Equity-based Reform: Moving Beyond Accountability
Partisan political discourse—the language of campaigning and advocating for policy—is trapped in the power and allure of cliche and cultural myths. Even those leaders we might designate as the best or right type of leaders are trapped in a disturbing truism about the power of their messages: “more often than not, the less sophisticated story remains entrenched—the unschooled mind triumphs,” Howard Gardner explains.
Gardner has identified that the five-year-old mind, bound by a proclivity for either-or thinking and limited to simplistic truths, is essentially the public mind that leaders must speak to in order to succeed—to be elected, for example, and then to have policy implemented.
Gardner’s analysis of leadership explains why political leaders in the U.S. prefer and succeed by invoking a
