Five Minds for the Future
Howard Gardner
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1422145352
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In Five Minds for the Future, bestselling author Howard Gardner shows how we will each need to master "five minds" that the fast-paced future will demand:
· The disciplined mind, to learn at least one profession, as well as the major thinking (science, math, history, etc.) behind it
· The synthesizing mind, to organize the massive amounts of information and communicate effectively to others
· The creating mind, to revel in unasked questions - and uncover new phenomena and insightful apt answers
· The respectful mind, to appreciate the differences between human beings - and understand and work with all persons
· The ethical mind, to fulfill one's responsibilities as both a worker and a citizen
Without these "minds," we risk being overwhelmed by information, unable to succeed in the workplace, and incapable of the judgment needed to thrive both personally and professionally.
Complete with a substantial new introduction, Five Minds for the Future provides valuable tools for those looking ahead to the next generation of leaders - and for all of us striving to excel in a complex world.
Howard Gardner—cited by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the one hundred most influential public intellectuals in the world, and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient—is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Scientists observe the world; come up with tentative classifications, concepts, and theories; design experiments in order to test these tentative theories; revise the theories in light of the findings; and then return, newly informed, to make further observations, redo classifications, and devise experiments. Individuals who think scientifically are aware how difficult it is to ferret out causes; they do not confuse correlation (A occurs before B) with causation (A caused B); and they are aware
up with potent syntheses than those who are limited to a single, often attenuated representation of that idea. Nowadays, instruction along these lines often takes place under the label of “metaknowledge”— coming to understand the building blocks of knowledge in an explicit way. Alluding to this relatively new enterprise, my colleague David Perkins speaks persuasively of the “knowledge arts.” Of special value are useful and supportive critiques of the synthesis, connection, or integration put
will be devised—indeed, programs have already been devised—that yield new works of visual art and music, new commercial designs, new scientific patterns and hypotheses. Those hooked on creative activity will also use computers as intellectual prosthetics— manipulating variables or accumulating massive amounts of data that would have been inconceivable in a precomputer age. Most innovations today—from the architectural designs of Frank Gehry to the decoding of genomes by the company Celera—would
engineering, and robotics.13 I share his anxiety that a cloned toxic agent or a computer programmed to fire atomic warheads could wreak havoc on life as we know it. Needed today is a generous dollop of creativity in the human sphere—in particular, in the ways in which we human beings relate to one another personally, carry out our work, and fulfill our obligations as citizens. It is to these moral and ethical considerations that I now turn. C H A P T E R 5 The Respectful Mind THE
one’s grasp than for one to aim too low or too narrowly. Now the time has come to take stock—to review the major claims and to clear up some lingering questions. In this book, I’ve spoken a lot about synthesis. I have not hesitated to praise some syntheses, while expressing reservations about others. And so the challenge of synthesis is in my hands. In the following series of similarly configured boxes, I recapitulate the principal features of each kind of mind. Thereafter, I review some of the