Psicologi

aCHAPTER ONE

The Disciplined Mind
What All Students Should Understand By HOWARD GARDNER
Simon & Schuster

Read the Review A Personal Introduction: An Education for All Human Beings

From the Parochial to the Universal

As a psychologist with a deep interest in education, I have been gratified by the growing concern about educational issues throughout the world. Whether I am traveling inthe United States or visiting Europe, Latin America, or the Far East, I find a surprising consensus: the belief that the quality of a nation's educational system will be a chief—perhaps the chief—determinant of its success during the next century and beyond. Yet I often feel frustrated as well. Everywhere, much discussion about education remains mired in the parochial. Frankly, I am tired ofwritings by educators that focus on the instrumental or the momentary: Should we distribute vouchers so that youngsters can attend private schools? What are the advantages of charter schools? Are teacher unions the problem? The solution? Should teaching degrees be granted at the college level, only in graduate school, or only for those trained "on site"? How much education should take place at thecomputer or over the Internet? Should we have local control, national standards, international comparisons? And I am equally weary of debates that array one educational philosophy against another—traditionalists versus progressives, proponents of phonics versus advocates of "whole language."

These discussions, while not unimportant, skirt the most fundamental question. They avoid consideration ofthe purposes of education—the reasons why every society should devote monetary and human resources to the education of its young persons. During my years of studying education, writing about education, and visiting hundreds of schools throughout the world, I have come to my own conclusions about this question. These conclusions are personal; in a sense, I am addressing this book to my own fourchildren and their descendants. At the same time, however, I intend this book to be universal, to speak to individuals all over the world who care about education: indeed, as the title of this chapter states, my concern is the education of all human beings. Not that I think there is only one ideal education; that idea is naive. Still, I've come to believe that certain features ought to characterizegood education—or, more properly, good educations—everywhere in the world.

An Uncluttered Perspective: The True, the Beautiful, and the Good

I want everyone to focus on the content of an education—the meat and potatoes: on how that content should be presented, mastered, put to use, and passed along to others. Specifically, I believe that three very important concerns should animate education;these concerns have names and histories that extend far back into the past. There is the realm of truth—and its underside, what is false or indeterminable. There is the realm of beauty—and its absence in experiences or objects that are ugly or kitschy. And there is the realm of morality—what we consider to be good, and what we consider to be evil. To make clearer what I include in these realms,let me mention three topics that I would like individuals to understand in their fullness. My example in the realm of truth is the theory of evolution, as first articulated by Charles Darwin and as elaborated upon by other scientists over the last one hundred and fifty years. This is an important area of science, with particular significance for a developmental psychologist like me. Unless one has someunderstanding of the key notions of species, variation, natural selection, adaptation, and the like (and how these have been discovered), unless one appreciates the perennial struggle among individuals (and populations) for survival in a particular ecological niche, one cannot understand the living world of which we are a part. The processes of evolution are fascinating in their own right, as...