Customer Reviews

The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves

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Fortunately for readers (and anyone connected to education), Gardner has not been idle since he first published his benchmark book Frames of Mind. I sincerely appreciated reading how he has continued to develop his thinking in cognitive psychology and his suggestions for education need to be taken seriously as a blueprint for change. Along with Postman, Kohn, Ravitch, Darling-Hammond, Allen, and Perrone, Gardner takes the position that education relates cultural values as much as anything. Further, those values need to engage the student in sustained, meaningful encounters in science, art, and narrative that produce a vigorous, cognitive growth. His candid suggestions for educators to assimilate units on truth, beauty, and goodness suggest that Gardner is not only willing to make a radical suggestions for the advancement of learning among children (in the spirit of Dewey and Bruner), but also that the humanitarian interests in education are worth sustaining; that is, for Gardner, meaning needs to take ascendency in our instruction.

Gardner is a fantastic writer. He has a gift for explanation and explication; I recommend the book if only for the Appendix. He delineates between two world views in education and it is worth the price of the book itself.

Yes, his suggestions are radical and extreme, but being normal is only taking education down to a new nadir. I heartily endorse this book.

In previous books, Professor Gardner has introduced us to important concepts like multiple intelligences (Frames of Mind) and how little university graduates can make practical application of anything they learn (The Unschooled Mind). In The Disciplined Mind, he takes those concepts and combines them to define a minimum educational standard: Introducing students to the thought processes of major disciplines to appreciate important issues from the perspective of multiple intelligences.

To exemplify the point, Professor Gardner develops examples of his concept involving Darwin's Finches (as a window on evolutionary thinking), one scene from The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart (as a window onto social commentary and music) and the Wannsee Conference in Nazi Germany (as a window onto the banal evil of the Holocaust). He sees the fundamental questions that education should address as following into the subjects of truth, beauty and goodness (or good versus evil) which these three examples epitomize.

Those sections were great fun, but the most valuable part of the book comes in chapter 10 where he addresses "Getting There". It's a marvelous description of how to create positive organizational change within education. Professor Gardner gets tough in pointing out that good leadership is essential. Otherwise, multidisciplinary means just messing around with whatever appeals to you . . . and not learning a darn thing of lasting importance.

I can relate to that point. One of my first college courses was intended to teach us the historical discipline by working with primary sources about the Entresol Club in France before the Revolution. But the case didn't really work for that purpose and the leadership was muddled. The only thing I learned was the entresol was the floor above the ground floor in a French building. That has helped me in elevators several times since then. But I had to learn the historical discipline elsewhere.

He points out several key lessons:

Have a long-term perspective
Be flexible and seek small victories
Anticipate setbacks and be prepared for them
Allow time for reflection
Build on strengths
Pay attention to implicit messages in the institutional culture
Create a community that cares
Visit and be visited
Cultivate new energies
Commit yourself to the process of change

I was reminded of Peter Senge's excellent book, The Dance of Change, as I read this section.

The next best part of the book came in chapter 9 where Professor Gardner explained how multiple intelligences can be brought to bear for understanding.

This material is a classic for introducing any important subject:

1. Provide powerful points of entry that engage students.
2. Offer apt analogies to make the material accessible.
3. Deliver multiple representations of the core ideas of the topic that capture each of the multiple intelligences.

Many of the people who have been honored with the MacArthur Prize Fellowship (the so-called Genius award) fail to impress me as being geniuses. Professor Gardner is the happy exception to that observation. This book is a marvelous summation of his perspective and how to bridge the unsatisfying gap between classical "memorize everything" education to produce the "whole person" and the pressure now to produce highly functional "specialists" who are ignorant outside their specialties.

Bravo, Professor Gardner!

Well, it took some discipline on my part to finish it. Because I passionately agree with Gardner on the importance of going slow and deep, because throughout the book I felt I was listening to someone of congenial temperament (likely an abstract idealist), because I admire his triplet examples of the good, the true & the beautiful and his respect for mastery of the disciplines, I am flummoxed by my inability to spark to the book, which I found almost painfully circumspect. The language is of that heavy, deadly, academic variety, you know, as if he's trademarking concepts such as "pathways to understanding." Then there's the emphasis on "community", a ruined word for me thanks to my undergraduate years in the politically-correct late '80's and early '90's. Students, ideally, would give "performances of understanding" to the community. Kind of like writing a book review for the Amazon community? My approval score is pretty low, so maybe that's why I'm dragging my feet.

Recently, I attended a riveting seminar given by a Ph.D. in soil fertiity on the subject of "life force energy" and particularly emphasizing the work of Wilhelm Reich. The lecturer emphasized the rarity of functional thinking, the ability to see common functioning priciples in order to make connections in research; he talked about how the repression of emotions and impulses is a barrier to making contact with natural living systems; he contrasted this type of rich, syncretic thinking with the mechanistic or materialistic thinking one sees in the academy today. I tried to make a connection with Gardner's emphasis on depth. I wondered, as I often do, if Ken Wilber and Integral Philosophy folks could help here, but unfortunately they seem to have little use for children in their sexy Integral Universe.

Here's what I see in my daughter's public school classroom: Of 20 kids, you've probably got 1 of idealistic temperament, 1 of rational temperament, the rest the more conventional artisan or guardian temperaments (I'm using Meyers-Briggs theory here). The experienced and seasoned teacher has a highly-conventional guardian temperament and an average I.Q. Most of the kids have average I.Q.s, maybe a couple are mildly-to-moderately gifted and only one is highly-sensitive and quite-highly gifted, and the teacher gets irritated with her for working ahead and not following directions. The ages in this classroom span a four-year difference. As a backdrop, you've got a lot of parental and "community" support and involvement, plus the wretched "No Student Left Behind" curriculum with its frequent standardized testing. I needed a bit more help from Howard Gardner in deepening my understanding of how his disciplined approach with its theory of multiple intelligences would work in a classroom where the majority, including the teacher, are of average ability and temperament. My favorite part of the book was on Mozart's opera and the trio of colliding agendas; that was so great, it made the reading worthwhile; I can only imagine, ironically, that you get a fourth colliding agenda when you add the classroom teacher's voice to the mix, and then things get really funny.

Howard Gardner has remarkable insights about what schools should be doing. He discusses some things a rookie teacher such as myself has barely given thought to. I now have a better vision of what I should be doing as a teacher and how to manage the various agendas that are pushed on teachers from every direction. I give four, maybe five stars for Gardner's insights but because this was such a tedious read, cannot give the final product the same rating. Educators have much to gain by reading this book but will need patience if they hope to read it cover to cover.

Anyone who works with kids and pays attention must realize that many of them are talented--even brilliant--in ways that are not recognized or valued in schools. The concept of "multiple intelligences," first proposed by Howard Gardner twenty-five years ago, helps to explain why most schools, heavily weighted as they are in favor of linguistic intelligence, are an uncomfortable fit for many, if not most, students.

The Disciplined Mind is a thoughtful and interesting meditation on what Gardner believes schools should do to be meaningful for most children and to achieve the goals we want for education. His argument begins with a basic principle--that schools should foster deep understanding of what is true, what is beautiful, and what is good--and proceeds to demonstrate what that means in terms of the various academic disciplines. I was most interested in Gardner's frank discussion about the profound differences between his theories and practices and those of E. D. Hirsch, whose notions of "cultural literacy" and a prescribed body of essential knowledge have had a huge impact on educational policy in the United States.

For readers who are somewhat academically inclined and interested in educational theory, this is an excellent book. For those who labor under the handicaps imposed by politics and wrong-headed approaches to "education reform," Gardner's common-sense approach may be a refreshing reminder that, somewhere, sanity still prevails.

In Gardner's view, truth, beauty, and good are the pillars upon which an education striving for deep, profound understanding should stand. Throughout the book he offers the examples of Darwin's Origin of Species, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and the Holocaust as possible case studies in order to achieve this goal. His plan is persuasive in its scope and ideology, and attempts to reach all children through espousing the theory of multiple intelligences and several "pathways" to educational success. In sum he is bolstered in theory, but thin in implementation. For parents, "The Disciplined Mind" seems an excellent source through which to guide ones' children. For educators, it seems overly ambitious, practically requiring a paradigm shift in the educational bureacracy.

Very good reference for educators, parents and guardians. Sensible ideas to make the student a whole person - one who appreciates the world around him. A guide on how to develop teaching materials and motivate students to learn based on truth, beauty and goodness.

In the Disciplined Mind, Gardner lays out a basis for what education ought to look like. Gardner highlights the fact that the societal view of what defines an intelligent person is changing. In previous eras, someone who knew a lot of facts was considered to be intelligent. However, in our ever changing technological world, his assumption is that an intelligent person is someone who can think critically about an issue and problem solve. It is this idea that he uses as the foundation of his thoughts on education.

In line with, Intelligence Reframed and The Unschooled Mind, Gardner points out that there is more to intelligence than the traditional IQ tests lead us to believe. As a part of this philosophy, he argues that for all children in an educational institution, we need to do more to tap into their different perspectives on the world around us, while still helping them to truly understand some basic concepts.

Unfortunately, Gardner's ideas in this book are so idealistic in terms of structuring and reforming public schools that they will problem do more to discredit his work than to shore up his place as an educational reformer. Limiting curriculum to only three areas of study is a radical shift in the paradigm of modern education. The idea he expresses in this book are probably one step too far for not just politicians and parents, but also many classroom teachers. If there was a way to quantify the end result of how Gardner would like children to be taught, he would be considered the greatest educational reformer of all time.

Prof. Gardner's books is disappointing. He tries to be all things to all people saying both that he believes in basic competencies but wants to put inquiry first. He believes in building up the inner world of "mental representations" [unexplained term] yet insists on "performances of understanding." He has respect for the individual learner and individual differences, yet he is concerned about the "position" or "situation" or social class dynamics in which the learning takes place. In short, it is extremely difficult to pin down Prof. Gardner. It would be kind to say he is eclectic. I hope it's just not fuzzy thinking.

However, we can discern that he has a romantic obsession with beauty, truth, and goodness. I call these categories "romantic" becuase to define them as updating Greek philosophic traditions would not do justice to the Greeks. Rather, I think he is a more prosaic version of the poet Keats. Remember "Ode to a Grecian Urn?" "Beauty is truth and truth is beauty. That is all ye know and all ye need to know."

I think that in attacking E.D. Hirsch whom he calls the main speaker for "cultural literacy" he sets up a straw man. He says that this "other school" of thought has an underlying belief in the Lockeian "tabula rasa"; yet,as one who believes that education is inherently conservative and should pass down the cultural heritage from one generation to the next, I am not a believer in the tabula rasa.

I find a tendency on Prof. Gardner's part to oversimplify certain issues, like the Holocaust, and to overcomplicate certain others, like the nature of intelligence.

His writing style is a bit too fond of adjectives, and the book reads as a whole like It Takes A Village by Mrs. Clinton. On the whole, the work has a mellifluous style that seems self-consciously presenting itself as being both profound and filled with balanced common sense at the same time. Nonetheless, I fail to see an emphasis on knowledge, justice,Judeo-Christian values, persistence, responsibility, or character development...words which I find essential for a true philosophy of education.