We Stopped Cultivating Wisdom

This is the third in a six-part series on what education would look like if it were designed for human flourishing.

Start with Part 1.

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768)

When was the last time you heard a politician give a speech about making students wiser?

I can’t recall one. The speech (or op-ed or social media post) is always about scores, credentials, competitiveness, jobs. Robert Sternberg, a psychologist who spent decades studying wisdom, put it plainly: “Wisdom is neither taught in schools, nor is it generally discussed. Many people will not see the value of teaching something that shows no promise of raising conventional test scores.”

We’ve built an entire system around measuring what’s measurable, and in doing so, we’ve quietly dropped the most important thing.

Intelligence is all the buzz right now. Artificial intelligence. Emotional intelligence. Relational intelligence. Ad infinitum. Somewhere along the way, intelligence became the assumed product of schooling: young people go to school, gain knowledge, and graduate as possessors of some type of intelligence. For most of history, though, the point of an education was to grow in wisdom. So when did wisdom give way to intelligence, and why?

Start with the difference between the two, because they’re not the same thing.

Intelligence, at least as education systems measure it, belongs to the individual. It can (some argue) be quantified, ranked, compared. It produces useful outputs: correct answers, passing grades, admissions to selective institutions. And it’s supposedly neutral. Intelligence tells you how effectively someone can do something, never whether the thing is good.

Wisdom is knowing how to act well in the world: reading context, weighing competing values, considering how your choices land on other people. That makes wisdom social and ethical from the ground up. You can’t separate it from community, because what counts as wise depends on what a community values and the problems it faces.

Scholars who study the history of education have noted that this shift (from cultivating wisdom to measuring intelligence) tracks pretty closely with the shift toward seeing education as an economic instrument. When school becomes primarily about preparing workers and consumers, wisdom drops out of the equation. Workers need skills. Consumers need preferences. Neither particularly requires wisdom.

What gets lost when wisdom disappears from education? The capacity to live well, for one thing. But also the capacity to govern well, to disagree productively, to see the humanity in people who are different from you. You know, the things that are pretty foundational to democracy.

John Dewey worried about exactly this. He spent much of his career arguing that education and democracy were inseparable (that you couldn’t have one without the other) and that short-sighted visions of education were actively undermining both.

One of his sharpest observations was about time horizon. He wrote that each generation tends to educate its children to get along in the present world, when the proper end of education is something bigger: “the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity.”

I remember reading that line in grad school, underlining it, closing the book, and running it over in my mind the rest of the day. The best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Not the best possible workforce. Not the most globally competitive economy. Humanity, realized as fully as possible. Aren’t you setting the bar a little high for us school leaders, John?

But Dewey wasn’t naive about what this required. He knew that different communities had different values and different visions of the good life. He wasn’t proposing that schools impose some universal set of ideals from the top down. He was proposing something more demanding: that communities actually work through their values together, through genuine democratic engagement, and that schools be the place where children learn to do exactly that.

He offered two questions for evaluating whether a community was up to this task. First: how numerous and varied are the interests that members consciously share? In other words, how much genuine common ground does this diverse group actually have? Second: how freely can members of this community interact with people from other communities who don’t share their values?

A community that scores well on both questions (one with broad shared interests and open exchange with outsiders) is a healthy democratic community. A community that scores poorly is, in Dewey’s words, setting up “barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.” It’s closing in on itself.

Pose those questions against our current moment and the diagnosis is uncomfortable. Political communities have narrowed. Information environments have sorted (welcome to the echo chamber). The ability to share genuine interests across difference, and to learn from communities with different value systems, has deteriorated. And schools, by and large, have done little to reverse it — in part because they’ve been so focused on individual achievement metrics that the democratic function of education has been treated as secondary, or optional, or someone else’s job.

The argument I’m building toward is that wisdom and democratic engagement aren’t add-ons to a good education. They’re central to it. A school that produces high test scores and low civic capacity is producing something incomplete, regardless of what the rankings say.

This connects back to the last article’s discussion of eudaimonia. Aristotle understood that the good life was impossible outside of good community. He was explicit about this: wisdom isn’t something you develop alone. It emerges from living among others, engaging with their perspectives, navigating disagreement, taking responsibility for the effects of your choices on the people around you.

That means education has a communal obligation that can’t be fulfilled by focusing only on the individual. Helping a child develop her potential matters. It matters enormously. But helping her understand herself as a member of a community, one with obligations to that community and the capacity to help shape it, is equally essential.

This is what gets stripped away when education becomes purely about individual achievement. The child who earns excellent grades and never learns to work through conflict with a peer, never practices disagreement without contempt, never has to consider someone else’s needs alongside her own has been schooled, maybe, but not educated.

The good news is that wisdom and democratic engagement can be cultivated. Schools can be designed to do this. The next article gets into what that actually looks like in practice: specific design principles that make a learning environment one that produces flourishing humans rather than just credentialed ones.

But the precondition is being honest about what we’ve lost by pretending that test scores and wisdom are measuring the same thing. They’re not. And until we’re clear about that, reform efforts will keep optimizing the machine without asking whether the machine is pointed in the right direction.

Next: What flourishing schools actually look like: design principles grounded in research.