The Getting of Wisdom

There is a problem, however. Experience, alone, cannot guarantee wisdom any more than reading can. The lessons of life are only available to those who are ready to learn them. If wisdom is the goal, then students must “walk 10,000 miles, read 10,000 books” said 17^th century Chinese philosopher, Gu Yanwu. In other words, becoming wise requires not just having adventures but a cultured mind that is open, ready and able to absorb the lessons that experience teaches. Pasteur famously said that “Chance favours the prepared mind”, and our job as university academics is to take his words seriously.

To prepare students to learn from experience, we need to go beyond vocational training. Life, death, love, beauty, courage, loyalty—all of these are omitted from our modern vocational curricula and yet, when it comes time to sum up our lives, they are the only things that ever really matter. On Ash Wednesday, the priest admonishes the faithful to “remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” A salutary reminder of what we all have waiting for us. In the meantime, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, we spend our years trying to find some meaning in our lives.

It is easy to fall into the pit of nihilism, to consider life “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. But before we let our students reach this conclusion, we should at least try to provide them with the intellectual foundation they need to make such a judgement. In the few years they are with us, we should be concerned not only with teaching students the state of the various arts, we should be equally concerned with the state of their hearts.

In Choruses from The Rock, T. S. Eliot asks these questions: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” If you think these are just the melancholy musings of a poet who spent too many hours at his desk, out there in the “real world” they’re saying the same thing, albeit in different ways. For just one example, The World Social Science Report 2010, published by UNESCO, observed today’s global challenges are increasingly interrelated, spread fast from one part of the world to another, and so bring into question traditional university disciplinary boundaries. These “profound and menacing developments" need to be understood "in a plurality of contexts" – which surely includes what we learn from the great works of the past. Specific and narrow skills are simply not enough to enable us to understand and solve the problems we face.

It is not easy for universities to go against the utilitarian flow but it is our duty to try. As author Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to a friend, “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you”. It’s time we once again started hearing the word “wisdom” on campus.