Wisdom Starts With Teachers
Wisdom, in the sense here intended, is that quality of understanding that enables a man to recognise the best ends and the best means for attaining those ends. I t consists in part of penetrating beyond mere knowledge to sense the implications of this knowledge and in bringing to hear on a given problem the necessary correlations among, or the synthesis of, the knowledge-implications patterns from several areas of knowledge. I t apparently requires unusual insight, continuous even life-long probing and a prudence that is rare and intensely acute. As far as we know, no one has succeeded in writing a book that teaches wisdom, but we know numerous wise men who attribute their propensity for wisdom to the influence of one or two outstanding teachers. For these men those special teachers galvanized their intellects, molded their attitudes, focused their sensibilities and transformed them with exhilarating visions of accomplishment into beings of purpose, reason, and resolve. Perhaps i t is significant that not always did the student elect to pursue the discipline of the teacher who most influenced him. We know a botanist who was so influenced by a chemist, a chemist who was stimulated by a physicist, and at least one scientist who was awakened by a humanist. The single quality these extraordinary teacher:! appeared to have in common was their capacity for transforming knowledge to widsom and for leading students to do the same. No one seems to have a clear view of how these teachers went about the process of transforming knowledge to wisdom, though they apparently knew a set of principles that required them first to master the subject matter and to immerse themselves completely into the situation they wished to study. They also seemed especially interested in the individuals who contributed to the knowledge they studied. But this interest was much less in personalities than in the nature of the intellectual struggle, in the character of the adroitness used, and in the depth of insight provided as the earlier investigator groped for understanding. Fortuitously perhaps these teachers also appeared especially interested in their students-not in their hair styles, their dress, or whether they were getting enough sleep, but in the intensity and agility with which they responded to challenge. Students who could stay with one of these teachers-and nearly every student who made an honest effort could-as he led them first from the facts, through the ideas, and then beyond all this to considerations of the basis for these ideas and into the very struggle to push the knowledge one step further came away from this experience with what seemed to them the beginning of wisdom. I t is said that there is no wisdom in science. What is meant, of course, is that science does not provide the mechanisms for constraining the society to use scientific discoveries wisely. And yet we wonder if even this is completely true. For has science not provided society with the basis for a rational, versatile approach to problem-solving in the often abused, always compelling scientific method(s)? How strikingly similar this is to the kind of thing those extraordinary teachers have been doing with their students. In effect they have become and they have required their students to become thevery embodiment of the scientific method
editorially speaking in its finest sense. Though their secret for effective teaching may go far beyond this, nevertheless the scientific methodas a discipline in contrast to a mode-would appear to have great potential for spawning wisdom even beyond the confines of science. As complex and intractable as are the problems of modern society (and as naive as this may appear to be) we wonder if a good many of these problems might not be solved faster and somewhat more agreeably if the protagonists understood, and would faithfully and consistently employ, the spirit and discipline of the scientific method in approaching them. Of course there is much cynicism to overcome and many myths to explode--such as the layman's view of scientific objectivity-before this can be given afair trial. But assuming the cynic~smwere overcome, where would a student learn about the spirit and discipline of the scientific method? Would he get this in the average college science course? Would he emerge from such a course enlightened by the experience gained through centuries of scientific effort and confident that he had seen a path to wisdom? In how many courses and in how many colleges and universities today do students have such an experience? If the scientific method is to be a path to wisdom it must he travelled first under the tutelage of an experienced guide. Evidently those teachers of science who have the unusual ability to transform knowledge to wisdom already have hired out as guides. Hopefully other teachers are following their lead. All of which causes us to wonder then if the courses in science should not be committed at least as much to the pursuit of wisdom as they are to the pursuit of knowledge, if it might not be at least as important to educate the student as i t is to teach the subject. We are not suggesting that chemistry courses become philosophy or history courses, or that they be diluted in quality by having the instructor spoon-feed the students or recite the steps in the scientific method at every turn. We are suggesting that the ultimate value of chemistry may rest somewhat more in the lessons to be learned from the intellectual struggles of chemists with nature than in the facts and theories their combiued efforts have produced. Just as every chemist feels more deeply about his own successful encounters with nature than about the overall body of chemical knowledge, even so every student who enters our courses challenges us to provide for him a measure of this feeling and some insight into the method that has made i t possible. Wisdom starts with teachers; knowledge comes from books and research. Science teachers have no monopoly on stimulating wisdom, but the scientific method is the most successfuland viable approach to problem-solving thus far devised. I t appears to offer a path to wisdom as valuable to the science student as to his nonscience colleague, as vital to the future chemist as to the future politician. Not many students can grasp the power of this method if the teacher is no more than a transmitter of knowledge. The teacher who is remembered sees beyond the knowledge he imparts to the human struggle involved in attaining it, and he sees beyond the class before him to the need of each student to WL find that exhilarating vision of accomplishment. Volume 45, Number
9, September 1968
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