EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 36(4), 261–264 Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
The Path To Wisdom
THEKUHN PATH TO AND WISDOM UDELL
Deanna Kuhn and Wadiya Udell Department of Human Development Teachers College Columbia University
While applauding Sternberg’s bold vision of the kinds of goals education should embrace, we suggest a more modest goal of teaching the tools for wisdom, rather than wisdom itself. We also advocate drawing on what we already know about adolescents’ intellectual development to guide pedagogical efforts.
We applaud Sternberg for his blunt criticism, here (2001) and elsewhere, of raising standardized test scores as the goal of educational reform. The real challenge of educational reform today is to engage the fundamental question of what it is that we want schooling to achieve. Sternberg’s project is an attempt to do just that. The answer he proposes is indeed a bold one. Wisdom, as he notes, is a construct that through the ages has defied simple definition, and no one has ever suggested that it might be easy to teach. The concern we raise here is that Sternberg’s (2001) project may be overly bold. Even in the current climate in which bold approaches are called for if we hope to effect real change, an endeavor that reaches not quite so far may in the end yield greater dividends. Specifically, we propose, educational efforts may be better focused on the more modest goal of teaching the tools for wisdom, rather than undertaking to teach wisdom itself. This more modest objective, if realized, would equip students to construct and apply their own understandings of what it is to think and act wisely. As well as using the tools of wisdom to decide if it is wiser to vote Democratic or Republican, students could apply them to construct their own answers to the vexing questions surrounding wisdom that Sternberg notes—how to balance self and others’ interest, how to define a common good. An advantage of this approach is that the program no longer rests on an agreed-on definition of wisdom. If we accept the goal of teaching tools for wisdom, Sternberg (2001) himself asks the next question: “What are the processes used to render wise (or unwise) judgments?” Unless we know what the tools for wisdom are, we’ll be in no better a
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position to teach them than to teach wisdom itself. There is indeed much we don’t know about tools for wisdom, but we can capitalize on a few powerful things we do know. Again, it is Sternberg himself who provides the answer: Wisdom is an outcome of clear and careful thinking. “Wisdom is ‘mindful,’” he says. “One cannot be wise and at the same time impulsive or mindless in one’s judgments.” If it is thinking, then, that produces wisdom, and not the reverse, why not focus on teaching the means —thinking—as a path to the end?
THINKING ONE’S WAY TO WISDOM Identifying thinking rather than wisdom as the educational goal confers one immediate practical advantage—more ready acceptance by the education community. At a time when academics increasingly are dissatisfied merely to propose new ideas and want to try them out to see if they work, this advantage is not to be dismissed lightly. In the latest report (Jackson & Davis, 2000) from the middle-school reform effort (and we agree with Sternberg that middle-school years are the critical time to intervene), it is acknowledged that organizational restructuring has not been enough and that teaching and learning must receive more attention and be geared to clear goals. The report is unusually explicit in identifying these goals: “[A]bove all else … middle grades schools must be about helping all students learn to use their minds well” (p. 11), and “The main purpose of middle grades education is to promote young adolescents’ intellectual development” (p. 10). So, if we tell a sufficiently enlightened school district that we’re here to teach good thinking, we’re likely to receive a warm welcome (as long as we don’t take too much time away from efforts to raise test scores). But there is a second, more substantive advantage that comes with the practical one:
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There exists a base of knowledge about the development of thinking into and through adolescence to guide our efforts. In contrast, in designing the units of a wisdom curriculum—“What is wisdom?” “Some big ideas about wisdom,” “Applying wisdom across the ages,” and so forth—Sternberg and his collaborators are pretty much starting from square one. To be fair, neither is what (or how) one should teach under a heading of “good thinking” spelled out in a standard manual on the topic. To the contrary, interpretations and approaches are numerous and wide ranging. If we take the teaching of thinking to mean promoting intellectual development, however, as does the middle school reform group, the path becomes somewhat clearer. The very construct “intellectual development” implies that we know something about origins and endpoints and can identify directional change from one and toward the other.
WISDOM AS A DEVELOPMENTAL GOAL What does such development consist of? Cognitive development theorists differ on many particulars, but there are some broad dimensions regarding which there is considerable agreement. Our own model is one of a developing multidimensional structure comprising skills—of inquiry, analysis, inference, and argument—and metalevel processes that regulate the use of these skills (Kuhn, 2001a, 2001b). Metalevel processes include metastrategic operations, which govern procedural knowing, and metacognitive operations, which govern declarative knowing. The latter address specific knowledge—What do I know and how do I know it?—but also knowing more generally, in the form of epistemological understanding of what it means to know something. The development of epistemological understanding, which has just begun to receive the research attention it warrants (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997, in press), seems particularly germane to Sternberg’s (2001) concerns and goals. He proposes science lessons, for example, in which facts are not presented as the final word and students learn that “… scientists are as susceptible to fads as are members of other groups.” Sternberg’s objectives here stand to be enriched by a framework provided by knowledge of the path that developing epistemological understanding takes. Very briefly (see Hofer & Pintrich, 1997, in press, for more detail), young children quickly outgrow a naïve realist belief that human knowing accurately reflects the external world and there can be no false beliefs. But the next, absolutist level of epistemological understanding often lingers into adolescence and even adulthood. The absolutist maintains faith in a world of objective truth, such that if you and I disagree, it is simply a matter of ascertaining which one of us is right and which one is mistaken. It is the next transition, to multiplism or relativism, that is the most dramatic: In a word, now everybody’s right. Claims become a matter of subjective opinion, with all free to select their beliefs as they would pieces of clothing. And tolerance
eclipses judgment: Because everyone has a right to their opinion, all opinions are equally right. It is the unique challenge of those who undertake to educate adolescents to move them beyond radical relativism to an evaluativist level of epistemological understanding: Though all may have a right to their opinions, some opinions are nonetheless better than others, to the extent they are better supported by argument and evidence. Almost everything else we are trying to do in educating adolescents rests on the developmental achievement that this insight represents. If facts can be ascertained with certainty and are readily available to anyone who seeks them, as the absolutist understands, or, alternatively, if any claim is as valid as any other, as the multiplist understands, it is hard to see any point in expending the intellectual effort that thinking hard and well (and wisely) entails. Students, in other words, must believe that there is a point to thinking well if we are to have any hope of success in teaching thinking skills. It is certainly hard to envision the attainment of wisdom in the absence of this development. Like Perkins, Stanovich, and other “dispositional” theorists of thinking, we believe that people engage in the hard work of thinking critically only because they are convinced of the value of doing so. Developing competence is only the first step. Epistemological understanding supports values that, in turn, support dispositions (Kuhn, 2001a, 2001b). And the goal of advancing young people’s epistemological understanding is best approached within the framework of the developmental progression just described. We do not want to digress from our commentary to review what is known about the development of other dimensions of thinking, notably the skills of inquiry (Kuhn, Black, Keselman, & Kaplan, 2000) and argument (Felton & Kuhn, 2001; Kuhn, Shaw, & Felton, 1997). Before commenting further on Sternberg’s (2001) curriculum, however, it is worthwhile to note a couple of general things about the process by means of which skilled thinking develops. A pedagogical shift has occurred in recent years away from training and toward experiential educational methods, a trend congruent with a shifting emphasis from performance to understanding and, on the theoretical front, toward increased attention to metalevel processes. These metalevel processes bear a reciprocal relation to performance: Metalevel understanding informs performance, but exercise of skills enhances understanding (Sophian, 1997). This model accounts for our own and others’ findings that skills do advance in the course of their being exercised, especially when this exercise is accompanied by encouragement of metalevel reflection on what one is doing (Kuhn et al., 2000).
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A Web site (www.educationforthinking.org) describing our project provides a more comprehensive view than we can provide here with respect to both means and ends.
THE PATH TO WISDOM
TEACHING WHAT OR HOW? Returning now to Sternberg’s (2001) project, we observed two striking similarities between his efforts and our own recent work. The first is in conceptualization of the process by means of which change is envisioned to occur, and the second is in assessment instruments. Regarding process, Sternberg makes clear his view that “wisdom is not directly taught so much as indirectly acquired.” As a teaching method he advocates “scaffolding for the development of wisdom and case studies to help students develop wisdom.” More generally, he claims, “one teaches children not what to think, but rather, how to think” (emphasis in original). This approach seems entirely congruent with our own work and with the experiential methods referred to earlier. The similarity may be somewhat less than it seems, however, due to a gap we noted between the educational philosophy Sternberg (2001) endorses and his description of what his team is actually going to do. His curriculum, first of all, is designed for teachers, not students. At a methodological level, then, we need to be concerned about the similarity of the intended curriculum to the “received ” curriculum experienced by students. There are multiple points in the proposed sequence of events where things may go wrong and the designer’s intentions remain unrealized. Even the intended curriculum, however, comes across to us as discrepant from the experiential terms in which it is characterized more abstractly. Sternberg seems bent on different ways to teach children about wisdom and less concerned to offer them exercise in the kinds of thinking processes likely to lead to wise judgments and decision making. The 12 weekly topics certainly convey this sense (“What is wisdom?” “Some big ideas about wisdom,” “Famous examples of wise individuals,” etc.), but so do many of the “principles of teaching for wisdom” (teach that wisdom is critical for a satisfying life, teach the usefulness of interdependence, have students read about wise judgments and decision making), as well as proposed topics in the teachers’ curriculum handbook. Still other proposals (e.g., teach foreign languages in the cultural context in which they are embedded) strike us as sound but reflecting Sternberg’s own personal wisdom, rather than having a clear basis in a wisdom-based curriculum. To be fair, some components of Sternberg’s curriculum do have a more “process” flavor to them (e.g., “Encourage students to think dialectically”). But broad pedagogical prescriptions of this sort have long suffered from lack of specificity. How, for example, at a procedural level do we distinguish the “dialectical” thinking Sternberg refers to in his Principle 11 from the “dialogical” thinking he refers to in Principle 12? What specifically do students do that demonstrates either? Our approach in research designed to foster the development of thinking has been to identify as precisely as possible the skills of interest and the different forms in which they appear at various levels of development, and then undertake to
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engage students in exercise of these skills at their current level, with the goal of advancing them along a developmental path that we already know something about. In this respect, our work does not fit into the category of a “standard” critical thinking curriculum that Sternberg identifies as one of his control conditions. In current work on developing argument skills, for example, we have relied on aspects of Dewey’s, Piaget’s, and Vygotsky’s thought in engaging academically at-risk middle-schoolers in a unit about the same number of weeks in length as Sternberg’s, centered on preparation by pro and con teams for a “showdown”—a debate-like activity—on the topic of capital punishment. Specific skills (e.g., supporting reasons with evidence, evaluating reasons, developing reasons into an argument, examining and evaluating opposing-side’s reasons, generating counterarguments to others’ reasons) are highlighted, scaffolded by various concrete aides, and practiced, in the context of a goal-based, socially shared activity (see Table 1). The specific argument skills that we have developed ways to measure (Felton & Kuhn, 2001) do show advancement, we find, not just with respect to the capital punishment topic but in assessments involving other social-issue topics as well. In related work following a similar approach, we are focusing on adolescents’ decision making about everyday issues they might confront in their own lives (Kuhn & Udell, in preparation). DIFFERENT PATHS TO THE SAME GOAL? Given the points of divergence just noted, it is all the more striking for us to note the convergence between our work and TABLE 1 Activities and Goals in a Program to Develop Argumentive Thinking Skills Generating reasons Goal: Reasons underlie opinions. Different reasons can underlie the same opinion. Elaborating reasons Goal: Good reasons support opinions. Evaluating reasons Goal: Some reasons are better than others. Supporting reasons with evidence Goal: Evidence can strengthen reasons. Developing reasons into an argument Goal: Reasons connect to one another and are building blocks of argument. Examining and evaluating opposing-sides’ reasons Goal: Opponents have reasons, too. Generating counterarguments to others’ reasons Goal: Opposing reasons can be countered: “We can fight this.” Generating rebuttals to others’ counterarguments Goal: Counterarguments can be rebutted: “We have a comeback.” Contemplating mixed evidence Goal: Evidence can be used to support different claims. Conducting and evaluating two-sided arguments Goal: Some arguments are stronger than others. Note.
From Kuhn & Udell (in preparation).
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Sternberg’s (2001) with respect to assessment. Among the problems we ask young teens to contemplate in both assessing and developing their thinking are ones very similar to those Sternberg illustrates as representative of those he will use to assess the success of the wisdom curriculum—how Felicia and Alexander, for example, should think about the career and personal issues facing them. Our work and Sternberg’s appear to be addressed to the same, or at least very similar, goals. The important difference lies in the means, with our approach the more conservative one. We identify the kinds of things we want to have students do well, specifically in this case to be able and disposed to think thoroughly and carefully about important issues of concern to them personally, as well as issues of broader social concern. To pursue this goal, we engage students in frequent practice of precisely these skills, initially providing them the social context as well as other kinds of scaffolding to support these skills until they become further developed through exercise and able to function without support. A feature of this approach is that assessment and intervention activities are scarcely distinguishable. Should we worry, then, that we’re teaching to the test? We think not, because the “test” in this case has such high face validity. We want students to be able to think deeply and broadly about complex issues of real-life significance. If they show they can do that, we have attained our goal. At the very least, they are on a path to wisdom. In Sternberg’s project, in contrast, treatment and test are less directly connected. But could it be, nonetheless, that a more direct engagement with the topic of wisdom in Sternberg’s program will get students farther or faster on a path to wisdom? Obviously we can’t say. We can only hope that our developmentally based approach will be successful in illuminating a developmental path to wisdom in a way that will be informative to those seeking to guide young people along this path.
THINKING AS A VALUE We close with a word about values. Sternberg (2001) makes a point of admitting that his approach doesn’t resolve the problem of universal values. At most, he proposes, one can promote a type of “values clarification” process in which students come to identify their own values. There is one value,
however, that both Sternberg’s and our programs reflect, that warrants highlighting as a specific value that we can legitimately advocate to students. It is the intellectual value that thinking is worthwhile—that it leads to desired outcomes, the benefits of which outweigh the effort that thinking entails. The development in epistemological understanding described earlier supplies the necessary foundation for this value, although individual (and cultural) variation remains substantial (Kuhn, 2001; Resnick & Nelson-LeGall, 1997). Universal values are a rare entity even within a single culture or subculture, and the education of children is an arena in which our society has come to be most wary of them. Identifying a value that can be embraced as more than personal or cultural preference and that helps to define one’s purposes and goals, as it does in the case of our education for thinking work, seems worth highlighting. We recommend it as well to Sternberg as a value that has a contribution to make in defining what it means to be wise.
REFERENCES Felton, M., & Kuhn, D. (2001). The development of argumentive discourse skills. Discourse Processes, 32, 135–153. Hofer, B., & Pintrich, P. (1997). The development of epistemological theories: Beliefs about knowledge and knowing and their relation to learning. Review of Educational Research, 67, 88–140. Hofer, B., & Pintrich, P. (Eds.). (in press). Epistemology: The psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Jackson, A., & Davis, G. (2000). Turning points 2000: Educating adolescents in the 21st century. New York: Teachers College Press. Kuhn, D. (2001a). How do people know? Psychological Science, 12, 1–8. Kuhn, D. (2001b). Why development does (and doesn’t) occur: Evidence from the domain of inductive reasoning. In R. Siegler & J. McClelland (Eds.), Mechanisms of cognitive development: Neural and behavioral perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Kuhn, D., Black, J., Keselman, A., & Kaplan, D. (2000). The development of cognitive skills that support inquiry learning. Cognition and Instruction, 18, 495–523. Kuhn, D., Shaw, V., & Felton, M. (1997). Effects of dyadic interaction on argumentive reasoning. Cognition and Instruction, 15, 287–315. Resnick, L., & Nelson-Le Gall, S. (1997). Socializing intelligence. In L. Smith, J. Dockrell, & P. Tomlinson (Eds.), Piaget, Vygotsky and beyond (pp.145–158). London: Routledge. Sophian, C. (1997). Beyond competence: The significance of performance for conceptual development. Cognitive Development, 12, 281–303. Sternberg, R. J. (2001). Why schools should teach for wisdom: The balance theory of wisdom in educational settings. Educational Psychologist, 36, 227–245.
