When I was young (23) back in the hippie dippie days in California, I attended encounter groups, psycho-drama and other stuff like that, that was popular in those days. At one these, the guru leader said to me that he knew I was smart but asked “was I wise?” I knew that I was supposed to say “no” so I did. I was a professor at Stanford so of course I thought I was wise. The years have taught me that I certainly wasn’t wise then and that I am not so sure I am wise now, and that anyhow, I am not all that sure what it means to be wise.
I was wise enough at that time to realize that the graduate course in Semantics that I was teaching was of no use to anyone who was taking it. (It was a requirement for the PhD in linguistics, so the students didn’t necessarily want to be there in any case.) Since then I have been thinking a great deal about teaching, about the mind ,and about universities in general, so I find myself asking two questions:
What does it mean to be wise?
How would teach someone to be wise?
Notice I am not asking, what is wisdom and how do we teach it, because everyone (except maybe me) seems to know the answer to that question, namely tell everyone what wise people have said. (Of course, I think that this is nonsense but our university system is based on that idea.)
I am not sure what it means to be wise but I know it when I don’t see it. My children (who are older than I was when first pondered this), are not wise (I hope they are wise enough not be angry with me when they read this. My employees are typically not wise (same hope.)
I say this because I spend a great deal of time advising them all on how to look at a problem, (technical or personal.) They are wise enough to ask however.
I am asked for advise often so maybe they see me as being wise. I will admit to being wiser about their lives than they are, but I am not all that wise about my own life I think.
So, what is wisdom then? I am not sure, but that won’t stop me from thinking about how to teach it.
How not to teach it is easy: don’t tell anyone anything any wise person has said. They won’t remember it and they won’t know how to use it.
Although I am a great believer in experiential learning and in some sense experience does make one wise. but one typically does not become wise as a result of one (or a few) experiences. Experiential learning doesn’t make one wise either.
What does make one wise? I think the answer is repeated failure of the same type followed by reflection. The great French philosopher Montaigne (whom I consider to have been very wise indeed) never left home without a phalanx of bodyguards. That is an example of wisdom learned from experience.
If my definition is correct, then how to teach wisdom becomes an interesting question. And, inducing colossal failure repeatedly is the obvious answer. But it is not a very practical answer.
We can’t take a class full of university students and put them in complex situations in which they might fail and then do it again and again, now can we?
But, of course, that is exactly what they army does on a regular basis with its soldiers. It is also what an aspiring entrepreneur has done who succeeds on his or her tenth try. And curiously, it is also what good teachers do after twenty years or so of teaching.
To put this another way, wisdom can be learned and so it can indeed be taught, but only if we are willing to re-conceptualize education.
We simply have to get over the idea of teaching wisdom as the transmission of information and we have to emphasize repeated tries and failure followed by reflection.
I am assuming that the people who call me for advice are not actually calling for answers. (This is easy to believe since they don’t follow my advice all that often.) Rather they are asking me to help them become wiser through repeated reflection. I am being their mirror at that point.
Becoming wise requires repeated looks in the mirror.
Can education provide that mirror? It certainly would be nice if the education system took that idea more seriously.
Khan Academy, Massive On Line Courses and other fashionable trends of the day are more or less the opposite of what I have in mind here.
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