We are getting educated, but not becoming wiser

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The way to teach for wisdom is to get away from the stale, static, removed problems that schools use in much of their teaching

By Karin Sternberg & Robert J. Sternberg

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Published: Tue 2 Jun 2020, 12:13 PM

Last updated: Tue 2 Jun 2020, 2:17 PM

For many of us, each day brings astonishment to a new level with what is going on in the world. It is not so much the crises that arise - they are bad enough, with the threats of Covid-19, global climate change, newly created unemployment, pollution, misconduct by police and other authority figures - but rather, the breathtaking incompetence and brutal disregard of human life of many world leaders in the face of these tragedies. We could say that, well, the people in one country or another were taken in when they elected their leader, but at the present time, the world is enduring a plague of authoritarian and would-be authoritarian leaders who seem to care for no one but themselves and possibly some for some of their cronies.
Bad behavior that a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable has become normalised. The problem is not just the leaders, but their devotees who either do not see the rise of authoritarians, do not care about their rise, or actually support them, for whatever reason. The old script of having authoritarians take over by coups d'etat seems to have gone by the wayside: Now they are elected, whether in true elections or falsified ones. And many people have been taken in by authoritarians, in the past as today. If people in recent times have wondered how someone like Hitler came to power, perhaps today it seems less unbelievable.
If there is one thing that has become clear, it is that our model of educating is failing miserably. Over the years, people in the United States and many other places have been completing more and more schooling, with more and more disappointing results. At the same time that IQs were rising in the 20th century-the so-called Flynn effect-the stage was being set for a world in which millions of people would die from run-away climate change, air and water pollution, diseases, poverty, and wars, to name a few of our woes. If it ever has been clear that "intelligence" as we traditionally define it is not going to save the world, that time is now. Intelligence has given us great technology, but not the ability to use it wisely.
The ghastly failure of our educational model does not seem to take hold because the people who run most societies are those who, for the most part, were educated in a traditional model of Western schooling and benefited it. Or they are people who see how they can turn this model to their advantage. Either way, time is running out.
What's to be done? Some psychologists and other behavioral scientists as well as philosophers believe they have the answer, or at worst, an answer. That answer is to value wisdom more and traditional intelligence, as defined by IQ and its proxies (standardised test scores), less. Different scholars define wisdom in different ways, but in R. J. Sternberg's balance theory, it is defined as using your abilities and your knowledge to achieve a common good. That is, you do not look out only for your own interests, but also those of others, including others who are very different from yourself - who are not members of your self-perceived tribe. You achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with the interests of others and with larger interests, such as those of your family, community, nation, or the world. And you look out not only for short-term interests but also for long-term ones - you look for the long-term consequences of your actions, realising that outcomes that seem to benefit you and others in the short-term may be harmful in the long term. Fossil fuels were great - until they weren't. Single-use plastics were great - until they weren't. Finally, you act ethically in trying to ensure that short-term losses for some groups ultimately will be balanced by long-term gains.
The way to teach for wisdom is to get away from the stale, static, removed problems that schools use in much of their teaching. A lot of what students learn, especially in preparing for standardised tests, they never will use again. Instead, in science classes, students could be learning about pandemics and how to deal with them, about the effects of water and air pollution on living organisms, about how global climate change is destroying many life forms and may ultimately destroy ours, or about how highly sweetened food can end up leading to diabetes and other serious illnesses. In social-studies classes, students could be learning about how disparities in wealth have led to revolutions in the past and could do so again, or about how people gating themselves off from each other can cause disintegration of the sociocultural fabric holding nations together. They further could be learning about how climate change affects both geography and demography, as land masses disappear underwater and people seek new places to live and work.
The kinds of standardised testing our society does are ill-suited to measuring wisdom. Rather, they value those who accumulate trivial knowledge that will hardly matter at all in their lives. The tests benefit those who can solve artificial problems that can be solved as "right-wrong" simply by choosing one of four or five answer options. Instead, we need problems that reflect the problems individuals and collectives face in their lives. Essay-based responses and projects are needed that lead students to think creatively as well as wisely about how to deal with the problems the future will bring us.
It is not too late to infuse teaching for wisdom into our teaching and testing. The greatest barriers are our unwillingness to change an educational system that has been around for well over a hundred years-and the entrenchment of those charged with educating our children. We can do better. If we want our children and grandchildren to live in anything resembling the world in which we grew up, we will have to do better.
Karin Sternberg is Research Associate at Cornell and CEO of lovemultiverse.com. Robert Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell, holds 13 honorary doctorates, and has won the Grawemeyer and APS James and Cattell awards. -Psychology Today


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