The seasons are changing. Holidays are over. Children are going back to school. Soon enough, university students will return to their studies too. A new academic year means more learning, more knowledge, new challenges and, ideally, in a longer run, a more equipped and educated mind. As someone who spent too long hiding from adult life at universities, I do believe in the power of knowledge and education and affirm all the good things associated with it.

However, our approach to education may be problematic too. More and more, knowledge is measured by tests, which assess a student’s command of facts and not necessarily their ability to apply them. Research is getting more niche, often trying to find something that has not been said before, regardless of whether it even needs saying. We struggle to discern what knowledge is good and useful and how it should be used.

John Vervaeke, a Canadian cognitive scientist, has described the type of knowledge we aspire to in the West as ‘propositional knowledge’ and pointed out that in pursuit of this knowledge we as a society have forgotten all about wisdom.  And yet, wisdom can be our antidote to the problems described above. The trouble is, few of us can even define what wisdom is, let alone begin to understand where to find it and how to cultivate it.

Vervaeke argues that wisdom can be found in religion. Being an entirely secular scholar, he then goes off to propose developing something like a religious thinking without religion itself, so it can uncover wisdom but nothing else. I don’t think this would work, and one of the reasons is that wisdom is not found isolated within ourselves. Solomon asked God for wisdom; according to Proverbs 8, the world itself was created through God’s wisdom and then Christ came as an embodiment of the same wisdom (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 1.30). Wisdom is a gift, not a rudimentary part of our body we have forgotten how to use. We cannot just remember or recover it, we have to invite it in. A whole section of the Bible is titled ‘Wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. Unlike reading the Pentateuch or history books or the Book of Acts or the Gospels, reading these will likely not give you any actual knowledge, but you will be in the presence of something timeless and glorious, which, once it is acknowledged as a gift, can be accepted and then used.

Ana