Today’s post is by regular contributor, Richard Jurin. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies.  His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.

Do you need more knowledge?  Is more information going to save the world, or faster computers, more scientific or intellectual analysis?  Is it not wisdom that humanity needs most at this time” Eckahrt Tolle.

In many of my posts I have talked about the need for teaching and fostering wisdom, and most recently, about values.  When I taught my college worldviews class which was covered as a historical narrative with discussions about worldviews prevalent at the time during narrative.  I endeavored to always remain neutral in order to allow students to recognize their own values and as importantly, where those values derived.  The final assignment was a written essay where the student discussed and defined for themselves their ‘Ecological Identity’ (based on work by Mitchell Thomashow).  From debriefing discussions at the end of the class, my students felt empowered because they had been allowed to discover this identity and inherent values for themselves.  And as importantly, it also taught them that there are many perspectives to be understood when trying to resolve ‘wickedly complex’ problems and that open-mindedness was as much part of the solution as scientific knowledge.  

Like many educators, I think I did this intuitively, since I never benefited from a class on teaching wisdom.  And while I never used the word wisdom, I now recognize teaching wisdom was what I was actually doing.  When I retired, my class was taken over by a junior faculty member who tried to inculcate the students from his environmental perspectives.  While his aims were admirable, they were still indoctrinal and I suspect his success was less than he would have wished.              

Many will equate wisdom with religiosity or even psychology or philosophy, but it is generally excluded from any scientific education in favor of the apparent neutrality of empirical facts.  This inherent belief that facts will speak for themselves and have no inherent value, I believe is one of the greatest barriers to finding solutions for a sustainable future.  As we move forward we must have discussions in which people reconcile their beliefs and values about science, technology and the natural world.  Our current disconnection and separateness from each other and the natural world are as important to explore if we are to recognize that wise decisions are a prerequisite of an interconnected, viable and thriving future.    

I wish I had The Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom (Sternberg, Robert J. & Gluck, Judith (Eds), 2019, Cambridge University Press) to help me as an educator.  I recall reading many psychology papers concerning wisdom, yet the departments at mine, or any institution near me, were sparse in faculty who were knowledgeable in the study of wisdom; and the college of education, while sensitive to the idea, did not espouse the need teach such a topic to their teacher trainees already overwhelmed with classes preparing them to survive in modern academia.         

Like environmental education, wisdom is seen as an extra topic to add to already extremely busy curricula.  Individually we all recognize when wisdom is encountered (especially during decision-making) but including it in educator training and student education is compounded by the problem that wisdom is difficult to define because it encompasses so much.  According to the Oxford online dictionary, Wisdom is defined as: 1) The ability to make good judgments based on experience, knowledge, and understanding; 2) the ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting, and 3) Expert knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life that permits exceptional insight, judgment, and advice about complex and uncertain matters.

The recent list of wonderful NAEE posts concerning the Francis Review were fascinating and encouragingly full of critical analysis of the problem of developing curricula for a changing world.  I do not mean this as a criticism for all the amazing work done within our field of environmental education in the face of dogmatic systems, yet I come back to the Leopold quote I used in my last post, “[Sustainable] development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”  I feel that the quote below by Gus Speth says it all succinctly – teaching wisdom may be as, if not more, important than any facts in education for a better world.

“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change.  I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems.  I was wrong.  The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy…and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.  And we scientists don’t know how to do that” Gus Speth.   

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Richard can be contacted at: richardjurin@gmail.com

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