Howard Gardner’s, Five Minds for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), proposes five ways of thinking or acting in the world, which all students need to develop.  Consider how you can shape your own educational pursuits to develop them or, if you are an educator, how you might include these in developing your students:

1. The Disciplinary Mind seeks to master a body of information. Primarily, this is where I see education placing emphasis today.
2. The Synthesizing Mind is meant to organize, understand and articulate information from various disciplines in a unified and coherent way. The synthesizing mind is strong at comparing, contrasting and integrating information into an understandable system.
3. The Creating Mind encourages students to come up with new ideas, original solutions to problems and creative questions.  Creative writing and approaching things with “outside the box (norm) thinking is emphasized here.  Last year I heard China is going to invest millions of dollars in an attempt to produce one thousand Bill Gates. Seemingly, they may want to address the creating mind in their attempts to do so.
4. The respectful mind places priority on appreciation and openness to the differences and individuality of others. Being able to accept, understand and cooperate with different people, even from different nations, is important here.
5. The ethical mind encourages students to cultivate a sense of responsibility for themselves and the wellbeing of others, some very distant from them.  Giving of ourselves, a strong value of AI, would be included in developing the ethical mind.

Even if our instruction is not giving us development in these five areas, we can personally “own” our own development and do what we need to develop these areas ourselves.  These also can serve as an evaluative grid for those of us in education. Are we developing the “five minds” and therefore making students ready for tomorrow?