Howard Gardner: Rethinking College in the Age of AI

Today I sit down with Dr. Howard Gardner, the man who redefined intelligence with his groundbreaking work, the theory of multiple intelligences. This conversation goes well beyond IQ tests. Dr. Gardner makes a compelling case for a complete reinvention of education in the age of AI, one that prioritizes curiosity, lifelong learning, and the development of ethical citizens. We explore why he believes high school and higher education should function like children's museums and how artificial intelligence is forcing us to rethink what intelligence means in the first place. This is a conversation about education, yes, but also about power, responsibility, and truth in a shifting world.

Whether you're a teacher, a student, a parent, or someone simply trying to navigate the future with your values intact, this conversation will challenge and inspire you. Welcome to the Nick Stanley Show. Dr. Gardner, welcome to the show today. Um, let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up and who were your mother and father? >> Okay. Um, well, we're speaking in July of 2025 and I just turned 82. Um, the thing that people usually remember at least a few years ago is that I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania where Joe Biden was born and I'm the same age as Joe Biden, but he didn't stay in Scranton and I never knew him.

And I don't know what we would talk about nowadays. Alas, I he's not in not in great shape. Um, I grew up in Scranton. I was a child of immigrants who escaped from Nazi Germany just in time. They arrived here on Crystal Knuck, which is the night of the broken glass. And many of friends and relatives were killed or maimed or incarcerated. And anybody who's a child of the Holocaust, as I was, always has that in in their mind, not at least in the year 2025. I was a good student, a good pianist, very protected by my parents, not only because of their own escape from Germany, but because I had an older brother who died in an accident.

And even though it's not fair to say this in a sense I was a replacement child and so a lot was hanging on my being okay and successful and as a good student uh I uh was admitted to Harvard College 64 years ago. I moved to Cambridge and I've been there ever since. So I live in an academic community since we're speaking in the summer of 25. You know, Harvard, as anybody who's awake knows as a target of the current administration, and even though I'm sure Donald Trump doesn't know or care about uh you know what I do, it's very painful to me to feel that the university which has given me so much and where I've tried to contribute is now the target of of all kinds of attacks.

I um became interested initially in in becoming a lawyer. the the joke in the time was the lawyer is a Jewish boy who hates the who hates the sight of blood and that wasn't strictly true but I was more attracted toward law um but uh one summer I worked for a um psychologist who was developing a educational curriculum for the Newton Massachusetts public schools his name was Jerome Bruner people who know psychology and education may know his name um And working with Bruner and the people who work closely with him, I became very interested in cognitive psychology, how people think, developmental psychology, how they develop, and education because we were developing a curriculum, how to develop the mind, how to nurture the mind, uh how to use the mind well.

And if I'm known for anything, it's having developed some years later in in around 1980, a theory called the theory of multiple intelligences. If you know about the theory, you'll know that it claims that rather than being a single thing called intelligence. So either you're smart in everything or you're average in everything or you're impaired in everything. MI theory, multiple intelligence theory holds that the mind is a set of computers which are relatively independent of one another. And so you can be strong in one intelligence, average in a second intelligence, and below average in a third.

Now, people who criticize the theory often say, "Well, we know there are lots of different kinds of talents." Uh, and I say, "Yeah, but if I had written a book called the theory of multiple intelligence talents, you wouldn't know you wouldn't know of me." was tackling the IQ test, the standard IQ test, and saying, you know, that's a good predictor of who will succeed at a certain kind of school and in a certain century or a certain decade. But, and I will stop this saliloquy in a minute, if you'd lived 150 years ago, uh, what you needed to get into Harvard College was Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and nobody cared if you could do math or if you could do syllogisms.

It was learning languages. And now when we're speaking in the second quarter of the 20th century, um it's not at all clear whether we will have colleges at all, but it's quite clear that in an age where AI can do most things much better than human beings, the curriculum will not be what's tested on the SAT or the IQ test. So that's a a bit biography and a bit of an intellectual history. >> Yes. Well, there's a lot to go off of from there. Let's back up slightly. Where do you think the audacity came from that you found to challenge the existing IQ paradigm and say, "No, there's a there's a better way to look at all of this because that had to take a lot of courage." >> Well, that's a good question, but I want to be honest with you.

At the time I was doing it, I wasn't realizing that it would cause so much of a stir. I'd written other books which got you know some attention but were not not on bestseller lists and as I said if I'd written a book called the theory of multiple talents and it had been the same content um so I didn't realize that I was stepping into a firing squad and uh I've just written the introduction to the new edition so you're the first person to hear this it's a new edition of frames of mind and I said that I was first of all surprised that the book got a lot more reviews than other books had gotten. It was much more controversial than anything I've written before or since.

And it was in 1984, so 41 years ago, when I went to New York and gave a talk at the Hilton Hotel, which is still there on 6th Avenue in uh Midtown. When I walked into the room, there was actually a hush that went in the room. And as I quip in the introduction to the new edition, I had my 15 minutes of fame. This is Andy Warhol, the the artist quip that everybody's going to be famous for a few minutes. But when I became known more publicly was when the book came out and the book got a lot of attention. And uh one thing which might interest particularly younger people is that I could have ridden the multiple intelligences car for the rest of my life.

I could have had multiple intelligence to t-shirts, curriculum, tests and so on. And my kids say you should have done it. We'd be very rich then. But both because I'm not particularly driven by money. But because I had other things to I wanted to do and you I've written 20ome books since on a whole range of topics. I didn't want to be ins snared by that one idea. And I read in the just paper today, you read it too, half the kids in America want to be influencers. I didn't even know what an influencer was until recently. But of course, if you want to become an influencer, you always have to try to guess what's going to get people's attention, which is so different from what do you want to do and what do you want to do in the way that you want to do it.

So it makes me very sad that just being known so hush goes into the room whether you're Taylor Swift or Donald Trump or you can name whoever the the current celebrity is that's kind of sad. You should instead pursue what you're interested in. Try to do it well. You'll fail sometimes uh and then try something else. What you just said reminds me a lot of the type of advice that Mike Czech sent me high used to give to me and I know that the two of you collaborated closely on a number of projects. I can already see why you two got along so well. Do you remember any moments of connection or insight with him?

uh especially with the the good work project that you two worked on together. >> Sure. I I could talk endlessly, but remind me if I forget. I will tell you a wonderful quip uh which is worth retelling. I don't think it's ever been publicly told before. No, I was a then young scholar in my 30s or 40s and Mike Jixet Mahai and another person named Bill Damon whose work you may know. Um we we formed a friendship um and we began to work together um on a project which is continuing to this day called the good work project trying to understand what it means to do work that's engaging excellent in quality and um carried out in an ethical way.

You know some people are very excellent what they do but they don't pay any attention to ethics. Other people are excellent what they do, but they um they don't look forward to Monday. They look forward to Friday at 5:00 pm. And what we call good work are people whom we admire are people who are good at what they do, like what they do, and try to do it in ethical way. But Mike Chickset Mahai became my closest intellectual friend. And to be honest, it's because he was so wise. Uh this would take another program. You can do it unless he died a few years ago. He grew up in Hungary, but his father was um ambassador to the Vatican from Hungary.

Uh so he live lived in Italy in his teen years. And then he went on a a ship and traveled all around and finally found himself in the United States. But he'd heard a lecture by Carl Jung who was a great >> psychoanalyst. Freud and Young were the founders of psychoanalysis. And he said, "Gee, this psychology sounds kind of interesting. Maybe I won't become a Jesuit, which was what I think his family wanted being in the Vatican and being good Catholics." But he was very wide, very broad, much more softspoken than I, uh, didn't have a big mouth, but what he said was very wise. So that reminded me of the anecdote, which I don't think I've ever told publicly.

I would say literally I can tell you was 34 years ago. Um we were hiking in Colorado. Um Mike was an hiker and our son Benjamin was there and he was very bored. He was six or seven years old. That's why I know what it was. Um, and he was complaining and then all of a sudden we came to some pebbles in a in a stream and Benjamin be able started to jump from one pebble to the next not going into the water and he had the biggest smile on his face and he wanted to keep doing it and Mike said that's what flow is because he was bored but this produced the right kind of challenge and then he was in flow.

What's interesting about flow and about multiple intelligences and also about Bill Damon's um concept of purpose is you think of them positively but the all of them are neutral. You can use your interpersonal intelligence to help somebody who has a problem. You can use it to torture somebody. Similarly, uh you can be in flow when you're cracking a safe or when you're helping uh your son jump from one stone to the other. And similarly, sense having a sense of purpose means something that's important for you but not just for you. But if we compare Cambridge today with MAGA, uh both have purposes, but they're not the same purpose.

And each each group considers the other person's purpose to be evil. So they're all they all have a positive sound if you read about them in psychology today. It's good to be in multiple intelligence. It's good to be in flow and it's good to be have a sense of purpose. But in fact all those things can be twisted and torquked for lots of different kinds of ends. >> Yeah. Dr. Mike was in his classes would speak at length about that that flow was a neutral thing and I think he used an example of there was a Nazi who described his experience in being efficient with the extermination of Jewish people and yeah and and Dr.

Mike said, he said, "This sounds like flow." And he said that just pursuing these things as an end in of themselves is not enough. We've got to be aware of ethics. And I know that's a very strong theme through all of your work is is building a personal ethical framework. And you've even elaborated on it now um with your your five minds. Um, let's let's dive into that a little bit. Um, and how important you think it is to have an ethical framework for each and every one of us. >> Well, before I forget, while you're talking about it, if Mike were alive today, and I miss him a lot, we will be talking about ethics in the era of AI.

>> Yes. >> Because you can be sure there going to be countless AI entities which will claim that they can tell you what to be means to be ethical. And you know they will maybe often say very wise things but uh I think Mike and I would agree that this is not something we don't we want to download completely on chat pt. I think human beings who are mortal have a stake in ethics which uh machinery uh however it operates doesn't doesn't have. Um, and uh, the thing that kept Bill and Mike and me going was the realiz realization you can't start to become ethical when you're 50 years old, you know. Um, >> yeah, >> it needs to begin much earlier.

So, you know something about my own work. I began working with adult professionals and then with Wendy Fishman began to work with um college students and we were not impressed by the ethical sense. And so with Lyn Baronson and Shelby Clark, we began to work with high school and middle school kids. And we're now actually working, believe it or not, with preschoolers in a program we call good starts. Good starts. because our own work with with older people says that the United States is an incredibly egocentric society. It's so much about I and me and that doesn't begin when you're 20 or when you're 15.

So we're interested very early in life about how do very young people begin to understand about I, me, we and they. I and me is of course about numera uno ourselves. We could be a very small group, the family. It could be people look like us, people who talk like us, people have the same political views, people who have the same intellectual views. And then they could be people whom we ignore or whom we don't take seriously or whom we dislike and stay away from or we want to get rid of. And you talked about Ikeman. Fortunately, we're not in the middle of a holocaust, but there's so much hatred now in our country.

And uh I could add a long list of countries which are taking a fascistic turn where the they is not just people who look different or sound different but people who we'd like to wipe away those terrible immigrants for example. So I miss Mike. I'm happy Bill Damon and I are still close friends. But especially when you get old having uh partners that you've been through a lot with for a long time uh is is very meaningful. But all of us and you too were also teachers and educators and we tried to convey to young people what we think is important. We try to understand what they think is important. I had lunch today but with one of the leading scholars of AI and kids in the whole country and she said to me this is frightening.

She said I don't believe anything that I read online anymore. I don't believe anything. I don't believe any photograph that I see. How can you develop a sense of ethics and morality if there's nothing that you really trust anymore? >> Yeah. Who was that out of curiosity? >> It's somebody who I work with, but since I don't have her permission >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah. Somebody if she'd said to me five yet five years ago, I would have been astonished. But >> right, >> I know her work. I know my own work. And of course, I read the paper. I mean, you know, there's now something going on as we're talking where members of each party, political party are circulating fake videos and fake speeches from people.

Uh, and this is very relevant to our program. Uh, what you're doing now. I had talked about AI as needing to redefine education pre- cradle to postgrave. P cradle is easy but I want to talk about uh postgrave p cradle is now we can look at a fetus in utero then we can see whether that one is likely to have language problems >> and in one hand that's very useful the other hand do we want to start having flashc cards when the baby is one year of age so what I want to talk about is I'm not much involved with media as you probably can guess um but uh se six months ago some students in New Jersey in a in a in a psychology class sent me a video of myself giving a talk about psychology and I was totally freaked out because it wasn't me it was similacrim of me looking like me moving my lips as I obviously can do with words fed in my mouth and saying some stuff which is accurate some which which they thought was accurate but wasn't and some stuff that was nonsense But everybody who's watching or listening to this knows that if I were to drop dead tomorrow and somebody wanted to write stuff in my name and post it or create me giving a talk like this and post they could do it.

So um we need to rethink what we do in developing healthy minds, healthy bodies and people who are good, people who are ethical and moral at a time when it's so difficult to trust everything. I'll give a concrete example here. Um, I already revealed my my age and I spent almost no time online, but I look at 12 newspapers from all over the world each day. And um, just yesterday I read on the front page of the Guardian, which is newspaper from England, about something going on at my school, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which nobody else knew and wasn't in any other newspaper. Now, uh, I'd since checked because I knew something about that and the story was actually accurate.

But how would I know otherwise whether what I was reading in the Guardian had any accuracy? All I could do was look at other newspapers. Now, people say, I would look at my at my media feed, my news feed, and then I would say, well, how do you know it's accurate? And they wouldn't have an answer. Say, well, was it times? Well, how do you know the New York Times? Was it really from the New York Times? Did you talk to Tom Freriedman? Did you talk to David Brooks? Ezra Klein? Uh, was it really Ezra Klein? I mean, isn't this frightening? >> It is. It's terrifying. And it's only the fakes are only getting better and a solution needs to be developed because I think a society where no one trusts information is one where we can't trust each other.

And how do we have a common stories as a society to draw from and common facts if we can't trust any of these information sources? >> Well, I have a a pat answer which nobody including me would take seriously, but it is one I've writing a long blog about. So maybe in some months I think we need a new religion in the world, >> but it has to be a single religion. Uh, and I don't care whether God is in it or not or what God is called if there's a God, but it can't be the Jewish God against the Islamic God, against the Catholic God, against the Protestant God, against the Muslim God, against the Mormon God.

That's over it. And it has to be about the preservation of the species and the preservation of the planet. And I gave a I just had my 60th college reunion and I was asked to speak there. And the topic I chose and this there I've actually blogged about this and it's a slideshow is the end of the anthroposine. >> Most of my classmates being as old as I am didn't know what the word anthroposine means. So I explain it's the end of the era where human beings are the dominant feature on the planet. And it's not only because we have machines that are smarter than we are, but because between atomic bombs on the one hand and um the uh and pandemics in the second hand and climate change, which anybody anybody now who doesn't have a presented interest in denying climate change knows about it because we see it every day.

Uh so we the species and the planet won't survive unless we have some kind of religion and I told my class that to me the the model was Gandhi. Uh yeah >> and Gandhi is is the model because Gandhi was a good Hindu but he was actually assassinated by the Hindu who said he wasn't good enough. Gandhi understood that unless we could disagree civily and he was the model for Martin Luther King. It was a model for Nelson Mandela and so on. If we can't disagree peacefully, the planet won't exist. Now, if you're very religious and listening to this and you haven't shut it off yet, you'll say, "Well, you know, God will God will save us or we'll go to heaven and I hope that if it goes to heaven, he greets you." But he's got a lot to explain for her.

My mother who had a Jewish um education before she died and she lived 102 used to point up to the ceiling and she said, "Where were you God when six million Jews were exterminated?" And the people who believe in religion need to be able to answer that question. So I think a religion but not the one that pits individuals against one another. And this is I think I don't remember the whether Mike Chickson Mahai and I ever talked about this but I think we would be on the same on the same page there and if he's in heaven maybe you can get get some time with him and you can ask him. >> I will I will do that if I get the opportunity in shifting a little bit into AI because you've uh mentioned that.

So how is how do you think education needs to be transformed in this new age of AI? I mean, if you had a magic wand and you could redesign high school, what is a day in that in the life of that high schooler look like in a school designed by Dr. Howard Gardner to put them in a place where they can thrive in this new environment. >> I'm going to give you a much grander answer than you're looking for. >> I like it. Yeah. >> And I am writing about this. uh in fact uh my wife doesn't agree with me and we're going to post soon her disagreements and disagreements of two colleagues um when as I said earlier I think we have to rethink education from the ground up I think that um young people need to learn to be able to read write simple calculation and they need to understand what coding is coding cod i n g but I think that most of the rest of education will be much more like coaching where you help people find stuff they're interested in given to some extent their different intelligences and they have the options of pursuing that as much as they want.

Um but there's no obligation. They don't have to do history if they're not interested. They don't have to do chemistry if they're not interested. They don't have to do geology etc. They don't have to learn foreign language. But if they're interested, they should have the opportunity to do that for the rest of their lives. So we now have 6 or 7,000 universities in this college universities in this country. Nobody could name 10% of them. They're empty 90% of the time. I go to Harvard, it's a ghost town. I think we need to convert those entities into lifelong learning places where people of any age who want to get better in something can come.

They can return. They can meet with other people with that interest. They can work both with human beings and with large language instruments or robots and so on to get better. And you mentioned five minds for the future. Again, this I have actually posted. In the five minds of the future, three of them are cognitive. There's the discipline mind, which is what you're asking about, learning history, learning math, and so on. There's a synthesizing mind, which I think I have, which is putting lots of stuff together in a way that makes sense. There's a creative mind which is the Einsteins, the Freuds, the Martha Grahams, the Virginia Wolves, you know, people who come with them.

Taylor Swift, the Beatles come up with new stuff. And I think those are all great, but those should be optional. The other two minds, the respectful in the mind and the ethical mind, those are the ones that we can't say is that's optional. Respect means respecting other human beings, respecting animals, respecting plants. We've written about the intelligence of plants. I draw the line at rocks and mountains but if you want to include them that's fine too. An ethic which is what chicks at Mahai Damon and I worked on for 30 years is what does it mean to be a good professional and a good citizen and a good citizen is somebody who knows his or her stuff they're excellent in cares they're engaged and third ethical they don't do what's just what's good for me I mean you know taxes get lower that's fine for me but all the people get hurt by lowering taxes so that's the good citizen and the good worker is the person who knows his or her stuff.

They're excellent, engaged, they care, they look forward to doing it. I think you look forward to your work. If not, you're faking it. And I still work every day that I look forward to. But then try to do it in an ethical way. And that's what our educational system, whatever you call it, needs to transition to. And that, by the way, is what religions initially were designed to do is to help people to be moral and ethical. But of course they were for a tiny clack, you know, 50 people, 100 people. And then too soon as the two clacks got big enough, they clashed with one another. And the history of religion has been the history of wars.

And you and I both know went enough to school that we could list what those wars were. The the 30-year war in the 17th century was so bad that they actually they stopped wars for a while. And you know the first world war the second world war was the first world war was inconclusive which is why we had the second world war because Germany felt it had been mistreated Japan and so on. Um we now had P we had now had 80 years I had 80 years you probably had 40 years which were relatively peaceful in the biggest countries and people have now forgotten what wars like and that's when I look at what's happening in the world now whether it's China India Taiwan Hungary Germany Brazil uh I see the guns of war sounding and this time the war is not one which is going to just have casualties it it could well destroy the planet.

>> Yes. And it does seem, history shows us we need a reminder of that as a species every so often. The problem is that the stakes get higher with each massive conflict there because as technology advances, there are more deaths with each war. And as you just mentioned, the next world war would likely be the last. Well, some people who are watching this program, listening to it, um there's a classic AI example, meaning it I know about it. So, it's classic uh about, you know, some program figures out that what we need are more paper clips and it produces so many paper clips that the earth gets delued and destroyed.

Now, hopefully there'd be a Elon Musk would say enough. We don't have we don't need anymore. But maybe he'd be muddled and then it would continue. Yeah. No, it's it's an unprecedented time and I think we should be sure to tell people who survived so far that the best way to keep up. There are two good ways to keep up in what I'm thinking. One is to go to my website where I have blogs that are posted. But as of a month ago, as of June June 2025, they're available on LinkedIn, which I don't go to, and Substack, which I've never visited, so you don't have to go to my website. Um but um the the other thing is that just this past year we published two volumes of my collected papers and one's Howard Gardner on education the other one is Howard Gardner on the mind and uh if your appetite is wetted uh whed d you can read a lot more about my ideas about intelligence and creativity and the disciplined mind and my ideas about good work and good citizenship and about schools of the future in those in those two books.

>> Absolutely. Absolutely. And um and do you need to get going on with your your day here? >> I'm okay. >> I did want to ask how has AI changed the way you think about intelligence or intelligences? >> In it changed a great deal. In 1999, so half a quarter century ago, I wrote an article for the Atlantic was then called the Atlantic Monthly called who owns intelligence. And um in that I said what for 100 years the psychometric community, the testers have owned the IQ test. But what I and some other scholars like Dan Goldman of emotional intelligence have done is to pluralize intelligence. So we now talk about emotional intelligence and interpersonal intelligence blah blah blah.

I now think that we have been underestimated a great deal of animal intelligence. Um, in many ways, uh, whales and dolphins have intelligences we don't have, ants in their own way. And we've ignored that plants are able to communicate messages as well, especially when they're in peril to other animals. So I think intelligence now involves not just uh human beings but other animals and other um living creatures plants and artificial intelligence and my analysis of artificial intelligence which isn't deep but I've been working on it now for several years is that AI entities surpass human beings on every conceivable dimension except consciousness.

Um I don't feel we have persuasive evidence now that consciousness in the way that you and I are not just talking and making love and fishing and so on. But I think oh this is what we're doing. Now of course any apparatus can say oh I'm thinking about what I'm doing but consciousness isn't just thinking it's a feeling. Um so we don't we don't know yet to what extent um AI can equivalent be equivalent to human intelligence because we don't know about consciousness. But I actually believe consciousness in the sense that I'm talking about it in the sense that viewers and listeners are hearing it um is only a human invention in the last five or 6 thousand years.

Um I think we had um Neanderthal and various kinds of homo sapiens long before we had language and philosophy enough to say well I'm not just doing something because God tells me I'm doing something because I'm a thinking agent that uh uh can make decisions. Um and so when I talked earlier about how we have to rethink education, we need to realize that once we have entities which do everything as well or better than we do and which may or may not be conscious, we can't tell. Um there's no point in just trying to be smart the way they are. So uh my uh the moral of my story is you should be exposed to art and scholarship enough so you can see what you want to pursue and then you can pursue it on your own or you can pursue it online.

You can pursue it with friends. You can go to those universities which are largely empty and set up a study group there. Um and um you know if you want to try to do something new that's great but most of us don't delude ourselves. we're going to do something new, especially when we have computers now producing paintings a mile a minute, which could be seen thought to be van Go or go gang, you know. Um, but what we can't consign to the machines is how we treat other members of the species and how we make difficult decisions about the planet. If we give that up, then we may as well just close the book on homo sapiens.

Do you think AI will be helpful in bringing about this new personalized education that you're talking about? >> No. >> Yeah. Go ahead. >> No, it won't. It doesn't it's not to answer your question, it's not necessarily going to be a hindrance. Um, but the species and the planet has stake on it that the the large language instrument doesn't have, you know, >> right? It might say it does but you know it's not conscious in the same way. So yeah no I guess a better answer to your question is we should certainly make use of every form of AI that we can but in the end we have to make the judgment. Uh and you know if you're really into AI you can say all right here's 10 different solutions have them argue with one another and you can learn something from the argument.

I work with a wonderful scholar in Australia Anthia Roberts. I write about her in my blogs and she visits us periodically and she has eight or 10 different large language instruments um which have different kinds of expertise and they debate with one another and I think that's fine but I think even Anthia would say in the last analysis I as a human being I as a me as a member of a country I as a member of a community I have to take responsibility I can't say well this particular chat GPT said this and therefore I'm gonna follow it. So yeah, use it's the intelligences, use the advice, but don't um consign the decision elsewhere.

>> Yeah. Uh you wrote in one of your blog posts about how so much of education has been teaching kids to come up with the answers and that what might be necessary at this point. I'm paraphrasing here, but changing that paradigm to being about having students ask the right questions. Because if AI can come up with essentially an infinite number of answers for us, what we need to be able to do is ask the right questions and then question the answers that these large language models give us. >> Absolutely. Right. But we need to give credit to Anthia Roberts because she's the one who taught me that.

And for people who are uh interested, I I can give the formula very simple. In law school until 1870, students simply had to memorize cases. After 1870 till uh 2020, they just had to be able to answer the professor's questions. But after 2020, they now know how to have to ask questions of, you know, whatever it is that the large language machine is and have a conversation. So yeah, um the uh the best educated people now will know the right questions and of course we'll be able to evaluate the answers. And so when my wife and others are arguing with me uh they would say well how will you know how to challenge what the answers you get and so on and the answer is you have to keep involved in the conversation.

Um and that does take time but you have to be motivated. Uh uh one of the things that the expert in AI was talking about today said to me um you know students and teachers are now trying to figure out what the rules of AI are and if the rule is just get to the answer as quickly as possible that's bad very bad for education. If the rule is get an answer but then challenge it and then bring another large angle to bear and have argue with it and then have a group studying it and talking with one another about it and maybe feeding some more. That's what education should be. But we can't we can't impose that on people.

>> How do you mean we can't impose that upon people? >> We can't say all right um from now on in school we're going to decide what's important and we're going to make you um interrogate uh different instruments and come up with a better answer because there too many different topics. Now law school is different because you've decided you want to become a lawyer. But I want to take your children or grandchild and say you have to learn to do this in law or medicine or philanthropy or or pharmaceut. Uh so yeah I mean your question is a good one. Once you have kind of decided what you want to do vocationally or avocationally then yes I think that that's what we should be helping people doing educationally.

But you know in the gardener schools and you know this is present in my the two volumes of my essential papers. I think that the children's museum has always been a wonderful model for me because and nobody ever flunks the children's museum but if you go regularly to with your child your grandchild or somebody else's child to children's museum and you see what interests them what they go back to and not just ritually repeating themselves but trying something new. you say, "Aha." And maybe I'll close with a personal example. Um, I play the piano every day, even though I'm old and my fingers aren't very good.

My parents were desperately poor when I was young. They came to this country literally with $5. And when I was 5 years old years old, so this was in 1948, um, we visited a friend's house at my parents' friends, and there was a piano there. had never seen a piano before, but I went to the piano and picked out notes and eventually picked out tunes. And these friends, I remember their name was Blumenthal. They said, "You got to get a piano for Howard." Because they didn't say he was musically intelligent, but he's got an ear for music. There are lots of things I have no ears for. I'm mostly stupid in other areas.

So, my parents got a piano $30, which now would be like $300, but for them it was like $3,000. For years, I played in that piano. My grandchildren still play on that piano. They have it in a barn. Um, but why am I telling the story? Because my life would have been different if I hadn't been exposed to that. And my parents were not musical themselves. They didn't have a piano. Uh and uh so you think about children's museums and the universities and high school campuses more like Aspen or Jackson Hole or the Birkers where we're about to go for the weekend where you have museums and concerts and dances, festivals and places to study, groups that study that I think that we should let people choose what they're interested in and help them study it.

But everybody needs to take responsibility for being a good person and a good citizen. >> Yeah. So cover the basics. Then help people to identify what they're naturally curious about and then help them explore that further >> and make sure we've got an ethical framework that develops along with that curiosity. >> You can decide late in life. If my wife who's almost as old as I am says she want she's never studied painting before and she wants to do it, great. But don't force her because if if these friends had had a canvas there, nobody would have said, "You should go out and get an easel." Yeah, I like that.

I mean, it's really taking all of education and making it more like one of these free form preschools or a children's museum where we're discovering where the enthusiasm and some of those natural talents lie and then running with that >> but not making being a good person or a good citizen or good worker optional. >> Right. That's that's what I and you know I was a boy scout and I went through all the ranks and I haven't thought much about that in the intervening 70 years but it was actually very important and I think scouting um which has been maligned for some good and some bad reasons often develops more of a sense of what it means to be a good worker or a good citizen than many of our well-intentioned but inept educators.

>> Yes. Yes. Well, I Dr. Gardner, it is an honor and a privilege to talk to you and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to sit down, share your thoughts with me, with everybody who's listening and watching today. And thank you. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. And be curious.