Recently, a sequence of white-collar criminals have been convicted of intentionally robbing countless elderly people, some of whom were immediate family members, of their entire life savings. Clearly, very intelligent, well-educated people can, and do cause tremendous human suffering due to an utter lack of wisdom.
"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." General Omar Bradley, commander of US ground forces, Normandy invasion, WW II
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” Malcolm S. Forbes
“School instead creates closed minds, filled to the brim.” Rudyh
“Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” Galbraith's Law
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein
“Discipline divorced from wisdom is not true discipline, but merely the meaningless following of custom, which is only a disguise for stupidity.” Rabindranath Tagore
“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein
"We need to change the mindsets not just the problem sets”. Jean-Lou Chameau, Dean of Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affectation for a few people near us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Albert Einstein
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affectation for a few people near us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Albert Einstein
"The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self." Albert Einstein
“Education has taken the easier, quicker route. It leads students rapidly and relatively smoothly — in the wrong direction. That wrong direction is illustrated by the high-stakes systems of testing that have come to dominate the UK as well as the US. It is not that high-stakes testing is, in itself, necessarily bad. It is that what the tests measure, to a large extent, doesn’t matter all that much in the long run. What matters is not only how much knowledge you have, but how you use that knowledge — whether for good ends (as for Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King) or for bad ones (as for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin). In this article, we argue that what matters most of all is the development of wisdom.”
Sternberg RJ, Reznitskaya A, Jarvin L. Teaching for wisdom: what matters is not just what students know, but how they use it. London Review of Education 2007; 5(2): 143-58.
What can I do to cultivate wisdom?
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| Photo: Andre Gallant http://www.andregallant.com/ |
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