Abstract
Wisdom is increasingly important in the world. Yet schools are ill-preparing students for a world in which it is of such great importance. Wisdom-based problems, unlike school problems, are ill-defined, not susceptible to being answered in multiple-choice format, and almost always involve competing human interests. I analyzed elementary-school readers from the early 1900s, mid-1900s, and early 2000s. I found that stories with wisdom-related themes declined in frequency over the years, despite the even greater importance of wisdom than ever before. These data suggest that lack of wisdom in society may in part be due to schools abrogating their responsibility to teach children to think wisely.
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Sternberg, R.J. (2019). Where Have All the Flowers of Wisdom Gone? An Analysis of Teaching for Wisdom over the Years. In: Sternberg, R., Nusbaum, H., Glück, J. (eds) Applying Wisdom to Contemporary World Problems. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20287-3_1
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