Thinking about Thinking: Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner

Harvard researcher Howard Gardner, author of the seminal Multiple Intelligences, New Horizons,, has recently published a book titled Five Minds for the Future which is significant for parents and teachers.

Gardner, who described his work on this book as putting on the new "hat of the policy maker," sets forth what he sees as "the habits of mind" which must be cultivated for the world in which our children will live and work. These habits of mind do not replace the concept of multiple intelligences, but rather include these diverse ways of thinking and learning in developing his "minds for the future," which he calls the Disciplined Mind, the Synthesizing Mind, the Creative Mind, the Respectful Mind, and the Ethical Mind.

Gardner describes the disciplined mind as one who has mastered or become "expert" in some professional skill or craft, including a mature grasp of the system or process set forth in the great disciplines such as science, mathematics, or history.

Because the communication age inundates all of us with more information than we can process, the synthesizing mind is essential in the ability to function in the world of the twenty-first century. This mind is crucial in selecting knowledge relevant to the task (and ignoring the irrelevant), considering and combining extant syntheses, and working out a methodology to reach a workable synthesis pertinent to the process or problem at hand.

If, as Gardner describes it, the synthesizing mind comes up with the appropriate "box" in which a task can be considered, the creative mind finds the way to "think outside the box," or as Garner humorously has said, to "stay one step ahead of computers," to arrive at ideas which are both original and capable of success in a given context.

Gardner's fourth mind is the respectful mind, a concept which he admits is a surprising one for him, given his previous theoretical work with intelligence per se. This power of mind begins its development early, "at birth," as he says, and deals with an open-minded way of treating other people and dealing with differences among those people.

The ethical mind, as Gardner depicts it, is that way of thinking of oneself as an individual who is a worker and a citizen, a part of a culture, a society, a committed community in which one can also "respect differences so that the world is fit to live in." Although the final two "minds" smack of some old-fashioned human and family values, Gardner finds the these are perhaps the more important of the five.

Gardner remarks that in his teaching he has come upon a too-frequent mindset of intelligent and well-educated young people who wrongly see ethical considerations as secondary to getting ahead in their personal lives. His observations in this book apply to the general culture, but have much to say about the kind of home life and education which families and professionals bring to the development of young people. Gardner finds models, mentors, ritual and routines, the habit of learning to meet challenges, the skills of working "bi-mentally," i.e., as oneself and as part of a team, all critical in developing the five minds which will build a future in which people can live rich and fully human lives.