Howard Gardner, the father of multiple intelligences and a respected education thought-leader, gave a Distinguished Lecture at the 2012 Learning Forward annual conference on his most recent book, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed (Perseus, 2011) — described in a Harvard Gazette article as “a contemporary look at how our conceptions of these three virtues have shifted over time.”
The book, focused on both the positive and negative aspects of the information explosion sparked by the Internet and social media, posits that today’s educators should ask two fundamental questions:
1. What should we teach and what should students learn?
2. How is this best done in the 21st century?
Today, we all are confronted with these kinds of wonderings:
• When you hear a story, who decides whether it is true?
• Under whose authority is good and bad determined?
• With digital imaging, Photoshop and the virtual availability of art from across the centuries, is “beauty” a thing of the past?
Thinking about these questions caused Gardner to rethink the meanings of three fundamental concepts: truth, beauty, and goodness.
Gardener defines truth as being about the accuracy of statements or propositions: are they true, false, or indeterminate. From this perspective, he poses an important question: How does someone establish the truth of something? You may look things up on the web, but how do you know they are true?
Of course, this is a constant dilemma for educators. How do we help students seek the truth inside the constant flood of new and recycled information? Gardner suggests that we focus more on methods and motives, by asking questions like: Why did someone make this claim? What is the evidence? And, then, he suggests that if it can’t be verified, we should encourage students (and ourselves) to stop saying it, believing it, spreading it.
Turning to beauty, Gardner contends that beauty is something we experience — primarily nature and the arts. He suggests that our view of beauty changes over time, based on our experiences and our understandings of other’s views. We begin to see beauty where we didn’t see it before. Showing a variety of art on slides, he demonstrated the wide variety of art forms, and suggested that educators help students capture their interests in beauty through compiling an individual portfolio, with the intention of recognizing and recording their changing impressions of beauty over time.
Finally, Gardner defined goodness as the quality associated with relationships among human beings — those near to use and those more remote from us — and he pointed to three attributes of good: excellence, ethics, and engagement.
He drew a distinction between “neighborly morality” and “the ethics of roles.” The first we might associate with the Golden Rule or 10 Commandments — don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t steal. But in today’s world we aren’t all busy in survival-type roles – farmers and hunter-gathers. The old rules of conduct “don’t tell us is how to behave as citizens” or professionals in many different occupations. So what is citizenship today, when our perspective includes not just our neighbors but a wider public?
Pointing to the dilemma faced when there is no clear ethical or “right” answer to some situations (Wiki-leaks, for example), Gardner suggests that helping students practice and dialogue about moral issues is critical. By creating common places for teachers, students and staff to reflect on dilemmas, we can help young people work together to discuss and consider how the pressing problems in the world today might be solved and what lessons can be learned to avoid similar problems in the future.
