This weeks reading was ‘Minds Viewed Globally: A Personal Introduction’ in Five minds for the Future, written by Howard Gardner. This reading was a hard one to wrap my head around, mainly because there is a lot of information that you have to sift through. At least the first two pages just seem to be Gardner displaying all of his achievements which in context isn’t worth more than a paragraph to the reading. Once you get into it though you find a few themes emerging. He talks about mind-sets and how, if we are to progress as  species we must cultivate certain types of minds. He first turns to the education system stating that things need to change because as far as “cultivating minds” go, the education system is lacking in a few areas, areas that they seem to dismiss entirely. Which isn’t really news, everyone learns differently and the education just isn’t equiped to help those minds that don’t fit into their moulds. He then goes on to review science and technology, stating that in todays age they are both closely knit and one can not proceed too far without the other, makes sense I guess. Just as I was going to raise the argument about the creative mind, as in science and technology would be nothing without someone to conjure up creative ideas such as: how could a human fly, Gardner asserts my point of view, we also need creative minds. Finally he talks of globalisation and how as a world wide community we need to work together as a worldwide community but also as a local community, pretty straight forward.

My only problem that I have with this theory is that like the education system he is talking about, he is trying to mould minds of the future, isn’t it better to steer them where their own mind wants to go, not try and categorise them? In such a large world with such complex networks in place surely the answer to disruption is be fluid and ever changing along with it.