JB: Ideas like this don't have a prayer of getting adopted by a typical school board ÷ but they certainly can seep into the culture, in a very almost clandestine way.

GARDNER: It will take 50 years to see whether the ideas I've developed have impact. One of the things I've pushed very much is the idea of individual centered education. Up to now, everybody's taught the same thing, the same way, they're tested in the same way, if you do well fine, if not too bad ÷ it's seen as being very fair. My argument, which contradicts any argument ever made in history, is it's the most unfair method in the world. It privileges one kind of mind, which I call the language-logic mind, or sometimes the Al Dershowitz mind (which I admire), this view that says, the more you're like that, the better you'll do, and the more rewards we'll give you, and the more you're different from that, tough nuggies. (A technical term in Cambridge ÷ Ed. Note)

With the advent of the new technologies, individual centered education is only a matter of time. People in 50 years will laugh at the notion that we thought everybody had to be taught the same thing in the same way. Already anything that's worth teaching we know dozens of ways of teaching it; we can make available technologically these things to any individual. Moreover, because we have smart machines, they can record what the child learned well, what he learned poorly, how he learned well, how he learned poorly; and make use of that knowledge. So that's an idea that I know is right.

Understanding, that's a much bigger enchilada, so to speak. We've been content to see whether kids can sit on their duffs and do what they don't particularly want to do; that's been the operational definition of making it and that just isn't going to be enough any more. That might take a hundred years, so our grandchildren will know whether the world has become more receptive to an education-centered understanding.

The evidence that students are not understanding even what we're teaching them, is legion now. It's malpractice to expose kids to things for a week or two and go on to something else. We know that doesn't work. In this arena, the work of Project Zero, where I've worked for over 30 years, both in multiple intelligence and in teaching understanding, is promising. That's exactly the right word to use. If I had to go to a congressional committee and make the best case I could give numbers, but that would be a best case rather than the most accurate description. It's promising; it's tough work, and because education is not a science, it's an art, it's very hard when something goes well to know why.

Everybody in this country, including me, who knows about education, admires Debbie Meier; the school that she founded is in NYC, Central Park East, secondary school and elementary school. Those are schools in very tough areas, East Harlem, and they really turn out kids who get through, go on to four-year colleges, and do decently. But nobody really understands whether it's one thing or two things or 20 things there ÷ it's too hard to really figure out what the variables are ÷ you can't do a controlled experiment.

The important thing for someone like me is to do no harm. For the first ten years of work in multiple intelligences I kept my mouth shut and let people do what they wanted to do, and then I finally came to the conclusion that that was a mistake, because some of the things people were doing were harmful. So I began to speak up about it, and I began to take a more active role. In Project Zero we're actually studying schools around the country that claim to be doing well in cultivating the intelligences, and we are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I assume the same sense of responsibility for these new ideas.

The new work that I'm engaged in with Bill Damon and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores the relationship between responsibility or ethics, and cutting edge work in different domains and disciplines. Our analysis in a nutshell is that all over the world now what's being rewarded is cutting edge work; anything that's routine and algorithmic, the machine is doing. However, if that's all that's rewarded, then the issue became ÷ let's say that the work is not good, let's say it's dangerous.

Traditionally the law and religion were counterweights. They're weaker now than they've been, and the changes are much too quick for them to keep up. Just read EDGE, your own website, and look at the sorts of stuff that people are discovering. No way that the church can keep up with that ÷ they've just approved evolution after 150 years. And this is a real dilemma for the world. We certainly don't have a solution for it. But our notion is that within each of the domains or professions or callings, to use the traditional word, there needs to be a greater sense of responsibility for the implications of people's ideas, discoveries and practices. And then either corporately, the discipline as a whole, or when possible individuals in the discipline or domain, need to address some of the more troubling implications of what they're doing, and need to take some responsibility if their ideas are misused.

That's the discussion that's going on now in the Internet; the Electronic Frontier Foundation which was founded by Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow; people connected with the genome project, genetic engineering, cloning, virtual reality; etc. With the Manhattan Project it occurred afterwards, an interesting historical phenomenon. But it needs to be much more a part of the training of people. And this doesn't mean you take a course in ethics; it means that when you're an apprentice, when you're on your first job, that you realize that it isn't somebody else's job to mop up the implications of what you're doing. That's a big sea change as well. It's an empirical project that we've just begun in the last few years.

JB: When do you launch this to the public?

GARDNER: We'd like to study several domains in some depth. We've done a pretty reasonable job with the media; we're writing about that at the present time; but we would like to compare several domains and see the extent to which the same issues rise, whether you're a scientist, an artist or a lawyer, or in the military; and at the same time we want to begin to work with individuals who have much more responsibility for the actual training of individuals ÷ not just in training schools, but the first job. At least in my opinion it's the first job which is a real bellwether. If you go to work in a newspaper or a corporation or in a scientific laboratory where anything goes, that's going to be very hard to overcome, so to speak. If you work with people who have a sense of conscience about that, who ask, if I'm doing a story what harm could it do? Or, if we don't check that experiment again what might happen? That makes an impression on you. And in particular we are very interested in people historically, like Niels Bohr in the area of physics, George Orwell comes up all the time in the media, as does Edward R. Murrow. Individuals who serve almost as trustees for a whole domain, a conscience.

JB: Back to the book ÷ do you have a title?

GARDNER: My working title is "An Education for All Human Beings."

JB: How are people going to talk about it?

GARDNER: I guess "understanding for all" would be a slogan. Understanding of important things being available to everybody, not just for the elite. The elite always had a few such schools; the French schools are terrific at helping the best students think about these questions seriously, but it's been a luxury.

The issues of humane creativity which I call informally good work, the connection to ethics and responsibility in your work, are things we ought to be dealing with kids in school as well. When they're learning about these things that are true, beautiful and good, we ought to be talking about their social implications. Whether it'll be a new religion, I don't know, but it's got to become a part of what we breathe, or the world will not survive.