…don’t you think that it’s easier to recognize wisdom when it’s absent than when it’s present? Anti-wisdom is simply more readily identified and understood than wisdom itself. The effects of a lack of wisdom are often felt acutely and immediately. The results of wisdom often take longer to flower and unfold. Wisdom is just harder to get one’s head around.
I remember vividly a meeting about a decade ago where we were discussing the priority outcomes of a secondary school education. People were offering a wide range of options: critical thinking, ethical decision-making, good citizenship. I listened. This was a question I had been pondering for years. Ten years earlier, I had spoken at length with my aunt Betty—also an educator—about this very topic. We’d debated whether capacities like initiative or creativity should be the central aims of a proper education. There were always many possibilities. It’s true: distilling something as complex as education and learning into a single aim is difficult. Deanna Kuhn, in her book Education for Thinking, attempts to do just that. John Dewey tried to do it throughout his work. So did Ted and Nancy Sizer. So did Matthew Arnold. So did Sugata Mitra.
In that cramped upstairs conference room, I suggested wisdom as the central aim of a student’s journey through our school—an idea inspired by Robert Sternberg and his beliefs on learning and development. Admittedly, it was idealistic and, in practical terms, perhaps unrealistic. But it felt right. It felt like the truest goal of a good education.
Everyone laughed—at first a chuckle, then a crescendo of guffaws. I felt small. My instinct was to mock their mockery, but I couldn’t muster the strength or find a pithy retort. Yet, even in the moment, I understood their reaction: they found the idea of adolescents developing wisdom absurd. Young people, they believed, simply aren’t wise. Wisdom, in their eyes, was the antithesis of adolescence.
But I disagree. In many ways, very young children are profoundly wise. They are practical. They connect experience and knowledge in tangible ways. They simplify brutally. They reflect deeply. Their emotions and thinking are not siloed—they live holistically. Indeed, perhaps we are all born wise. Over the later years of primary school and into adolescence, though, that innate wisdom is often lost—to facts, formulas, “adulting,” and a world clouded by hormones.
Wisdom is closer an awkward child than some efficient managerial adult. True wisdom is slow, clunky and never neat. Wisdom demands compromise and gaining a modicum of clarity in a messy situation.
Later in life, if we’re lucky, we may regain some of that early native wisdom. But it often seems more a matter of luck than a product of intention or process.
So I wonder: what would it look like if our schools, our early years, our parenting and mentoring—all emphasized the development of wisdom, rather than mainly knowledge or skills? What if our workplaces, our governments, our personal lives were measured by the presence of wisdom, not just profit margins, GDP, or “success”?
This would require a balancing of knowledge with its application. It would mean recognizing that wisdom is as much about emotional understanding and reflective thought as it is about cognitive prowess. It would mean being intellectually humble and a willingness to stumble to some solution. Wisdom is also inherently kind and demands managing both reason and our emotions. Our almost exclusive focus on “cruel” reason—in education, in organizations, in national discourse—distances us from the possibility of being wise, either individually or collectively.
The sad truth is that we are surrounded by anti-wisdom. Wisdom is not the norm; it is not reinforced by the culture around us. And again, it is easier to spot the absence of wisdom than to see it when it is truly there. Wisdom is slippery, smoky, stealthy, clunky and nuanced.
I’ve always felt that wisdom hovers somewhere nearby in my life. But I am still searching. Perhaps wisdom is, in the end, not a clear destination but just a challenging process—the act of searching for wisdom is actually being wise, as Socrates proposed: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”¹. I just wish more searching for wisdom for all of us in these uncertain times.
This is only the beginning. I have more questions and thoughts about wisdom that I will write about in a future post.
Keep well.
¹ in Plato, Apology 21d
I love this idea of wisdom as an orientation, a direction to move towards in a messy and uncertain and never complete path of living and thinking and doing. As someone who has a visceral need to engage in very long walks every few years, this idea of wisdom as a trail marker, a sign post in the forest, something to look up from the path and the meandering thoughts that move in rhythm with one’s steps, resonates very deeply with me. Blazes and cairns can be obvious but so often they demand consideration, questioning, is this pointing me in the direction I want to go, have I veered off course? Where am I going and how do I want to get there? They demand thoughtfulness and attention and yes, a breath, a pause, a bit of puzzling to reach a decision. It can be disorienting and exhausting when you’ve lugged your pack for 17 miles and fog and night are descending but it is this reminder to be intentional and creative in wayfinding even, especially, when the mind and the body want to reach for the obvious, the easy, the pre established, that is the true gift of walking. To more walks and more wisdom in all our lives.
I am with Socrates on this one, which brings curiosity, and the desire to know things, in concert with openness. The sponginess of children seems an inherent wisdom. For me, about to turn an age where wisdom may be expected, I don’t feel like I have acquired it - but seeing it as an openness and curiosity, that resonates with who I am.