Psychologist’s latest workmore than just descriptive
It’s been more than 20 years since Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner offered up a radical idea: that humans possess multiple forms of intelligence rather than just a single type that is easily tested by linguistic and logical-mathematical parameters.
His groundbreaking “Frames of Mind” (1983) changed traditional psychological views of intelligence, and helped educators question conventional teaching and testing.
In a new book, Gardner goes beyond describing cognition. He ventures into prescription.
His “Five Minds for the Future” (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) describe a “quintet of minds” most needed in a changing and challenging future world.
Taken together, and working synergistically, he said, these five ways of ordering experience and informing action will shape resilient and effective students, citizens, and workers. We all face a world, said Gardner, that is — and will increasingly be — dominated by science, distracted by technology, overwhelmed by information, and marked by the interaction of diverse cultures.
The disciplined mind masters one or more ways of thinking used in a craft, discipline, or profession. “Be prepared to be an expert in something,” said Gardner, and to sustain that learning for life.
The synthesizing mind takes in a welter of information and transforms it into something brisk, clear, and repeatable. “We’re all inundated with information, but it’s largely undigested and unevaluated,” he said. “People who can’t (synthesize) are going to be at an enormous disadvantage.”
The creating mind challenges old ideas, uncovers fresh ways of thinking, and requires a “robust, iconoclastic temperament,” Gardener said. But the creating mind must first master one or more disciplines, and synthesize what is already known. “If you’re going to go beyond the box,” he said, “you have to have the right kind of box.”
The respectful mind learns tolerance for those who are different, and devises ways to understand and get along with others. “The respectful mind respects diversity as a fact of life,” said Gardner, and goes beyond “mere tolerance.”
The ethical mind takes a step back from the self, and considers the needs of society. Using this mind, a person acts appropriately as both a worker and a citizen.
In part to study how the ethical mind is formed, Gardner directs HGSE’s GoodWork Project, a large-scale study of the beliefs and practices of 1,200 young adults in the workplace.
So far, some of the GoodWork results are “disturbing,” he said. Nearly everyone knows what the right thing to do is — but only some do it. The rest defer truly ethical behavior to a future date, after ambitions are satisfied.
“Oh Lord, make me chaste,” said Gardner, quoting fourth and fifth century theologian St. Augustine. “But not yet.”
...To forestall any confusion, Gardner explained that the five “minds” are not the same as the seven multiple “intelligences” he described in 1983. (Now there are “eight or nine,” he said, including linguistic, musical, bodily, and special intelligences.)
These cognitive abilities, present in all of us to varying degrees, are innate turns of mind a psychologist could describe. The “five minds” are what a policymaker might wish for in citizens.
This from Harvard University.
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