Old Pedagogies for Wise Education: A Janussian Reflection on Universities

Abstract

This paper presents a synthesis of time-honoured pedagogical approaches to develop wisdom suitable to address the urgent problem-solving requirement of the modern university. During these last 30 years, I have employed a range of critical, interpretivist, qualitative research methods to examine archival and archaeological evidence and conduct cross-cultural and often comparative and international case studies to study wisdom. My central concern has been to understand how teachers across diverse locations throughout history have learned to develop wisdom and how they have educated others to such understandings. As part of this work, I examined the modern university and its capacity to engage with local knowledge and wisdom. Over the course of analysis, I find that one of the constraints of scaling up institutions for learning wisdom into the now global model of the university is that universities have forgotten how to develop wisdom in the race towards industrialisation, colonisation, and neo-liberalism within the scientific paradigm. One of the early sacrifices of such scaling up was the ability of the university to preserve an intention to develop the wisdom of its students. Therefore, distant memory now is the ideation of wisdom that many societies and civilisations, and their institutions of higher learning, are in danger of forgetting the pedagogical pathway to do so. The paper begins with an examination of the long history of pedagogies for the development of wisdom. I then briefly discuss the methodological aspects of this paper and explain my key terms: information, knowledge and wisdom, followed by an examination of wisdom through the lens of the teaching and learning modalities of the Oral, Written, and Printing. My synthesis of wisdom artefacts and stories about pedagogy suggests that while wisdom is individually sensed, understood, and lived phenomenologically, its meaning is latent, socially agreed, and constrained in terms of how and if universities might cultivate its essential elements. Taking a Janussian backward- and forward-looking view, I propose a remembering and reconnecting approach to educating for wisdom through purposeful consideration of what we know about time-honoured pedagogies for teaching and learning wisdom, what are its current constraints, and what are its future opportunities in the university into the new postmodern, planetary, virtual education era.

Wisdom in higher education: discussions with education academics utilising theBhagavad Gita

“…This study builds on the work of Diamond (2021), Ma Rhea (2017) and Smith and Sharma (2019) who have looked to ancient wisdom traditions to guide the development of wisdom in education. As a second tier in this research agenda, it may be expedient to follow Bruya and Ardelt's (2018) tested model of wisdom transmission in education.…”

“…We were moved and emboldened by Diamond's (2021) exhortation that universities now, while suffering the creep of fiscal expediencies and constrictive regulations, need to champion wisdom as a countermeasure. Given these encroachments on curricula and instruction, it is especially timely that academics assert their wisdom, as an expression of academic integrity, and to cultivate wisdom in their learning communities so as to not succumb entirely to systemic, and thus regulatory control at the expense of “education” in the more profound and liberal sense we have long believed it to be.…”

Teaching Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Topics – Challenges and Rewards, a Reflection from a Nursing Professor

“…Cindy Ko Diamond (2021), in his discussion of the "domains of knowledge," unwittingly concurs with Carper's personal way of knowing by emphasizing the importance of ensuring the delivery of the axiological (having to do with ethics and morality), ontological (having to do with awareness of, absorption in, and studying of a topic), and epistemological (having to do with insight and analysis) domains of knowing in higher education that would cultivate the development of wisdom (pp. 7-8, 20).…”

Emergence of Wisdom Research in Higher Education during 1988–2022

“…Wisdom has become the focus of many disciplines since the 1980s: in leadership and human resource management (Bachmann et al, 2018;Banerjee, 2014;Ekmekҫi et al, 2014;Jakubik, 2021a;Jakubik & Müürsepp, 2022;McKenna & Rooney, 2005;McKenna et al, 2009;Nonaka et al, 2014;Rooney et al, 2010;Solé, 2017); in psychology (Ardelt, 2004;Baltes & Staudinger, 2000;Bangen et al, 2013;Bruya & Ardelt, 2018;Jeste et al, 2010;Karami et al, 2020;Karami & Parra-Martinez, 2021;Sternberg & Karami, 2021); in educational philosophy (Barnett, 1994a(Barnett, , 1994b(Barnett, , 2011(Barnett, , 2015(Barnett, , 2018(Barnett, , 2022Diamond, 2021;Jakubik, 2021b;Maxwell, 2012Maxwell, , 2014Maxwell, , 2019aMaxwell, , 2019bMaxwell, , 2021aMaxwell, , 2021bMüürsepp, 2021;Robinson, 1990). However, as many scholars (Diamond, 2021;Jakubik, 2022;Karami & Parra-Martinez, 2021;Ling, 2020;Maxwell, 2012Maxwell, , 2014Maxwell, , 2021a<...…”