In the week that I was meeting Howard Gardner in New York, his theory on
multiple intelligences was being aired in my daughter’s primary school
newsletter. Such is the enormous reach of Gardner, Hobbs Professor of
Cognition and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and his
idea that intelligence is not a single measurable quantity but eight spheres
of competence encompassing such areas as language, logic, movement and music.
The concept of multiple intelligences (MI) caused ripples far beyond the
academic pool when it came out more than two decades ago. It placed Gardner
on the cultural map and in the affections of liberal parents and the
educational elite; it secured him a place in lists of the world’s top 100
intellectuals (Prospect magazine currently puts him at number 70,
above both Craig Venter, the bio-tech entrepreneur who helped to decode the
human genome, and Robert Putnam, a political thinker favoured by Tony Blair
and Bill Clinton). Gardner’s ideas were also grasped enthusiastically by
business leaders, who had long recognised that high IQ was no guarantee of a
productive or creative employee.
Twenty-three years later, he is breaking fresh intellectual ground. In his
new book Five Minds for the Future, he argues that the 21st century
will belong to people who can think in certain ways. Those who cannot
develop these cognitive abilities face a bleak future “at the mercy of
forces they can’t understand — overwhelmed by information, unable to succeed
in the workplace, and incapable of making judicious decisions about personal
and professional matters”.
He identifies this priceless pentad as: the disciplined mind, schooled
in basic subjects such as history, science and art but, crucially, a master
of one profession, vocation or craft; the synthesising mind, which
can make sense of disparate pieces of information (Gardner identifies this
as a key trait of good managers and highlights its importance in the age of
the internet); the creating mind, capable of asking new questions and
finding imaginative answers; the respectful mind, which shows an
appreciation of different cultures; and the ethical mind, which
enables one to behave responsibly as a worker and citizen.
Gardner writes: “The world of the future — with its ubiquitous search
engines, robots and other computational devices — will demand capacities
that until now have been mere options. To meet this new world on its own
terms, we need to cultivate these capacities now.”
The last two types of “minds” — respectful and ethical — seem less critical
to success than the first three. Not so, says the professor. The parochial
mindset bequeathed to our species through evolution — when people
rarely left their small communities — is no good for survival in the
global village, in which citizens, money, information and cultural trends
flow easily across borders.
Gardner’s thesis has already created a buzz within the business community: the
book is published by Harvard Business School Press and the idea of the
synthesising mind was voted one of 2007’s “Breakthrough business ideas” by Harvard
Business Review , arguably the most influential management magazine in
the world.
Gardner believes that the education policies of today, which still revere
rote-learning, are preparing children for the world of yesterday. He points
to my digital recorder, the size of a cigarette lighter: “Something that
small can contain every fact that you ever need to know. So what a waste of
time it is to sit around learning facts! All the premium in the future is
for people who can do things that machines can’t do yet. So, the capacity to
ask a good question, rather than getting the right answer from a machine,
becomes so much more important.”
Gardner adds: “I joked recently that I’ve finally discovered the purpose of
education. It’s to improve your standing in international comparison tables.
What a stupid goal! Does it matter if maths scores go up two notches? Is
that really what we have schools for?
“We need people to ask, what are the overall purposes of education and why? I
feel I’ve earned the right, by age if nothing else, to move beyond asking,
‘How do we raise test scores?’ to asking, ‘What should we be assessing
anyway?’ We also need to ask whether there are some very important things
that can’t be tested.”
Gardner’s finger appears to be on the intellectual pulse: Harvard University
is overhauling its core curriculum, which dates back to the Seventies, of
what all its students should learn. The review was prompted by the suspicion
that the oldest, richest and most influential college in America was not
adequately preparing its alumni for life outside the ivory towers.
Alison Simmons, a professor of philosophy at Harvard who is leading the
overhaul, says the educational emphasis needs to shift: “We are not trying
to say that an educated man or woman needs to know this, that and the other.
What we’re saying is that an educated person should have a certain set of
capacities: interpretive capacities, problem-solving capacities, reflective
capacities and critical capacities, to help them through the world.”
This philosophy bears more than a passing resemblance to Gardner’s hobbyhorse:
that mastering skills and ways of thinking will serve our children better
than learning the periodic table or the names of all the kings of England.
I meet Gardner in Manhattan, at the Museum of Modern Art, of which he is a
trustee. The 63-year-old father of four — he is married to the
psychologist Ellen Winner and they have one grandchild — is the image
of an overworked, overtravelled academic, with unruly hair and a serious
demeanour.
That he holds a position here is intriguing. Fellow MoMA trustees include
Ronald Lauder, billionaire son of Estée Lauder, and Leon Black, billionaire
investor; Gardner tells me later that he thinks it is wrong that people are
allowed to acquire such excessive wealth. And, although his latest work is
being marketed as a business book, Gardner has limited respect for the
markets, which he regards as “fundamentally amoral” and capable of causing
great unhappiness through their making of big winners and losers.
In writing Five Minds for the Future , Gardner had to deal with another
set of conflicting beliefs that eventually led him to abandon some
long-cherished notions. Respectfulness, he says, will become so prized in
the global village — which has the internet as its grapevine —
that we should jettison our unconditional loyalty to free speech. He does
not believe that the irreverent cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad
should have been published, because of the ill-feeling they caused among
Muslims. His change of heart has come about, ironically, because of one of
the major technological breakthroughs in the past century: the internet.
Because of it, information can no longer be confined to a selected audience.
Gardner explains: “We live in a time that was not imaginable even 20 years
ago. You can post something embarrassing about yourself on Facebook: it can
never be erased and it can haunt you for ever. And we evolved as a species
to know 150 people! Now, everything we say or do has worldwide consequences.
“There are very severe cultural divides which don’t matter when people are not
in contact with one another. But when they are in constant contact,
it’s naive to think that you can create barriers around them. I would like
to avoid the world blowing itself up and that’s why respect and ethics are
much more important now.”
It is painful, he admits, for someone who has spent 40 years at Harvard in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to many of America’s leading academic
liberals, to break ranks but he needed to have the courage of his
convictions. “People will say, are you kidding? I’m a friend of Alan
Dershowitz (a Harvard law professor and lawyer whose clients have included
O.J. Simpson) and the notion that a friend of his would say the First
Amendment (the clause in the American Constitution protecting freedom of
expression) is an option would get him very upset.
“But sometimes there are things you have to decide not to do
because the benefits are outweighed by the costs, such as looking at racial
differences in intelligence. It’s an interesting scientific question but I
wouldn’t touch it with a 10ft pole and I’d be happy if other scientists
didn’t as well, because the rewards of knowing it are dwarfed by the amount
of damage it can do. The people who spend their lives studying this, like
Christopher Brand (the British psychologist who believes that intelligence
differs across races), are falsely naive. They say, ‘I’m just following the
data’. Of all the questions in the world, why are they focusing on that? We
know the answer and . . .” — his anger at this point is palpable —
“. . . I’m not going to put it into words.”
He believes self-censorship should apply to the way that ideas are conveyed,
rather than to the ideas themselves. For example, the Danish cartoons were
offensive because Muslims do not depict their prophet in this manner.
Besides, “humour doesn’t work if you don’t think it’s funny. My family were
caught up in the Holocaust. My cousins, who were Jewish, were caricatured as
hyper-JewIsh in the newspapers and it ruined their lives. If I really think
respecting others is a very high value, we have to go the extra mile not to
gratuitously insult people who have very strong feelings about things. I
could wake up tomorrow and say, Howard, get over it, but I’m not there yet.”
The chapter on the respectful mind was the hardest to write, he says, but that
doesn’t diminish the importance of the other four minds. Without a
discipline under one’s belt, “the individual is destined to march to someone
else’s tune”. The surge in the availability of information —
Wikipedia is an obvious example — means that a synthesising mind
capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, relevant from irrelevant, is
highly sought-after. The creating mind is one step ahead of the robots, and
its ability to think beyond rules enables its owner to come up with fresh
ideas and insights. The ethical mind works in a more abstract way, pondering
how it can contribute to improving society. The idea, he says, was to write
“about things that were important and interesting and underemphasised”.
Is there someone who embodies all five qualities? Gardner cites Yo-Yo Ma, the
top cellist, with whom he breakfasted the day before our meeting. Ma, a
Chinese-American who started playing at 4, boasts an eclectic repertoire
stretching from the classics to Hollywood soundtracks; in addition, Ma set
up the Silk Road Ensemble, a loose collective of musicians from countries
along the Silk Road, put together to deepen cross-cultural understanding.
While Gardner was meticulous in categorising intelligence — because MI
theory attempted to convey a complete scientific description of how the
brain worked — the “five minds” might yet expand to six or more: “Here,
I make no claim to be exhaustive. Science is about trying to explain the way
things are. Policymakers are not into that. It’s more like, faced with the
current mess, how can we make things better?”
And this is where educators, he argues, need to listen to the money men, who
will simply refuse to employ people ill-suited to the 21st century: “The
corporate world, for all its negatives, has a greater stake in not preparing
people for the 19th or 20th century than the educational world does.
Companies have to hire people, and if these people are only fit to do
assembly-line work, they will send them back.
“Most of my writings have been as a psychologist but here I’m wearing the hat
of a policymaker. I’m under no illusion that I’ll be included in anyone’s
cabinet but I would love education ministers to read this book and ask, ‘Are
we doing anything like this?’ ” On my return to London, another school
newsletter informs me that some of the children have broadened their
cultural and social horizons by participating in Comic Relief does Fame
Academy . Well, it’s a start.
THE FIVE MINDS WE NEED
The disciplined mind has mastered at least one way of thinking. It
takes up to ten years to achieve mastery.
The synthesising mind takes information from disparate sources. It
understands and evaluates information objectively, puts it together in ways
that make sense and is more important as the tide of information increases.
The creating mind breaks new ground and raises new ideas. It poses
unfamiliar questions and arrives at unexpected answers. It is impossible to
hone without a foundation of discipline and synthesis.
The respectful mind welcomes differences between people, tries to
understand others and seeks to work effectively with them. It is a necessity
in the global village.
The ethical mind ponders the nature and purpose of work and assesses
the needs and desires of society. It thinks beyond self-interest and seeks
to improve the lot of all.
Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner is published by Harvard
Business School Press on April 3 at £14.99
