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

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