Wisdom

The current world is increasingly described as a ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992). The risk society is supposedly characterised by a move from structure to agency, from people gaining life meaning by giving their allegiance to large organisations and structures, to free ranging selves, individual agents having loyalty only to themselves. In the risk society, an individual's fate is bound up with the risks that they deliberately choose to take. Obviously, our notion of a growing capacity to make sound contextual judgements can be linked to this. However we are more sympathetic to the attendant social and communal factors in such judgement making, than to the rugged risk-taking individual conjured by the risk society.

In this chapter we firstly provide a brief account of the main approaches to understanding wisdom, with a focus on its possible connections to lifelong learning. We then examine in some detail the work of certain theorists that promises to illuminate the relations between informal learning, lifelong learning and wisdom. These include Shulman’s work and his notion of the wisdom of practice; Hubert Dreyfus’ work, particularly his ‘stages of wisdom model’, and his ideas on the nature of practice and the role of rules in practice; and Sternberg’s balance theory of wisdom. Finally, we draw the discussion together by showing that it has provided us with some useful and important principles that productively link informal learning, lifelong learning and wisdom.