Academic commencement ceremony: source unknown.
THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES
Harvard Professor of Education Howard Gardner has expressed a powerful vision for education which embraces the best of the Liberal Arts tradition. Gardner (2000: 16) champions an “uncluttered perspective” which emphasizes nothing less than “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good.”
Gardner is a strong proponent of the scholarly disciplines. He characterizes them (2000: 144-157) as “entry points for considering the deepest questions about the world.” According to Gardner the organized disciplines have “endured over the ages” and have evolved as “specific,” “concerted,” “systematic” and “largely nonintuitive” ways of thinking about the most essential questions.
Gardner, Howard (2000) The Disciplined Mind. Penguin, New York.
The disciplined mind has mastered at least one way of thinking—a distinctive mode of cognition that characterizes a specific scholarly discipline, craft, or profession. Much research conforms that it takes up to ten years to master a discipline. The disciplined mind also knows how to work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding… Without at least one discipline under his belt, the individual is destined to march to someone else's tune.
Gardner champions an integration of five kinds of minds. He declares that “[b]uilding on discipline and synthesis,” it is “the creating mind” that “breaks new ground.”
Gardner, Howard (2006) Five Minds For The Future. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.
A child may possibly learn mathematics on his own by finding the right books and the right mentors, but cannot make a difference in the domain unless recognized by teachers and journal editors who will witness to the appropriateness of the contribution.
What we are saying is that we know what great art is much better than van Gogh’s contemporaries did—those bourgoise philistines…
A more objective description of van Gogh’s contribution is that his creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something inportant to contribute to the domain of art. Without such a response van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.
Csikszenthihalyi (45-50) recommends the combination of good training, doggedness, playfulness and reflective, critical judgement. One research participant—a very successful inventor—is convinced that:
if you’re good, you must be able to throw out the junk immediately without even saying it. In other words, you get many ideas appearing and you discard them because you’re well trained and you say, ‘that’s junk.’
On the subject of hard work Csikszenthihalyi (1996: 413) playfully concedes that the quip about creativity being 99 percent perspiration was first made by the German poet Wolfgang von Goethe, who died fifteen years before Thomas Edison was born… it seems to me that this particular aphorism fits Edison’s mentality better.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1996) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins.
