I was studying, into psychology, because he created a curriculum for fifth graders. And the curriculum still exists. The name of it is dated, as everything from that era was dated. But the ideas are very profound. The curriculum, the fifth grade social studies curriculum was called man, a course of study. And of course, now we wouldn’t say man, even though generically, of course, it didn’t mean just men, but the Bruno curriculum, man, a course of study which my children had at progressive shady Hill school in Cambridge, was what makes human beings human? How do they get that way, and how can they be made more so? And even though I don’t have the ten Commandments above my desk and I don’t have Bruner’s questions, I don’t even think about them that often. But essentially, that’s underwritten everything that I’ve done that I’ve thought about.

Howard Gardner:
What does it mean to be human? How do we get that way? How can we make more so? And I think chat GPD doesn’t destroy it. It just actually magnifies the importance of those questions. I mean, Harari says, maybe human beings are at an end. That would mean either we blow ourselves up nuclearly, or we destroy our environment so that we can’t breathe anymore, or we create instruments like chat GBT, which are so much smarter than we are that they run the universe. That’s been the job of science fiction until very recently. But a lot of what’s happening now is like science fiction. One of my colleagues wrote to Chat GPT said, do the theory of multiple intelligence, as Shakespeare would. And then Shingri said to me, oh, yes, I just say the word sayeth every once in a while.

Howard Gardner:
S-A-I-E-T-H. But I’m sure did a better job than that.

Matthew Worwood:
So, keeping on the topic of Chachi Pt, I’m wondering if you have an opinion around this idea of what is originality? In the world of generative AI, originality is so much part of how scholars typically evaluate and engage in discourse around creativity. So what’s your take on originality? Can machines be original?

Howard Gardner:
That’s a great question, and it allows me to come back to something I should have developed earlier. What if four and five year olds do? It’s all creative for them. And even if every other four or five in the world has figured out conservation of liquid, meaning that the shape of the container doesn’t determine the quantity in it, for a five year old, it’s a genuine discovery. And I play the piano every day. It’s one of my three forms of therapy. And I know that I don’t play as well as 900,000 pianists, but I don’t care if I discover something new. Even today, I discover something new, or I play something in a way I haven’t played before, and it works for me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s done its job for me.

Howard Gardner:
And I don’t think we’re going to stop having people play musical recitals or dance just because we can create apparatuses that do it better. People haven’t stopped playing chess or go just because the machine can do it better. But then the question is, who are we doing it for? We’re doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for our friends. And occasionally this is where Thomas Pugehn’s paradigm shift comes in. Occasionally, somebody or something will do something, maybe even chat TPT will do something so different that it really changes the way we think about everything. But then this is where chickset Bahai’s field judges come. Somebody has to notice it.

Howard Gardner:
If nobody noticed Darwin, or nobody noticed Gregor Mendel, who actually sent his stuff in genetics to Darwin, but Darwin never read it, then it wouldn’t have been discovered. So maybe part of what you’re helping us understand, Matt, we’re going to have dialogue now, not just between humans present and past and future, but between humans and other entities which create things which before only human beings could have. And we have to decide, does our species hang up its stirrups, or do we carve out things which are meaningful? They don’t pass the journal reviewers because it’s been done better by Chat GPT. And that’s something we have to think of with reference to children, whether it’s our families or the young people who we are teachers for, whether you’re doing it in elementary school or you’re doing it at the university. But it’s always a new discovery for the child, and that has to be honored. But we may have discoveries now which before we wouldn’t have thought about anybody except human beings doing, and now that’s just wrong. As for the question about people’s rights, I think it’s very unfortunate if somebody creates one of these tokens which takes your artwork and does it as well as or better than you. But I don’t think we can spend our time in law courts fighting this out.

Howard Gardner:
I think it’s a losing battle. And I don’t see how governments are going to be able to control it either. I mean, the chinese government tries to control all of this, and we’re debating whether to do it or not, but there are always hackers who can do it, and even the government can’t put everybody in jail. So the stakes are very high. And we need to prepare kids for this, but we need to defend their childhood as well. We can’t rob it. And that’s where I think the good interest in creativity for kids comes. I hope my opening statement didn’t tell people that you shouldn’t encourage kids to be adventurous.

Howard Gardner:
But what I did want to say is this is not something that’s always been honored or respected. And at the end of the day, if you want to move toward a middle c or a big c created, then you have to do something which other people value, not just the parrot who puts the painting on the refrigerator, nice as that is. Our refrigerator is filled with that stuff.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think just to kind of close this section that was my takeaway, is that there are different environments. We engage in creativity in different ways and for different purposes. And just listening to you talking about the fact that you try and play the piano every day and knowing that the piano has always been part of your life from when you were child into adulthood, we want to probably cultivate and facilitate lots of different types of creativity. And so some of this mini c, little c creativity can continue into our childhood, and then there’s going to be other environments to where we will strive and pursue pro c and middle c type creativity because we’re actually trying to produce an outcome that’s valued for our field. But both types of creativity are important, and we want to probably, within the school system, make sure we keep our eye on cultivating lots of different types of creativity. It’s not always just driven for this kind of one economic viewpoint only, including.

Howard Gardner:
One which I would not have thought of except I read a really interesting, important article by fellow developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, and that is caregiving. And caretaking is something that’s been almost ignored in our politics and our economics, especially in our neoliberal world, and yet more women than men. But throughout history, caregiving and caretaking has been really important, especially for young people and for old people like me. And there’s enormous room for creativity there, not honored as such, because it’s been seen as being women’s work or stuff that you can hire somebody to do. But anybody who’s a parent or a child with aging parents, there’s tremendous opportunity for creativity and how we deal with people who are vulnerable. And even though there may be some societies where we get robots to do it, I think it’s deeply anti human for robots to be given these care jobs. So that’s the whole area which has been largely ignored because of too many of men like me are busy deciding what to study and what to understand.

Cyndi Burnett:
And speaking of that, I want to talk a little bit more before we go on about the five minds for the future. And I’m curious if you see any other mindsets that you think are required for the future, given especially the last five years, with the pandemic and artificial intelligence moving and everything happening in our political landscape, is there any other minds for the future that you would add in 2023?

Howard Gardner:
Well, let me just say a word about the five minds, because this is an idea which I wrote about years ago, and three of them are largely cognitive. There’s the disciplined mind, which is mastering the areas that are valued in your society. Then there’s a synthesizing mind, which brings stuff together from different areas and hopefully in a useful way. And then the subject today, the creating mind, that goes on and tries to push the envelope into ways that are new. And even if you fail, it’s fun to try. But then I talk about two other kinds of minds, and that’s really what my colleagues and I have been focused on for the last 25 years. There’s the respectful mind and the ethical mind. And the respectful mind is something that we know from the Ten Commandments and the golden rule.

Howard Gardner:
It’s how do you treat people who are around you? And we were talking about caregiving before. That’s certainly an aspect of respect, especially those who are not able anymore. We respect our infants because they can’t take care of themselves. We respect our old people because they aren’t able to take care of themselves. If we’re good, if we’re not good, we disrespect, we diss them. Ethical is what we’ve really tried to study. And ethics is how do you deal with really complicated questions, questions where there isn’t any obvious right answer. Matt seems to specialize in those questions, like, what do we do when you can have some kind of an algorithm that does your work better than you.

Howard Gardner:
That’s an ethical question. We can’t just look it up. I guess the only thing I would add, based on what we were talking about earlier, is we haven’t had to worry very much about the post anthropocene world until now. Anthropocene is a $24 word for this has been the error for human beings in the last 5000 thousand years. And we’ve kind of done our job to ruin the environment in the last several hundred years. But the question is, what does it mean for our species when post anthropocene is over? I hope my grandchildren don’t have to deal with that directly, but I think the species does. Something I just read yesterday, it’s not the case that Chat GPT is politically neutral. Chat GPT happens to be biased toward liberal, progressive values because more people who develop these programs which feed information are reading the, let’s put it this way, the New York Times rather than the Wall Street Journal.

Howard Gardner:
So people are creating chat GPTs which are more conservative, if you will. And of course, those are going to put things together in somewhat. So some of the battles we’re having now in the world, in Ukraine, in our own country, that could occur among different TPT systems. And indeed, if I read more science fiction, I could say, oh, yes, this is what Isaac Asimov wrote about 100 years ago, but I can’t give you any reference on that.

Cyndi Burnett:
Howard, you have been watching the changes happening in our education system for almost 60 years. So I would love to know from you what leaves you hopeful and what makes you worried about the future. And I know you mentioned several times you have grandchildren. So what leaves you hopeful and excited for them and what leaves you worried?

Howard Gardner:
Well, I’m going to give you an answer that you don’t want, but it’ll be useful, I hope. Wendy Fishman and I have written a big book about college. It’s called the real world of College. And we were asked, would you like to edit a journal about new ideas in higher education? And I said, if you want to know about new ideas in higher education in the United States, I have no interest whatsoever because I could write the whole journal myself. I know all the ideas. But if you want a book on higher education around the world, we’re going to do that. And that’s exactly what we’re doing now. I think the worst thing about the United States is we look at ourselves in the mirror and we argue with ourselves without learning from things.

Howard Gardner:
Countries as different as Singapore and Finland, we have tremendous amount to learn from both. But we look too much in the mirror. And part of the reason is because, unlike those two countries, education here is local and politicized. So we have fighting now about whether you should read a Tony Marsden book. I mean, for Christ’s sake, we fight about that. But when you have a reasonable national educational approach, as they do in Scandinavia, as they do in Singapore, then you can get rid of these silly kinds of battles, and you can focus on developing the minds and the spirits of our children. So what gives me hope is there are interesting things happening around the world. What makes me despair is that we look at ourselves in the mirror, because maybe at one time we had the best educational system.

Howard Gardner:
I can’t go back to Horace Mann in 1850, who invented public schools. I can’t go back to our colleges in the GI bill in the late 40s, where we sent more people to college and universities than ever before. We’re rearranging deck chairs on our educational deck. Does this mean that individuals don’t get good education? Of course not. We have great schools, but the country as a whole is terrible because we don’t take it seriously enough. We don’t take educators seriously enough. When people in Finland become teachers, they become teachers for life, because they’re dealt with as professionals. And here, half of our teachers leave within five years.

Howard Gardner:
And I bet you after the pandemic, it’s even going to be worse. So what gives me hope is it’s not just the United States. What makes me despair is that we spend too much time fighting old battles and looking in the mirror.

Matthew Worwood:
So, Howard, we ask all of our guests this question. What three tips do you have when it comes to promoting creativity in education?

Howard Gardner:
First of all, every young child, unless they’re beaten or are in a very autocratic system, loves to explore, tries things out, gets pleasure out of it. And when a child is young, I think the job of the parent is to encourage the child to be worried. If the child is obsessively repeating, that’s not good, or if the child slips from one thing to another without spending any amount of time. But as long as the child is engaged and trying things out, and the child is 234567, I think that’s great. Ultimately, however, to use a yiddish word, potchkiing around is not enough to get you through life. At a certain point, you need to develop some discipline, some skills, in the sense that something can be better than something else, and there are reasons for it. And so what I call the development of the disciplined mind is something that any parent educator needs to be concerned about when the child finishes the first years of life and is in elementary, middle grades and so on. But as we said earlier, keep your eyes open for that iconic class who isn’t just destructive, but is trying things out that are really different, because ultimately that can be very precious commodity.

Howard Gardner:
When the Arthur fellows were studied, these are people who are considered creative. Most of them didn’t fit in very well with school because they weren’t doing exactly what their teachers and parents wanted them to do. So having some gives some slack to child trying something, not doing it like everybody else. And then I guess the final bit of advice, I would say, is that it’s probably more important that every human being finds some things that they enjoy doing and that they feel is satisfying for them and they can get better at it as long as they’re not harming anybody else. I don’t play the piano with late at night because I don’t want to disturb the neighbors. But having something that you’re passionate about and is meaningful to you is very important. It doesn’t need to be the arts. I happen to think of the arts.

Howard Gardner:
It can be sports, though, that gets harder as you can be old as you get older, but it can be cared giving. I mean, there are people who are older than I am who do wonderful jobs of playing with young or gardening or taking care of somebody who has lost their mental faculties. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s big c creative. It matters that it’s doing something that has some meaning for you and hopefully for other people. What William Damon, who is the other person I work with, along with my high chicks at Mahai, says we need purpose in life, and purpose is something that’s meaningful to us, but it should have meanings for other people as well. So those are three words of advice from a man who’s about to turn 80. Maybe they’re not going to increase the creativity quotient, but if they help to have more meaningful lives, I think then that would be worthwhile.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, Howard, thank you so much for your time today. We are so appreciative of your insights and your scholarship and your breadth and depth of knowledge in so many domains. And we look forward to seeing where you continue your work. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Matthew Worwood:
Thank you so much for joining us on this special episode of the fueling creativity in education podcast and knowing when we’re going to be releasing this. We wish every educator a happy summer and hopefully a summer full of creativity. Wherever your creativity interests reside. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood, and.

Cyndi Burnett:
My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by creativity and education, in part partnership with warwoodclassroom.com. Our editor is Sina Yusefzade.