A READING UPDATE

Despite some reservations about Howard Gardner’s normative weighing of various “multiple intelligences” and uneven conceptual development in his earlier works, I’ll give Five Minds For The Future a preliminary endorsement. The chapters on the disciplinary, synthesizing and creative minds are worth the purchase price alone.

There are some very sound observations on these cognitive outlooks on Gardner’s part – readers here will see vertical and horizontal thinking well represented, though Gardner eschews the use of those terms ( he does cite De Bono’s lateral thinking exercises). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a strong influence on the creativity chapter though, as an aside, I do not always buy into Csíkszentmihályi’s social/collective/domain/peer ratification of creativity as a standard as Gardner does.