Greetings, I'm Howard Gardner and I am speaking to you from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Because I'm about to make a trip to India I'd like to tell you a little but about who I am and about my background, some of the reasons why I am looking forward to my trip, talk about some of the work that I've done in the past and then finally the issues that I've been thinking about at present and going forward.

Early Days
I am American born from parents who came from Europe, from Germany and I lived in Pennsylvania in the North East of the United States until I became a student in Harvard College many years ago, in fact this is my 50th year being in Harvard – first as a student, then as a researcher and most recently as a professor.

I began with an interest in psychology and social science and began as a researcher but then moved a lot into the area of education. A lot of my work in the last few decades has been educational practice and policy and my primary affiliation is with the school of education and then more recently I've been looking at broader questions of the kind of society we have and the kind of society I think we ought to have – so I've been moving, we might say, into the area of vision and trying to envision the world different from the way that it is.

On India and Mahatma Gandhi
Even as young person I was always interested in India. India going back for a millennia has been the seat of great civilizations, important ideas, important practices, great art and it also happens to be the country in which the person lived who I think happens to be the most important human being for the last thousand years and that's the mahatma, Mahatma Gandhi. Now you may think that it is odd that an American saying the praises of Gandhi particularly because at present it is not easy to see his influence in contemporary India but when I say a thousand years, I'm keeping a very broad prospect. I think that the ideas that Gandhi developed about how human beings relate to one another, what people do when they do not agree about things, about the kind of stance that you have to be prepared to take in terms of your value system – incredibly important but it will probably take a long period of time to see whether or not the Gandhian ideas take hold both in Asia and in the rest of the World.

Even though I've had an interest of many decades in India, in fact I've written about Gandhi in three of the books I've written, I've never made a trip to India and so when I began to speak to Ashish Rajpal, who was a student of mine in Harvard and then to his colleague Anustup Nayak, who also was a Harvard student and we talked about the possibility of making a trip to India early in 2012. I became very excited about the idea – like many people I'm interested in traveling to new places, meeting new people, having a chance to exchange ideas with people in education, with policy makers, with thought leaders, people who can write about ideas that are in the air, people from different sectors of the society – from art, from universities, from business, from the non-profit sector and even though I would be giving talks in several cities during the period of my visit, I'd expect to gain to learn at least as much, probably more than I can give to the audiences and to the people with whom I meet.

His Work in Education
So that's a bit about my identity and my motivation about making a trip to India. Let me be a bit more specific about my own work. As I mentioned, I was trained in psychology in particular in cognitive psychology–how human beings think about things and in developmental psychology–how our thoughts develop from childhood to latent life and as part of that empirical work with young people and with other populations including brain damaged adults, I developed, thirty years ago, a theory called the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. And that theory posits that instead of there being a single general intelligence which people have in varying degrees. That instead, people have a lot of relatively independent faculties or abilities, which I call the Multiple Intelligences. And even though I saw this principally as a contribution to psychology, in fact, the area where it has really taken off is in the area of education and there are multiple intelligence schools, classrooms and even networks of schools in many societies including in India.

Education for Understanding
This interest in the part of educators led me think more about how I conceptualized education and for me the important goal of education is to help people use their minds better to think about what's true in the world and what's not true, what's beautiful and what may not so qualify, what's ethical and what's not. And I see school is the place where once we become literate we acquire the various tools that people have developed over the years, the various academic disciplines, history, science, mathematics, the arts and the various professions–journalism, engineering, architecture that people developed to figure out how to understand the world and how to get things done. As part of the theory of multiple intelligences I've thought a lot about individuation, how do we teach each human being so that he or she can learn the best and how do we assess each person so he or she can show what they have understood and what they haven't understood about truth, beauty, goodness and the like.

On Pluralisation: Presenting Ideas in Different Ways
Also as part of my work in education I have thought a lot about pluralisation and that means presenting important ideas in many many different ways. When there is an important idea whether it comes out of history or mathematics or the arts or politics, we can't just present it once, we have to present it in many ways and many times. And the more different ways in which we present ideas, the more intelligences that we can activate, the more likely there is that the person will really understand the idea, the topic, the theory that we are talking about.

And when I come to India, I will speak a lot about developing minds, about education for understanding, about how to individuate and how to pluralise the things that we think are important.

On Excellence
Also in the last few decades, I've thought a lot about excellence. What does it mean to be truly excellent in something. I've studied excellence in leadership–what it means to be an excellent leader, which includes management but goes beyond management because leadership involves presenting visions of how the world should be and how the world can be. I've thought and written a lot about creativity–what does it mean to be an excellent creator, to come up with new ideas to implement them and to convince other people of those ideas. And I've thought a lot about what it means to be an excellent worker, an excellent citizen. How we can be not just technically proficient but also engaged in what we do and how we can do it at a very high ethical and moral level.

And in my trip to India I will be talking about how we achieve excellence in leadership, in creativity in work, in citizenship, and perhaps as I mention these areas, you can see why I'm so interested in Gandhi. Because Gandhi was tremendously creative, he was a very effective leader, and he thought more than anybody else about what it meant to be a citizen, not just of his state or his nation or his religion but of the entire planet. In an era of globalization that ability to be non-parochial, to think broadly, to place one selves in the largest space, in the largest firmament is so crucial.
I want to talk now about things I've been thinking about recently building on my work in education, building on my work on excellence.

Five Minds for the Future
One thing I've been thinking about is what kinds of minds do we need to have going forwards in the future and I've written a book called Five Minds for the Future in which I describe three cognitive areas and two human areas where I think we need to focus our education in the future.

The cognitive areas are the Disciplined Mind – what it means to become truly experts in an area, the Synthesizing Mind – how we put things together which are disparate, which don't necessarily immediately call themselves to be combined, but which needs to be integrated if we are to understand them and if we are to communicate to other people and when we live at a time when we are deluged with information of all sorts much of which is of quite poor quality, the capacity to synthesize is tremendously important.

The third kind of cognitive mind is the Creative Mind, the mind that thinks outside the box, that come up with new ideas, with new practices. It's great to think outside the box but you can't think outside the box unless you have a box. And the box is the discipline and the synthesizing you have done before you can be generally creative.

The last two kinds of minds have to do with the human sphere. I call them the Respectful Mind and the Ethical Mind. The Respectful Mind recognizes that we have tremendous diversity in the world, indeed tremendous diversity in any community of any size. And when people look and behave differently from us we can try to kill them, we can ignore them, we can tolerate them or we can try to work with them and clearly it is best for the world if we respect one another despite these differences maybe even because of these differences.

The Ethical Mind is the mind, which asks not just what rights do I have, human beings are very good nowadays at stating their rights but also what are our responsibilities, what are our duties and I am particularly interested in our responsibilities as workers if you are a professional of some sort–educator, doctor, engineer, architect, lawyer – what are your responsibilities, and if you are a citizen of a community or a state, a nation, a region, the entire world what are your responsibilities. And the Ethical Mind doesn't always get it right but it thinks a great deal about what it means to be a responsible worker and responsible citizen.

Curriculum: What and How We Teach
As an educator I am also very concerned about curriculum. What is it that we teach and how do we teach. And as I mentioned before I believe in school, once we have become literate its our task to learn about what is true and what's not true, what is beautiful and cherished and what is not good. These issues have become more complex in recent years.

On the one hand we have what we call the postmodern or relativistic critique, which says who am I or who are you to say what is good and beautiful and true–that is just a matter of taste–every country, every state, every group have its own definition of truth, beauty and goodness. And because the technological world that we live in, the digital world, where anything that is posted can be changed, morphed, transformed, forgotten, combined, deleted, posted and so on, and it is very hard to think about truth, beauty and goodness when we have such a fast changing, facile, flexible world. So in a book that I recently published called Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed, I've tried to think through the traditional curricular goals in the traditional subjects in light of the post-modern critique on the one hand and the very fast changing, flexible digital world on the other–and I expect to be talking about that on my trip to India.

Use Intelligence for the Good
Finally, I've studied intelligence for many years. I find it a very, very fascinating topic but I've become convinced in recent years that the kind of human beings we are and the kind of societies we live in is really much more important than whatever kind of intelligence we have. Because people can be very smart on any definition but if they don't use their abilities and their skills for the good, for trying to bring people together, for trying to work toward peace, to trying to eradicate poverty and disease and hostility, then the use of all that intellect is really for naught.

And I worry about this in terms of the United States, India, China – countries, which have a tremendous focus nowadays on test scores in doing better in comparison but perhaps not enough focus on what's it all for, what kind of place we want to live in, what kind of people we want to be, what kind of a world do we want to live in.

And here as in so many other spheres, Gandhi has something to teach us. I found a nice quotation from Gandhi with which I want to conclude. Gandhi said, "I'm an average man with less than average ability. I admit that I'm not sharp intellectually but I don't mind. There is a limit to the development of the intellect but none to that of the heart."

Well I think in any definition Gandhi was pretty smart. He's probably putting himself down when he says he's not of average ability intellectually, but whether or not there is a limit to the development of the intellect, there certainly shouldn't be a limit to the development of the heart and coming to India next year I want to look as deeply and widely as possible with the kinds of things that you have cherished over the millennia and to figure out how all of us in the world can work together to have a world which we would be proud to live in with human beings that we can also feel very good about.