Best Practice

Ideas for teaching wisdom

Teaching resources Skills
Dr Stephanie Thornton continues her series on the teaching of traits and skills to our pupils. This time, she considers ‘wisdom’ and whether we can teach the young to be wise

Robert Sternberg, one of the most prominent psychologists of recent decades, has argued strongly that we should be teaching wisdom to the young.

Palpably, education is failing in this area: for example, the people who brought the international economic system to its knees in 2008 were shining products of education: bright, well-informed, knowledgeable, the successes of the exam system. None of this stopped them from making decisions that were dreadfully, disastrously unwise – decisions that have damaged us all.

Nor is this an isolated incidence of folly. History is replete with other examples. Sternberg (2012) suggests that events in this 21st century make the teaching of wisdom urgent: more than ever before we need a population that can make wise decisions as they take direct action, such as voting, or even tweeting.

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