• Howard Gardner
• Harvard Business School Press
• $49.95
In the years ahead societies will not survive let alone thrive, unless as citizens we respect and cultivate the particular “quintet of minds” outlined in this book. Well, that’s how Howard Gardner puts it in what he admits is departure from description to prescription – he’s not just telling us how our cognitive processes work but how we should be shaping them to cope with the future challenges facing humankind. The five “minds” he advocates are: disciplined, synthesising, creating, respectful and ethical.
Well it’s always good to have number – but Gardner does good job of defending his choice of this particular five while noting few others that were in contention. As chair of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he also brings considerable academic grunt to the task.
Probably better known in education than business (there are “Howard Gardner” schools specifically set up to embrace his approaches to learning), Gardner’s main claim to fame was his positing the existence of ‘multiple intelligences’ rather than singular, measurable IQ way back in the early ’80s. He refers to this in his ‘personal introduction’ to the five minds before going on in successive chapters to detail each and explore how they might be encouraged and developed.
In brief, “disciplined” mind is one that has mastered at least one way of thinking, usually through specific craft/profession and without which, says Gardner, an individual is “destined to march to someone else’s tune”. The “synthesising” mind can pull together information from disparate sources in way that creates valid new connections. Both these contribute to the “creating” mind which is able to question ‘norms’, find new patterns and explore different possibilities and ways of doing things.
The final two are tad more abstract and have to do with living well in more complex and crowded world. “respectful” mind notes and welcome differences between human individuals and groups, trying to understand and work effectively with ‘otherness’, while an “ethical” mind delves into issues of how what we do fits into overall social/community good.
Without discipline, says Gardner, individuals will be unable to succeed in any demanding workplace; without synthesising ability, they’ll be overwhelmed by information and unable to make judicious decisions; without creating capacities, they’ll be replaced by computers; without respect, they will “poison the workplace and the commons”; and without ethics they will yield world devoid of decency and responsible citizenry.
It’s all an easy read that makes good sense. The only carp – from the perspective of my own journalistic discipline – is some slapdash editing/proofreading, though possibly that’s because mine was an “advance” copy.
