Books
Book Review
Five Minds for the Future
by Howard Gardner,
professor of cognition
and education
(Harvard Business
School Press, 204 pages)
Reviewed by Lory Hough
In his forthcoming book, Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner wants you to know right up front that despite decades of thinking about the mind -- how it works and develops, for instance -- he doesn't have a crystal ball when it comes to predicting the kind of minds we will need in the future. But in order to thrive as managers and leaders and citizens, especially in a world where people and places are super-connected in ways they've never been in the past, he writes that there are five minds he thinks we should have: disciplined, synthesized, creative, respectful, and ethical.
In response to the inevitable question that he'll get asked once the book comes out in April -- why these five particular minds? -- Gardner says in chapter one that these are the five he thinks "are particularly at a premium in the world of today and will be even more so tomorrow. They span both the cognitive spectrum and the human spectrum -- in that sense they are comprehensive, global." He considered others -- the technical mind and the flexible mind, for instance -- but writes that
these five made the most sense.
"I am prepared to defend my quintet vigorously," he writes, sounding almost parental.
Early in the book, he also tackles the other inevitable question he'll be asked by readers and reviewers: Didn't you already say there were at least eight or nine minds that we all have? Gardner explains that the five minds in this new book are different than the multiple intelligences he became famous for in his classic 1983 book, Frames of Mind. The five minds "make use" of the different intelligences, he writes, but are more policy than psychology.
In an interview with the Guardian in November, Gardner said that what he's trying to do is "think of a world of the future and if I was a policymaker, what kind of minds I would like to cultivate." That cultivation would ideally begin at birth and continue throughout someone's life.
"If any cliché of recent years rings true, it is the acknowledgment that education must be lifelong," he writes.
In many ways, this book, described by Gardner as "ambitious, even grandiose," is not a manual for teachers and educators only. As Gardner writes, when it comes to cultivating minds, although schools are the most obvious place (they "bear the most evident burden," he writes), "parents, peers, and media play roles at least as signifi cant as do authorized teachers and formal schools."
One of the strengths of Five Minds is Gardner's ability to explain complex, weighty matters (what could be more complex and weighty than the mind?) without slipping too deeply into academic lingo. Written in the first person, and often witty ("I issue two -- but only two -- cheers for globalization."), the book includes a list of definitions (chapter 7) and is peppered with personal stories that make the material easier to follow. For instance, in chapter 5 on the respectful mind, Gardner talks about a decision, made by an official in France, to bar Muslim women and girls from wearing veils and other religious garb to school.
"I sympathized with the ruling. After all, French schools have been determinedly secular for two centuries and those in attendance should respect that nonreligious commitment," he writes. "But then, weighing the costs to the women of the deprivation of an important part of their religion, and realizing that the veils did not really impinge on anyone else's liberties, I concluded that respect should trump a longstanding norm."
In the end, Gardner writes that although no one knows exactly how to create an education that will yield students with the five minds fully intact, trying to do so is critical.
"Our survival as a planet," he writes, "may depend on the cultivation of this pentad of mental dispositions."
