Teaching for Wisdom in Our Schools

It's not just what you know, but how you use it.

By Robert J. Sternberg

The top-level managers who brought down companies such as Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom were, for the most part, nothing if they were not smart and well-educated. Yet one cannot help feeling that something fundamental was missing in the way they were educated. Similarly, today's consummate terrorist defies the stereotype of the poorly educated ignorant peasant who, having nothing better to do, joins up with a movement and blindly follows orders while showing no personal initiative at all. On the contrary, many of the terrorists who are covertly walking our streets are smart and well-educated—in the United States, in some cases. When their plans go awry, they use their wits to figure out how to get those plans back on track. Once again, it appears that something was fundamentally wrong in their education.

What is that something? I believe it is that, for the most part, we are teaching students to be intelligent and knowledgeable, but not how to use their intelligence and their knowledge. Schools need to teach for wisdom, not just for factual recall and superficial levels of analysis.

When schools teach for wisdom, they teach students that it is important not just what you know, but how you use what you know—whether you use it for good ends or bad. They are teaching for what the Bush administration referred to recently, in a White House conference, as the "fourth R": responsibility. Smart but foolish and irresponsible people, including, apparently, some who run or have run major businesses in our country, exhibit four characteristic...