Cultivating Wisdom

The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates

If you can cause maturity to become aspirational again,
you’ve changed the world
—Ken Dychtwald

The Curse of Blessings

I was flying back from Orlando when Simi’s essay arrived at the top of the stack of papers I was grading. Three straight days of reading science teacher award applications had put me in a foul mood, wondering why so many of my colleagues had to conform to the stereotype of being poor writers, and seeing her paper made me smile.
Finally! I thought. Something good to read!
The assignment had been to think about how modern biology’s understanding of the human body had changed society’s image of the human self—what the essayist they had read referred to as the imago hominis—and to write their own essay about whether they thought this new imago was a worthwhile one. I considered it one of the most challenging Issues in Science papers I assign to my AP biology class all year and had watched many a student struggle with it. Simi, though, possessed one of those once in a career intellects with the brilliance to grasp things the rest of us mere mortals can’t even see, and all her other Issues essays had been among the best I had ever read. I was eagerly looking forward to reading her response.
What have you come up with this time, Simi? I wondered as I began to read.
I had just gotten to her arguments about toxicity and was starting to write some feedback when the plane shuddered from a little turbulence and my writing hand jerked. I glanced out the window to see the approaching storm front and silently swore. Trying to steady my hand, I continued reading:
…I think one of the greatest symptoms supporting the diagnosis that our culture is rotting because of our toxic imago hominis is the recent surge of people in America towards Evangelical Christianity. People are lonely and without a purpose, and the easiest thing to do is turn on the television and see a man speaking out at you from a crystal cathedral and fall in love with his promises of fulfillment. This requires no real soul searching, and promises a life replete with hope, love, and faith. People can remain in front of their televisions and for a small membership fee they can have access to all sorts of “visions” brought to them by a bunch of quacks. This is spiritual bankruptcy at its finest, but it shows the incredible desperation of our society…
I could see her argument, but she was resting her link between a modern understanding of “man as machine” and the resurgence in what she considered “blind faith” on a lot of unclarified assumptions, and I wrote a note challenging her accordingly. Try reading Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, I finished in the margins.
Then I came to what she said next and knew that, turbulence or not, I was going to have no choice but to finish what she had written. Suddenly, it was not your typical Simi essay!
…as I write this, I am struck with the sudden realization of how deeply I have personally been affected by the imago hominis. The question you posed was not “what is an alternative imago hominis” but whether the present one is worthwhile or not, so I will evade any attempt at describing what a new outlook should be. Instead, I will describe for you why personally this imago hominis is destroying me…
…I do not think that I value myself. The symptom of this is my constant reliance on relationships to provide me with a grounding root and a sense of self. For the senior poll, I have been designated “class married.” This is because since around seventh grade, I have not been single…
…So I seek to become an object in their lives, hoping that the qualities I see in them will somehow imbue me with a special value and meaning that I did not have before. The problem is that this is not reality. They are not deities or superheroes or even great human beings. They are not even close. So when they cannot give me that sense of value that I seek, I turn into something I hate…
…I heard my own voice when I read “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot yesterday…this section of the poem is a direct quote from Eliot’s wife, Vivien. When I hear a little of their story I see what pain she felt. Her wasteland was the same as my interior need. She had a brilliant husband in whom she saw the world. He made everything beautiful and meaningful in his poetry, but I am sure she never understood that he could not do the same thing to her…She seems to be maligned by those who know Eliot’s biography, but I feel a profound sympathy for this woman. And I don’t want to be like her at all…
It would have been painful enough to read words like these coming from any of my students, but here was someone I had the highest respect for–a person I would have deliberately chosen for a friend had we met as adults and not as teacher and student–and I was quite literally holding a piece of her private self in my hands.
…yet that is what my imago hominis will reduce me to if I don’t find an alternative. Personally, it is vital that I believe and not just understand that the modern imago hominis is not worthy of my veneration. I don’t know what is worthy of my veneration, but it is not that….
I read the remainder of the essay, pen down, knowing that I couldn’t hand this one back with just my usual scribbled remarks. When I got to the end, I flipped the paper over and began to compose a letter:
Simi,
I am honored that you would trust me enough to share such an honest self-reflection, and I can only hope that I can be worthy of that trust in what follows.
The plane vibrated even more violently than before, but I knew in my soul that halting the writing wasn’t an option. One at a time, I meticulously wrote each letter of each word, trying to control my shuddering pen as best I could. This is what I said:
Very early in 9th grade, I once had to ask you to stay after class to chastise you mildly about a verbal altercation with Eliza and to challenge you to recognize the leadership role you played in the lives of your peers. I will never forget your response: how you didn’t WANT to be a leader; how your ideal fantasy was to live alone on a desert island, never responsible to anyone or anything. I told you at the time that you didn’t have much choice in the matter, that simply being who you are was going to thrust such responsibility on you whether you liked it or not and that I believed you were capable of rising to that challenge.
I was reminded of that incident as I read the last couple of pages of your paper and saw you struggling now as you did then with the “weight”–it is the only word I think that carries the correct meaning–the weight of simply being who you are. Whether you like it or not (and you know yourself well enough to comment at the one point on the vain part that does), you are among the most “blessed” human beings I have ever encountered in this world. Your genes gave you a brilliant mind, stunning physical beauty, and vigorous health; while random fortune placed your genetic gifts within a nurturing, loving family with access to first-class educational resources and the kind of raw wealth and social privilege available to less than 0.5% of our species. “Blessed” is literally the only word that springs to mind.
Yet as you knew (at least intuitively) in 9th grade and are more cognizant of now, the problem with “blessings” (at whatever level) is that the “curse” on the other side of that particular coin is the responsibility of stewardship: “how will I use my blessings?” Hence, the greater we are blessed, the more challenging our stewardship becomes. For instance (as you clearly struggle with in your paper), your beauty is going to ensure the attention of nearly every male you ever encounter, and (for different reasons as primates) most women as well. The “curse” of the “blessing” of all that attention, though, is that you bear the responsibility of choosing the circle of people–and more importantly the quality of those people–whom you select to keep in your life. If you choose people not because of their qualities in their own right, but because of some void you think they will fill in you, then you are absolutely correct in your self-assessment that you will find yourself a rather poor steward of your blessings–and very much dying in very important and meaningful ways as a consequence.
Your capacity for self-assessment, however, is a “blessing/curse” I have seen you steward rather well in the time I have known you: your mind. The blessing part, of course, is that you have an amazingly gifted and able capacity to know and to understand your place in the world–how it touches you and you it (to even grasp what an imago hominis is in the first place!). You possess that rare ability for true, deep, and real self-reflection. But the “curse” is that you will always know that anything and everything–self, society, marriage, health, career, friendships, culture, etc.–COULD be otherwise: that whatever paradigms you choose to govern your life COULD be different than the ones you end up actually deciding upon and that therefore the responsibility of choosing which paradigms you actually USE is yours and yours alone.
From reading your conclusion to your paper, I suspect I’ve not said anything you do not at some level already know (but perhaps I have given you some words for your experience, and that is always at least a helpful thing). But the one thing I see after all these years that I sense you may still doubt (from my reading of your paper) is whether you are someone worthy of and capable of facing the challenge of her blessings. I am here as your teacher to tell you that I have watched you grow into someone who most definitely is. You not only have the potential to determine who you will choose to be (and with whom), but you have the potency for it.
So as much as you may still desire to live on a deserted island, I sense you are beginning to realize that the imago hominis you someday choose to guide your life by will need to be one of your own making (and not in conformity with society’s). That is how our world changes–when individuals of great potency like yourself choose to make it other than it is. You are up to that challenge.
Sincerely,
Mr. Brock

Author’s note: this story has been approved for publishing by the individual involved; names have been altered to protect privacy.

The Examined Life

Many years ago, I once read a Doonesbury cartoon where the characters of Joannie and Zonker were having a discussion—the exact wording of which escapes me—but it involved Zonker, the perpetual “Peter Pan” of the series, begging Joannie not to take the next logical steps toward mature adulthood.  In the last frame of the cartoon, Joannie’s significant other, Rick, comes in, and when Zonker learns of his support for her decision, he cries out in anguish—and here I do remember the exact wording—“And you condone this?”  To which Rick replies: “Zonker, the world needs grown-ups.”

That phrase, “the world needs grown-ups,” has stuck with me throughout my adult life, and a recent exchange of e-mails with a former student of mine made me recall it as well as my letter to Simi, and, as a result, I suddenly realized that there is something significant that I have left out from my discussion of what good education looks like.  I have obviously talked at length about the properties of good teaching and learning and the three characteristics of the authentic engagement necessary for an educator to make them happen.  Likewise, I have spent a good deal of time explaining what’s wrong with the current educational system and why there appears to be at times an active investment in keeping it broken.  But what I have not done is share what I think is education’s ultimate purpose, its Telos (to use the formal philosophical term).  To put it another way, I have not answered perhaps the most important question of all: why do we educate?

There are, of course, numerous traditional responses.  We educate to prepare people for work and careers, to produce literate citizens, to generate shared common social values, to…. I could continue, but I’m not going to because while I think these answers and many others are correct, I think they are incomplete and may even be a little “low-hanging” in the “fruit” department.  Instead, I want to argue that education’s true Telos is the cultivation of wisdom.

However, before I can explain why I think this and to explain how I think education does it, we probably need first to come to some common understanding of what is meant by the term, “wisdom.”  It is a word with a lot of weight to it, and many might argue that similar to the Supreme Court’s stance on pornography, creating a definition for this idea with precise boundaries is not practical and that, therefore, an individual will just know wisdom “when I see it.” 

Others such as former CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, Chip Conley suggest that—at least in the work environment—it is “the capacity for holistic or systems thinking that allows one to get the ‘gist’ of something by synthesizing a wide variety of information quickly” (p. 8).  It is a definition that resonates with me because I know from my own work as a department chair that the preceding decades of classroom experience definitely made coaching and mentoring my younger faculty during my third decade significantly easier and more effective.  The ability to cut quickly to the core of a problem and help them find solutions had become simply instinctual by that point in my career.

But I think the founder of NPR’s On Being, Krista Tippet, whom Conley quotes in his own book about wisdom points us in the right direction when she states that wisdom is “an embodied capacity to hold power and tenderness in a surprising, creative interplay [that] transmutes my sense of what power feels like and is there for” (p. 132).  Wisdom, I think she is suggesting, is fundamentally about how we approach our relationship with our own power and how our use of that power affects ourselves, other people, and the larger world.  It is about how we perceive power and how we use it, and that is why I like Conley’s notion of “holistic or systems thinking:” those possessing wisdom know and understand that there is in reality no isolated use of power, that instead any and all acts take place within a web of actions and relationships and that what one sets in motion will ripple out and back forever.  Wisdom, in other words, is the capacity in a given situation to understand—at the mind’s deepest and most intuitive levels—the “this” that will be reaped if a particular “that” is sown.

At least that’s going to be my working understanding for the remainder of this discussion, and thus, the question I want to ask now is: What can we be doing in schools to nurture it?  I think we start by developing and fostering curiosity because “a curious mind begins with the premise that things may not be what they seem on the surface, and that exploring the scaffolding of one’s point of view may help you uncover faulty or beautiful assumptions that aren’t necessarily obvious at first glance” (Conley, p. 99).  How we might accomplish this cultivation of curiosity I leave for Ian Leslie’s great book on the subject to address.  But once we’ve done so, we generate something even more important to the cultivation of wisdom:  questions!

Questions, I think, are the key because it is only “through the process of reflection [that] every question can become a quest, a journey of self-discovery, the facilitator of a sojourn into uncharted territory” (Conley, p. 98).  It is only as our students explore such territories that they have the opportunity to risk actions and live consequences that will enable them to explore their own relationship with power, and it is only through such exploration that they start down the path to growing (hopefully!) ever wiser.

Too often, though, what takes place in our schools encourages answering, not questioning, and what is more, even when we do make room in today’s classrooms for questioning, years of focus on answering has sadly left a lot of our students’ ability to ask already impaired.  Ted Dintersmith, for example, shares the story of an English teacher in North Dakota who decided to set aside one class period per week for students to work on whatever they were most interested in, most intellectually passionate about.  Yet when he did so, half of the students did a Google search for “What should I be interested in?”  As Dintersmith points out, “when I relate this anecdote to audiences, the initial laughter quickly turns to reflective silence.  This is what we [have done] to our children” (pp. 29-30).

Furthermore, not all questioning or questions lead to wisdom.  As authentically engaged educators, we need to be providing and asking the types of questions that—by the time our students are middle aged—have “developed and nourished a human being rather than [merely] a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer” (Conley, p. 88).  Like Michelangelo’s famous claim about releasing the art within the stone, our task as teachers is to use what I am calling “purposeful questions” such as I did with Simi’s class to chip away at the ignorance, selfishness, and irrationality hiding the wise person already present within, and while none of us individually will likely see the final “work of art” revealed, we can know that that “small pile of rubble over there, that’s mine!”

But what is a “purposeful question?” Charles Fadel suggests that these are questions that do two things:  they get students thinking about the quality of their thinking (known in the trade as metacognition) and they push a student out of his, her, or their comfort zone into a growth mindset. Thus, questions that challenge preconceived assumptions, hidden biases, unquestioned beliefs, etc. are those he considers “purposeful,” and he calls the process of employing them, “meta-learning” (see Chapter 6 for a more detailed exploration of these ideas).  I suggest further that it is only as we create conditions for “meta-learning” in the classroom that we as educators can be successful at cultivating wisdom, and for some examples of what I think that might look like, I encourage visiting or revisiting the following vignettes from this project:  the first two in Chapter 3; the second in Chapter 5; the first in Chapter 8; and all of them in the Conclusion.

Speaking of which, I would like to conclude this post by examining what’s at stake if we don’t work towards education’s Telos; what is at risk if we are not deliberately actively cultivating future wisdom in our students. As Conley himself recognizes, “our world is [already] awash in knowledge, but often wanting in wisdom” (p. 86).  But I would argue that—even worse—it is awash with “alternative facts” and false knowledge claims that have combined with a “consumer society [that] has increasingly isolated individuals from the implications and consequences of their preferences and actions.” The result, I think, has been an actual reduction in wisdom—a situation which “the internet and niche media outlets that foster the proverbial ‘echo chamber’ have only exacerbated” (Thompson & Smulewicz-Zucker, p. 8).  This, in turn, has led large swaths of our society to start “to privilege ungrounded belief over reasoned argument and evidence, [which] as we are now witnessing [firsthand], carries dangerous consequences for environmental policy and the health and well-being of [our] citizens” (Thompson & Smulewicz-Zucker, p. 12). 

I’m going to address America’s anti-intellectual streak behind this state of affairs in my next post, but for now, I think it is enough to say that we are a world in desperate need of some wisdom and as educators we need to be cultivating as much of it as we can because otherwise what kind of world will we leave for our descendants?  Or as I used to purposefully question my students: do the unborn children of tomorrow—including possibly your own—have a moral claim on your choices and actions of today?

References

Conley, C. (2018) Wisdom @ Work: the Making of a Modern Elder. New York:  Currency.

Dintersmith, T. (2018) What School Could Be. Princeton:  Princeton University Press. 

Fadel, C et al. (2015) Four-Dimensional Education. Boston: The Center for Curriculum Redesign.

Leslie, I. (2014) Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. New York: Basic Books.

Thompson, M. & Smulewicz-Zucker, G., ed. (2018) Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society.  New York: Prometheus Books.