…Contd.
The Ethical Mind involves a higher level of abstraction. Being in the world involves a higher level of thinking. Because the Ethical Mind does not say, “how should Howard Gardner behave towards others?” But rather, it says, “I am a worker, in my case a teacher, writer, scientist and I am a citizen, in my case of my university, my community, my nation, the wider world—how should I behave?.” Not in terms of what my rights are, but what are my responsibilities as a citizen, as a worker, within the school context, what are my responsibilities as a student and as a member of a school community? And of course it’s great to know your responsibilities but it is not sufficient; to be sufficient you have to act on the basis of responsibility. Thus, the Ethical Mind reflects on different roles that we fulfil and talks about what are the proper ways to fulfil those roles and tries, though not always successfully, but at least makes the effort, to fulfil those responsibilities.
The work that I have done has been in collaboration with many scholars, particularly William Damon and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It is called “The Good Work” project. We define good work as a work that embodies three Es: excellence in a technical way; engagement—that people are meaningfully involved with what they are doing and they find it motivating. They look forward to Monday and are even willing to come to the meetings on Saturday and ethical, behaving responsibly in your world as a worker. I think of these three Es as a triple helix. And interestingly these three Es don’t necessarily coexist. You could be excellent but not ethical. You could be ethical but not engaged.
The challenge of good work is to intertwine those three Es. And we have carried out a very large scale and careful project over twelve years, almost entirely in the United States, trying to understand what makes for good work and how one carries out good work at present. Things are changing very quickly, our whole sense of time and space is being altered by technology, markets are very powerful, and especially in the United States there are no forces able to mediate or moderate or modulate the markets. Therein lies the challenge of good work.
My colleagues and I did a study of good work in young people from the ages of 15-35. Wendy Fischman and others wrote a book called Making Good: How do Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work and we found a very disturbing picture. I give you this picture although it may not exist in your country. But alas just as in the United States what starts in California ultimately tends to make its way across the country, often in the world what starts in the United States travels all too quickly elsewhere.
We found that the best and brightest, those young people who are the elite of your schools and are already winning awards, knew what good work was. Some of them tried to be excellent and ethical and engaged, but many of them told us that they could not afford to be ethical. Because, they said, it was very important for them to succeed, to have money, power, prestige, prominence. Since they were in competition with their peers, they suspected that their peers were cutting corners and they were not going to be upright, if that meant that they were going to lose to somebody who was less ethical. And so they told us that someday they would be ethical, that they would be the cream of their community, serve as a role model, support good causes, and hire ethical people. But they couldn’t afford to do it now. We are reminded of what Saint Augustine said “Oh Lord, make me chaste, but not quite yet”.
And that is what these young workers were telling us. They were not typically bad workers since they weren’t doing things that were illegal, but they were doing compromised work. They were doing journalism and making things up, or taking things from the web and not verifying the source. They were doing science but not running the extra control or not sharing the data with people who share the data with them. They were compromising.
This finding has changed my life. I am now spending my time with people in secondary school and colleges. We are exposing young people to ethical dilemmas and having them think about them, as well as role playing, and essentially trying to make them carry out what we call meaningful work and a meaningful life. Not focussing so much on the next prize, but thinking in the long run what kinds of human beings we want to be and what kind of world we want to live in.
An example: Marilee Jones was a very successful Dean of Admissions at MIT for many years, but it turned out last year that she had faked her own resumé by inventing the degrees that she didn’t have. And MIT had no choice but to fire her, because how can you judge other people’s records and ask for their honesty when you yourself have lied about your past? There were only two reactions among students whom I was teaching: one reaction was that she was doing a good job so why was there a problem? The second reaction was “well, everybody lies on their resumé, right?”
Conclusion:
I want to close with two interesting quotations from Americans who have a deep sense of what is important. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Intelligence plus character— that’s the goal of true education”. And philosopher Ralph Emerson said, “Character is more important than intellect”. You are all in the business of educating young people and there are enormous pressures to make them excellent and especially IB schools which are good at achieving that end. I have nothing against excellence, but at the end of the day we do not need more of the best and the brightest, but we need more of those who have good character. That is why the issues of respect and ethics, which are hard to measure objectively, are so terribly important. In conclusion, these are the main elements of my Five Minds.
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