Teaching for Wisdom Cross-cultural Perspectives on Fostering Wisdom
Wisdom is valued as an ideal aim of personal development around the world. But we rarely see how wisdom is understood in different religious and philosophical traditions and different scientific disciplines, and more particularly how wisdom is taught. The
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Teaching for Wisdom Cross-cultural Perspectives on Fostering Wisdom Michel Ferrari Editor Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto, ON, Canada
Georges Potworowski Editor University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Michel Ferrari Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto ON, Canada [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-4020-6531-6
Georges Potworowski University of Michigan Ann Arbor MI, USA [email protected]
e-ISBN: 978-1-4020-6532-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007936373 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
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Preface
The chapters in this volume are all devoted to a single question: Can wisdom be taught, or at least fostered? They span many different traditions and times, which generates both problems and opportunities. The most obvious problem is that of translation. As Curnow points out in the opening chapter, the word ‘wisdom’ is used to translate a variety of terms from antiquity that have only a partial overlap with modern work. It is interesting to consider that the Egyptian word ‘seboyet’ translates as either wisdom or instruction. The same is true of terms from Buddhism or Confucianism, or even the Ancient Greek tradition acknowledged as a source of most current views of wisdom in the West; all the terms drawn from other languages and traditions have only partially overlapping meaning. With this in mind, each chapter can be read independently of the others. However, we have also arranged them in an order that reflects common themes that emerge despite this diversity. We have not arranged them by geographical region, or historical time, but rather by the sort of educational strategy they advocate to foster wisdom. The first chapter by Curnow provides a basic overview of approaches to teaching for wisdom in the West. This is already a very ambitious undertaking, spanning ancient Egypt and Mespotamia to the renaissance and the dawn of the modem world, where the term wisdom has fallen largely out of fashion until very recently. Curnow is able to identify very different strands of what is considered wisdom, echoed by others in later chapters. It is possible to see similarities even to Eastern and African traditions that he does not address. In particular, he notes a tension between wisdom as knowledge or insight about the world and wisdom as insight about how to live a good life. In some traditions, like the Stoics, an effort is made to unite these two strands. We also find a range of approaches to teachng for wisdom that are echoed and amplified in the following chapters. The
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