Note: This paper was given as an oral presentation at the Ecolint Meeting in Geneva, January 13, 2008. It has been edited only in the interest of clarity.
Introduction:
Education is fundamentally about values, but we have a great deal of difficulty talking about values. In the United States now, we rarely teach Philosophy of Education or History of Education, because people would disagree too much. There is a local joke in the United States called the “Jesse Test”: You could never, in the United States, come up with a curriculum that would please: Jesse Helms, a conservative Southern senator; Jesse Jackson, a fiery, African American leader; and Jesse Ventura the wrestler-turned governor of Minnesota. And therefore, we simply don’t talk about values.
The economist J.M. Keynes said that you can put down economists as much as you like, but whether we know it or not, we are all acting according to the theory of some long dead economist. I believe the same about education. People who have never heard of Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, or Dewey, are living their educational philosophies, erroneously thinking it is their own philosophy.
I welcome the platform of this conference. My presentation is somewhere in betweenmust and should. Must in the sense that the Five Minds are competencies which young people and the society need in the twenty first century going forward. My talk is also about should in the sense of my own values. If I were the Tsar of education worldwide, this is what I would prescribe. However, I remember what happened to the Tsar, and so I am more cautious.
People who know my work in education think of me as the man who proposed seven, eight, or nine different intelligences. When I write about intelligence, I am trying to be a scientist. If we really understood human evolution in detail, we would see that the mind and the brain are composed of a number of relatively autonomous computing systems. For example, one system is for language, one for music, one for spatial cognition, etc. In talking about Five Minds I am of course interested in psychology, but I am really speaking from the perspective of policy. And in that sense, there are many other minds that I could have talked about. As the policy maker/Tsar, these are the minds that I would try to promote today and tomorrow.
Here are some images of the future: The genetic revolution: within all of our lifetimes, young people will go to school with gene chips which contain their entire genome and they’ll say to teachers and administrators “these are the genes that are inactive, these are the ones that are working- teach me effectively!” and we will not be able to ignore that plea. More images of the future include: Mega cities, images and fashions that circulate around the world; trillions of dollars traded 24/7 each day; machines which do thinking, carry out tasks which used to be done by human beings; virtual realities like “Second Life”.
A hundred years ago, most people didn’t go to school, and those who did left school at twenty years old, confident that they would never have to be further educated. But nowadays as one biologist told me, if one doesn’t keep up for three months one will never be able to catch up again. All of you know the speed with which knowledge accumulates in almost every sphere. Much of our education has to be self-education.
Here are some descriptions of changes which will impact educational thinking. Many people work on problems which cut across disciplines. They converge on a geographical area, work together in teams, build on one another’s knowledge, then separate and maybe connect electronically, but maybe never work together again. Linear thinking doesn’t end, but non-linear kinds of thinking, systemic thinking, and dynamic models are in the ascendancy. So much of “thinking within the box” can be done by automata, and so the capacity to be one step beyond computers takes on additional importance. Most of our students are already way ahead of us digitally whether we are teachers or parents, and that raises interesting questions about what it is that they have to give to us and what it is that we have to give to them in terms of the educational dynamic.
The plan for the rest of the talk will be to describe the five minds. I will be concentrating more on the Synthesizing Mind and the Ethical Mind because I think that they are less familiar, and frankly, I find them more enigmatic and thus more energizing to explore.
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