Teaching for Wisdom - Urgently Needed Now

     "Teachers who teach for wisdom will explore with students the notion that conventional abilities and achievements are not enough for professional success as well as a meaningful life. Many people become trapped in their lives and, despite feeling conventionally successful, feel that their lives lack meaning, at least in the sense of contributing to a good that is larger than their own. Contributing to a common good is not an alternative to success, but rather, is an aspect of it that, for most people, goes beyond money, promotions, large houses, and so forth. The teacher will further demonstrate how wisdom is critical for a life that makes a positive difference to the world. In the long run, wise decisions benefit people in ways that foolish decisions never do. The teacher must teach students the usefulness of interdependence -- a rising tide raises all ships; a falling tide can sink them.  
     It is also important to role model wisdom, because what you do is more important than what you say. Wisdom is in what you do, not just in what you say. So students should read about wise judgments and decision making in the context of the actions that followed so that the students understand that such means of judging and decision making exist. Teachers need to help students to learn to recognize their own interests, those of other people, and those of institutions. They need further to help students learn to balance their own interests, those of other people, and those of institutions. They will teach students that the "means" by which the end is obtained matters, not just the end. Students need to be encouraged to form, critique, and integrate their own values in their thinking. They further need to learn to think dialectically, realizing that both questions and their answers evolve over time, and that the answer to an important life question can differ at different times in one’s life (such as whether to marry). Wisdom further requires them to learn to think dialogically, whereby they understand interests and ideas from multiple points of view. For example, what one group views as a “settler,” another may view as an “invader.” Most importantly, students need to learn to search for and then try to reach the common good -- a good where everyone wins and not only those with whom one identifies.
     Teaching for wisdom will succeed only if teachers encourage and reward wisdom. Teacher must make wisdom real for students’ lives. Teachers should teach students to monitor events in their lives and their own thought processes about these events. One way to learn to recognize others' interests is to begin to identify your own. They also should help students understand the importance of inoculating oneself against the pressures of unbalanced self-interest and small-group interest. 
     Students will develop wisdom by becoming engaged in class discussions, projects, and essays that encourage them to discuss the lessons they have learned from both classical and modern works and how these lessons can be applied to their own lives and the lives of others. They need to study not only “truth,” as we know it, but values. The idea is not to force-feed a set of values, but to encourage students reflectively to develop their own prosocial ones.  
     Students should be encouraged to think about how almost everything they study might be used for better or worse ends, and to realize that the ends to which knowledge put do matter. Teachers need to realize that the only way they can develop wisdom in their students is to serve as role models of wisdom themselves. A role model of wisdom will, I believe, take a much more Socratic approach to teaching than teachers customarily do. Students often want large quantities of information spoon-fed or even force-fed to them. They then attempt to memorize this material for exams, only to forget it soon thereafter. In a wisdom-based approach to teaching, students will need to take a more active role in constructing their learning.

     The important thing is to work together toward a common good — toward devising the best ways to select and educate students so as to maximize their positive future impact. We wish our students to show wisdom. We need to do the same."

       Robert J. Sternberg "Academic Intelligence is not Enough! WICS: An Expanded Model for Effective Practice in School and in Later Life."  https://commons.clarku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=mosakowskiinstitute