Develop your mind...all five of them.

                Six to eight weeks.
That’s how long I need to wait for my Flip. Flip is a camcorder smaller than my hand with a USB port that will allow me to take up two hours of video. I will enlist a 9-year old to help me learn to use it.
            Nine year olds. Their worlds are digital and global. It’s a scary thought, especially for teachers and parents, that the world these children will face will be vastly different from the world as we know it. Howard Gardner, best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, in 2007 wrote “Five Minds for the Future” (required reading in Dr. Maria Ciriello, O.P.’s University of Portland graduate class.) In the book Gardner  mentions four unprecedented trends of globalization that have implications on how we prepare children for the future: daily instantaneous movement of capital and other market instruments; movement of more than 100 million immigrants across borders around the world at any one time; movement of and access to megabytes of information; and movement of popular culture – songs, foods, clothing – across borders. 
The world is spinning. And with it, people and information. Some of us older ones may or may not still be here by the time the rate of spin doubles. But the nine year old who will help me with my Flip will have to somehow find a place in that rapidly spinning world that he can call his own. If he is helping me use my Flip, how can I even begin to think about preparing him for his future world?
Gardner lists five minds that are needed if we are to thrive in the future. Unless a person develops these minds, he or she will be at the mercy of “forces that he she can’t understand, let alone control.” These five minds are the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind and the ethical mind
            The disciplined mind takes at least a decade of diligent, steady study and practice of the scholarly disciplines (history, math, science, art, etc.) and major professions (law, medicine, management, finance, etc.) as well as crafts and trades. The synthesizing mind weaves massive amounts of information and makes sense and purpose of it to self and others. The creating mind asks new questions, offers innovative solutions, stretches existing configurations, and builds on established disciplines. The respectful mind is compassionate and seeks to understand those who are different, and constructs relationships “beyond mere tolerance and political correctness.” The ethical mind strives towards goodness in work and citizenship in the community.
            The mind of my nine year old Flip instructor, in order to thrive in the future, must then take at least ten years study for a profession or a trade (the disciplined mind),  try to make sense and meaning out of gigabytes of information available to him (the synthesizing mind), question everything he or she learned, break out of the confines of his or her study and create a new breakthrough (the creative mind), accomplishing it all with moral integrity and without compromising core values (the ethical mind) while at the same time being able to work collaboratively with a diverse group of people of different ages, gender and ethnicity (the respectful mind).
            Gardner is the John H. and Elizabeth A. Hobbs professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also adjunct professor of psychology at Harvard University and adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. He has 21 honorary degrees and is author of over 20 books. So one might say he knows a little about the disciplined, creative and synthesizing mind.
            But Gardner is also a son of Jewish immigrants. Although his parents did not want to talk about the Holocaust, he found out enough about it to be disturbed by “Schindler’s List” and walk out of the movie “The Pianist” because, as he wrote in “One Way of Making a Social Scientist” he found it “too painful to observe the inexorable transition from lives of comfort to lives of discomfort, torture and eventual annihilation.”
            The Holocaust is probably the ultimate tragic example of what happens when the first three minds (disciplined, creative and synthesizing) are on overdrive, and the last two (ethical and respectful) are negated. And yet this is a phenomenon not unique to the past, albeit in a lesser scale. For even today, with so much goods, services and information available to us, many feel so disconnected from other human beings and take the extreme way of violence. We hear of extremely intelligent and extremely beautiful and extremely successful people who bankrupt themselves and others around them because they are lacking the respectful and ethical minds. In a way, technology and globalization of today is the equivalent of economic and scientific breakthroughs of the past. Some think that the difference is that for great minds like Isaac Newton and Johannes Keppler, the motivation for their science was to discover God’s laws and creative design. There was a moral, ethical framework to all they did, a framework that people like Gardner are somehow trying to put back in without rooting it to a spiritual, supernatural source. The Apostle Paul, in his first letter to the Christians in Corinthians, wrote: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard…the things which God hath prepared for them that love him…For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ."
            My big fear about the future and technology is it is making us increasingly cold and disconnected. Based on lessons from the past and news from the present, the hardest and most important mind to develop seems to be the respectful and ethical mind.
Gardner believes the five minds have to be nurtured in order to be developed. The nine year old child may be teaching me how to do the Flip, but in the end he is still just a child. For all his tech savvy, the future does not bode well for him and for us unless he also develops the respectful and ethical mind.  Because Winston Churchill was right: the empires of the future will be empires of the minds. If I might add, not one, or three, but all five minds.

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