Five Minds for the Future

The Challenge:

The Generative Questions:

What curriculum will best prepare students for their futures?

What skills and values will be required?

If we take on those challenges where do we look for guidance?

Howard Gardner is the Hobbs professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is is best known perhaps for his theory of multiple intelligences* that burst on the education scene in the early eighties and has had significant impact on how we think and value intelligence and intellectual diversity.

His 2007 book, Five Minds for the Future outlines the specific cognitive abilities that he believes will be sought and cultivated by leaders in the years ahead. He names vital attributes needed by professionals in this age of global hyper-speed and competition.

• The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of
  major schools of thought, including
  science, mathematics, and history, and of
  at least one professional craft.

“Without at least one discipline . . . the individual is destined to march to someone else’s tune.”

• The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to
  integrate ideas from different disciplines
  or spheres into a coherent whole and to
  communicate that integration to others.

“. . . the capacity to synthesize
becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates”.

• The Creating Mind: the capacity to
  uncover and clarify new problems,
  questions and phenomena.

“…breaks new ground” “It puts forth new ideas, poses unfamiliar questions, conjures up fresh ways of thinking, arrives at unexpected answers.”

• The Respectful Mind: awareness of and
  appreciation for differences among
  human beings and human groups.

“…notes and welcomes differences between human individuals and between human groups . . . In a world where we are all interlinked, in-tolerance or disrespect is no longer a viable option.”

• The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one’s
  responsibilities as a worker and as a
  citizen.

“…conceptualizes how we can serve purposes beyond self-interest”. The ethical mind then “acts on the basis of these analyses”.

Gardner focuses on the intellectual approaches and mental building blocks needed to prosper in the 21st century workplace.

Here are two ways to watch Gardner talk about his book. This first video link is to a lecture he gave at the Royal Society of Arts in London.

The second is an interview with Lawrence Velvel, Dean of Massachusetts School of Law.

*The theory of Multiple Intelligences. According to Gardner’s theory intelligence can take the following forms:

• Linguistic Intelligence
• Musical Intelligence
• Logical-Mathematical Intelligence
• Spatial Intelligence
• Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence
• Interpersonal Intelligence
• Intrapersonal Intelligence
• Naturalist Intelligence