Howard Gardner

"So I wrote about what I wanted, and I said the average household makes about $40,000 a year, I think that nobody in America should be allowed to keep more than $4 million dollars a year, 100 times as much. They can make as much as they want, but anything above $4 million they either have to give back to the government or they have to set up a charity."

http://bigthink.com/ideas/16280

"I could not believe the guff I got from people who are wealthy, people who are average, and truck drivers and cab drivers. They all hated it because somehow, I made it, it's mine, and no one can take it away from me. That's insane. It's insane in any analysis, and yet I think that's what we have breathed in in our air, probably to some extent over hundreds of years, but certainly in that toxic Reagan/Gingrich—what did Reagan say? “Government is not the solution; it's the problem.” That's the stuff we've been sniffing. It isn't marijuana; it's that markets can do no wrong."

"Excellence, engagement, and ethics; that’s what I call good work. Good work is the people who know what they’re doing, are engaged in it, and try to do it in a responsible way. Then we flip the E another 90 degrees to W, for we. You can’t ask other people to be good workers unless you do it yourself and joining together to do good work is the replacement for money, markets, and me, and the way that we spread excellence, engagements and ethics."

"I said you've got to try something out, try to get some other people to support you, and if it doesn't work, what can you learn from it?"

- "is whether there's anything that I can do in any particular role to nudge upward the amount of good work that's done, work that's excellent, engaging and ethical. And I made a big decision five or six years ago to begin to work much more with young students, secondary students, college students, trying to get them to think about ethical issues at a time when they aren't already having to hit a payroll and do what the boss says. And I'm still feeling that way.
I mean, the problem prehistorically was, people could be very bad workers, and they could destroy their society, but the rest of the planet would survive."

"but I'm a great believer that people cannot deal with any kind of complex issue unless they've had to engage and think about it, discuss it, role-play and so on."

"Now we're in it all together, you know, whether it's, you know, disease or money or human beings. We circulate all around the world. Somebody who wants to do mischief could destroy the planet, could destroy all the people on it. And unless we develop the Good Work muscle regionally, locally, nationally and internationally, there won't be a planet."

" But here's the big question we don't know, and that is, what is his existential intelligence like? Existential intelligence is one that I use kind of playfully, and that's the interest in big questions. John Kennedy really achieved nothing, practically, as President. But he had enormous power to excite people, to motivate them to think differently, and that's why we still remember him, you know, 50 years after the fact""

And the truth is, until a century or so ago, formal education for the elite was fine, but there was really no need to educate the mass of society, at least beyond the basic literacies. But now it's completely obvious that unless people are not only educated to a higher level, but want to continue to learn—can be motivated to continue to learn; don't feel it's a gun to their head—that they will not be very useful to themselves or to their society.

"The problem is that a small proportion of the population gets a very good education. For shorthand I would say the international baccalaureate crowd, which is a kind of education which elites are able to get whether or not they belong to the IB. But of course that's expensive education, and it presupposes a lot of parental and teacher support. In large parts of the world that's just not a practical reality, and that's why people who are in policy, which I don't, think about much more macro things ranging from one laptop per child toward making sure that women are able to go to school, to ensuring that the country isn't last on some kind of international comparison. And we can't think about education in that—as if it were just one thing."