Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner, 2007

Howard Gardner and his team of researchers/propagandists have been pushing the theory of “multiple intelligences” since 1983, without empirical data. They rely on anecdotal stories to show that all humans are equally intelligent—they just have different intelligences that each person has compared to others. The primary purpose of this program is to try and provide an alternative explanation for what constitutes intelligence, so that Jensenism/Spearman’s g can be undermined as the only empirical program that has any real validity. (See Wikipedia for a good explanation of the “MI” theory and its failures.)

When I ordered the above book by Gardner, I thought it would be expanding on his primary work on multiple intelligences. Instead, “The five minds posited in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences. Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace.” The only thing I got out of the book was how muddled Gardner’s thinking is with regards to human biology, so I’ll elaborate on just a few anomalies I found.

Gardner admits that, “We now have well-developed, empirically based theories of intelligence, problem solving, and creativity—along with the tools, software, and hardware based (or purportedly based) on these scientific advances.” Yet his whole program is based on undermining those very empirically based theories. His multiple intelligences program is primarily used within the educational community as an excuse for racial differences in intelligence. With this book, he tries to lay out ways of advancing or programming children in such a way that they will exhibit these five traits or abilities: “discipline”, the ability to “synthesize”, “creativity”, “respect” for others, and “ethical” behavior.

Of course, there is always the obligatory assumption, without any evidence, that eugenics is a pseudoscience. Gardner claims that ability in synthesizing is helpful: “Take, for example, a high school course on Nazism. Secondary-school students cannot be expected to be scientific or historical disciplinarians. Neither the disciplinary knowledge nor the disciplinary tools will have been consolidated. Yet, these students are likely to acquire a better understanding of the rise of Nazism if they can appreciate the various perspectives that can be donned: genetic explanation of differences between populations, along with the various pseudoscientific claims made by eugenicists; historical explanation of the long-festering factors that created a fertile soil for Nazi beliefs and practices, as well as the contingent factors that led to the Nazis’ surprising, largely lawful takeover of the German governmental apparatus in the early 1930s.”

When it comes to creativity he really misses the mark. A recent article in The Mankind Quarterly discusses creativity and links it with the behavioral trait of “openness.” That is a dose of ambition, along with intelligence and the personality trait of openness is the apparent concoction for creativity. This also includes scales for measuring openness in individuals as well as differences in the average level of openness between racial groups: East Asians are more intelligent on average than Caucasians, but Caucasians are on average more open and therefore more creative—and we have the innovations to prove it. Gardner states, “Clearly, the aspiring creator needs a generous supply of intelligence(s), skill, and discipline.”

Like intelligence he does note that creativity may just be genetic, “It is far more likely, however, that those who value creativity will seek to cultivate—though hopefully not to breed!—human beings with those biological proclivities. We can be even more certain that those who seek totalitarian control will find ways to eliminate these creative outliers. Instead of burning books, future totalitarian leaders or their brutal henchmen will excise key brain centers or knock out telltale genes. What was once the province of science fiction may well become the realm of science fact.” Gardner seems to be paranoid in his “just so” stories about the future. If anything, where there is totalitarian control, the state would just as easily want more creative scientists as to eliminate them.

Of the five minds he wants to develop in children, only “respect” was of real interest. Gardner admits, “insights from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are genuine. No doubt human beings have deeply entrenched inclinations to delineate groups, to identify with and value members of their own group, and to adopt a cautious if not antagonistic tone to other comparable groups, however defined and constituted. But such biologically accented explanations have limitations. To begin with, they do not account for the contours, breadth, or flexibility of such ingroup-outgroup distinctions.” His claim here is apparently that such theories should be able to explain how differing environments push humans into varying alliances and antagonisms, yet most scientists clearly understand this is impossible because human behavior is flexible, including being maladaptive in many instances thanks to human indoctrinability. White people voting for Barack Obama is a clear example of this.

Gardner’s solution to respect is to indoctrinate children to respect all groups and all individuals, and if they don’t, then “isolate or otherwise penalize those who fail to show respect….” That’s right, if one fails to show respect to anyone, then punish them. That seems like a bizarre way of promoting respect. And does he really mean we should show respect to psychopathic serial killers, wife beaters, reckless drivers, oppressive and demeaning supervisors, etc. It would seem to me that having respect for others is a rather vacuous preoccupation of liberals—some bizarre way of trying to make everyone equal. Of course, it is mandatory that all right thinking people show disrespect and try to slander anyone who holds the scientific position that humans vary in many ways as well as races in measurable averages like stature, intelligence, wrist diameters, size of genitals, conscientiousness, etc. The argument for universal respect for others seems rather circular for as soon as someone does not abide with the arbitrary mandate to embrace diversity and multiculturalism say, they deserve disrespect. It is an odd argument.

There is a problem with his program of indoctrination however, children are influenced more by their friends than by their families. That is, as children mature into their teens, the contribution to behavior and intelligence from the shared environment falls close to zero while the non-shared environment and genes take over. The split is about 50/50 for most personality traits and about 20/80 for intelligence as primarily genes complete the process of developing the adult brain. But Gardner rejects this research because it “mistakenly construes a situation that happens to characterize parts of contemporary American society as a law of evolutionary psychology.” The fact is, the data comes from a cross section of American culture, it is now readily established as credible, and it includes a 13 year study sponsored by the NIH and four universities, and a similar study is now following up on the first one because of its robust outcome. These are behavior genetic studies, and Gardner just doesn’t like them at all. He wants the power to mold the human mind to his liking.

On discipline he states, “As disciplined learners, it is our job to understand the world. But if we are to be ethical human beings, it is equally our job to use that understanding to improve the quality of life and living and to bear witness when that understanding (or misunderstanding) is being used in destructive ways. This is a reason why community service and other forms of giving are or should be—an important part of the curriculum of any school. Perhaps paradoxically, when students see that knowledge can be put to constructive use, they are most likely to gain pleasure from schoolwork and to find it meaningful in itself thereby achieving the other facets of goodness.” Now how does one define goodness? For those of us who believe in our genetic interests, goodness as acted upon would be radically different than how Gardner perceives it.

Finally, “A disciplined person should embody the ways of thinking and acting that distinguish her chosen discipline(s) and not just spew forth a lot of heterogeneous knowledge about the subject. A synthesizer should put ideas together in a way that is cogent and replicable, and not merely offer a convenient or cute package.” And yet, that is just what this book is, a just so cute book that is devoid of any coherence or capable of being replicated or falsified. These Five Minds are just so much mush.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 10:54 PM in IQ and Heredity
Comments (19) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Lurker on February 21, 2008, 11:36 PM | #

As far as I can see Gardner’s 5 are talked about by educationalists but when your child is tested, as mine was recently, by an educational psychologist what came back that was something that looked much more like an IQ test. No mention of five intelligences cobblers anywhere.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 22, 2008, 05:48 AM | #

One can, in fact, quite easily and properly cleave “mind” by broad function and evolutionary age - the very ancient “mind” which learns movement is not the later “mind” which informs through emotion is not the much later mind which operates by associative thinking. One can make a case for a scale of incompetence to excellence in the operation of these three “minds”. Learned movement runs from clumsy to elegant. Emotions run from coarse to fine. But only the thinking mind scales by intelligence.

Gardner is a psycho-shyster who operates from an ambition to obfuscate and deny the evidence for racial IQ differentials. It isn’t science. It’s politics. His “minds” and his “intelligences” are non-Jewish vehicles of anti-Euro liberalism, and nothing more. I suppose we should be grateful that he isn’t a Jew or we’d have a competently constructed argument to deal with.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 22, 2008, 10:05 AM | #

“I suppose we should be grateful that he isn’t a Jew or we’d have a competently constructed argument to deal with.” (—GW)

That is intended as sarcasm?

(Prof. Howard Gardner is Jewish.)

Posted by Guessedworker on February 22, 2008, 10:16 AM | #

No, I didn’t know that, Fred. Have you got a source? To my mind the emotional intelligence thing is such a feeble piece of thinking, and so obviously politically motivated, it couldn’t be related to the amazing standard of Jewish “creativity” we are so familiar with. It fails by several degrees of cunning.

The Wiki page gives no ethnic information about Gardner, which I took to mean that the guy is a Euro. I guess it’s not bad news, actually, that a Jew can dream up such patent garbage.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 22, 2008, 08:04 PM | #

GW, I recall reading somewhere that his parents were German Jews who left Germany in 1938 to come to the U.S.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 23, 2008, 09:59 AM | #

I should add that I for one supported the original version of Prof. Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences but some of these more recent refinements of his do seem suspiciously like an attempt to ... “get around,” shall we say? ... an attempt to get around certain facets of reality that — hey and I’m not mentioning any names or citing any specific ethnic goups here, OK? — certain facets of reality that academics of his ... “type”? ... of his “kind”? ... of his “variety”? ... feel a strong need to ... get around ....

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 23, 2008, 10:04 AM | #

I do still support his basic original idea though. It is in no way inconsistent with anything in the realm of so-called “racial reality” or “racialism” (what I call merely “normalness” because that’s all it is, and normalness doesn’t need a special name, only abnormalness does).

Posted by silver on February 23, 2008, 10:34 AM | #

Normalness is to mix (at least with closely related breeds), and to show concern about mixing but to ultimately nothing about it; that has been the history of the world and that is thus what is “normal”.

Maybe you should stop reinventing terms. Your “progressives” was a bust and so is this “normalness”.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 23, 2008, 11:04 AM | #

Oh did a gnat just bite me? Forgive me, I don’t notice — I never notice rankest insignificance, it’s just one of my quirks.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 23, 2008, 01:53 PM | #

In reply to this gnat, incidentally, no, unconstrained white normalness is not to mix but to self-preserve. Whites under constraint are no more a reflection of white normalness than Jews under constraint in the concentration camps dying of typhus and starvation were of Jewish normalness. The question is “Who, and what, exactly, are imposing the constraints?”

Posted by Lurker (Mk II) on February 24, 2008, 08:46 PM | #

http://www.howardgardner.com/docs/Scranton%20Interview.pdf

See answer to Q2.

Posted by Lurker (Mk II) on February 24, 2008, 08:51 PM | #

“Howard’s parents were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany; Ellen’s father was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia…”

and they adopted a child from Taiwan.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2087

Posted by silver on February 26, 2008, 11:08 PM | #

In reply to this gnat, incidentally, no, unconstrained white normalness is not to mix but to self-preserve. Whites under constraint are no more a reflection of white normalness than Jews under constraint in the concentration camps dying of typhus and starvation were of Jewish normalness. The question is “Who, and what, exactly, are imposing the constraints?”

My point was despite the concerns that are “normally” shown over mixing, the historical record has been one of failing to prevent it. Thus normalcy, of itself, is not much use to you. Yet you, when you get down to it, are arguing that it is of use; if only whites were allowed to be “normal”, everything would be okay. I am simply pointing out that that is not the case—something more is required.

As for “gnat”, I don’t know why you insist on making this personal. I make no secret of my disdain for you, but I don’t base my responses to your posts on it.

Posted by Joseph on July 24, 2008, 09:03 AM | #

Eventhough we have theories of intelligence and systems, people need to be educated about it , right?
http://www.visionomics.com/

Posted by Mike Walker on September 13, 2008, 03:35 PM | #

I have to agree, as an educator with 13 years of experience, that we are not all equal in intelligences. We are not equally endowed with thinking abilities. But many people, in their evil desires, would like to use that as a reason why the less intelligent are worth less. If you think that any person has more or less value than another based on cognitive functioning, you are only judging based on some particular criteria, and not VALUE. Howard Gardner does espouse a philosophy of equality through his multiple intelligences theory. What he is trying to do is use concrete, easy to understand ways to demonstrate that there are many ways of being smart. Think about it. If you are highly intelligent, and yet you are not happy, this is a sign that you have difficulty managing you brain in the areas that help control states of mind. If in fact you choose to be unhappy, how can that be an intelligent choice? Or if you think you are unhappy due to outside influences, then you have a character disorder related to your inability to balance your responses to stimuli in your environment. I have met idiots who are more successful at living a good life than brilliant people, who can’t quite manage or synthesize that knowledge into something truly meaningful and rewarding. It is very sad indeed. I have found that people who are against the multiple intelligences theory tend to be those who can’t recognize the value of the other intelligences, mainly because they lack the intelligences to perceive it in themselves. And of course, I can only feel sorry for them, because they do not have the capacity to understand what they are missing. Let me give a new definition of smart: The willingness and ability to survive. And by the way, every single human being alive today is a descendant of SURVIVORS.

Posted by silver on September 13, 2008, 03:54 PM | #

But many people, in their evil desires, would like to use that as a reason why the less intelligent are worth less.

You’re not wrong. But just as often IQ must be referred to in order to deflect blame put on your or your group for another group’s failing. In particular, whites must point to black-white IQ differences in order to fend off charges that black failings are the fault of whites. Some, of course, go further, and refer to intelligence differences to bolster their (already formidable, imo) case for racial separation.

Posted by David Hawkins EI on July 30, 2010, 05:08 AM | #

I think the premise of his book is completely sound, but yes, he has tip-toed around some little known things also known as ‘facts’. If you fail to deliver on that level then the whole book fails. All that’s left is a idea with the following of many cynics.

I personally have alot of interest in the topic of emotional intelligence. I read Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, several years ago and I found myself nodding throughout the whole of it.

I think these five minds need to be pandemic in years to come because I.Q has been the sole focus for too long.

Posted by Guessedworker on July 30, 2010, 05:44 AM | #

David,

Gardner’s analysis reveals its essential Jewish ethnic nature by being reactive to the IQ debate. It is worthless. And the notion that there are five “minds” is weak and nonsensical. There is one mind with three faculties, each faculty possessing certain qualities. Gardner is a victim of the current presumption for amorphousness, so he can’t distinguish between a mind and a faculty and a quality. But, then, he does not need to, apparently, to fool the ignorant and to attack the “racist” white gentile.

Posted by kia on November 03, 2010, 11:02 AM | #

In response to Matt who’s written this article.
Dear Matt please read page 111 second edition 2008 five minds of the future.
Gardner says [’’ I believe that these human-inflected topics should be taught in the light of a range of perspectives, this does not mean however that all sides in a dispute are worthy of respect’‘]

I doubt that Gardner is promoting implementation of sympathy for lawbreakers, that is not his point.
Ps I am not even a particularly huge fan of Gardner myself, yet I felt compelled to comment on your ‘‘strong opinions’’ in regards to this matter of Gardners respectful mind.
Thanks
Kia, 27yr female Sweden

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