This latest post in the series on Fostering Human Flourishing discusses the third sphere of transformation, knowledge & wisdom. This is the third sphere to be sparked by the saying “healthy, wealthy, and wise”, following health & wellbeing and wealth & prosperity.
Notice that this one doesn’t quite match, in the other two cases the word in the saying became the first word in the sphere formulation, but here “wisdom” comes second. I mentioned in the first post in the series that I originally used the phrase “wisdom & understanding” for this sphere, which did match, but decided to change it for these reasons:
Because knowledge is the means to which wisdom is the end, just as health is the means to which wellbeing is the end, and wealth is the means to which prosperity is the end. It is wellbeing, prosperity, and wisdom that most foster human flourishing.
This is also a huge sphere of the Transformation Economy, encompassing anything having to do with education at any level, including post-school and in-company education, plus more. Note the box of all the types of companies that lie in this sphere, including those that provide commodities, goods, services, and experiences that support transformations. Whether it is a complete list or not is the main question I ask in the Google Form linked to at the bottom of the post.
Oh, and if you’re not an endnote reader, I do highly recommend you read endnote 7 here. . . .
Joe
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Knowledge & Wisdom
Education is also fundamentally a transformation industry. Parents all have aspirations for the education their children have, from pre-school to elementary school to high school to (most of the time) college, with each one a stage in the progression from toddler to adulthood. They also pay for many classes, courses, and programs outside of school based on the personal predilections of their kids and themselves. Governments have great interest in transforming citizens into productive and contributing members of society through education and spend a lot of money to do so. Education affords individuals – as people, as consumers, as workers – greater possibilities for their future as their knowledge grows.
In looking at college in particular, people have long complained about skyrocketing college tuition, which (not unlike healthcare) has also far outpaced inflation for decades – around 3 times the increase in inflation over the past five decades, in fact.[i] A large part of this increase is the cost of greatly increasing the ratio of administrative personnel to, you know, actual instructors, while another large part is the cost of what are generally called “ancillary services”,[ii] which include hotel-like dorms, better facilities, and on-campus events, as well as more and expanding athletic programs, wellbeing support, and healthcare benefits – in other words, the experiences & transformations that people, students included, value more highly than in the past. (That’s valueflation again!)
As with healthcare, higher education has seen significant valueflation in the past few decades
People have willingly paid these increased costs (all too often in the US by going into debt via student loans) because they so value a college diploma, presumed to be a ticket to a nice upper middle-class life. And this too overlaps with prosperity, to the extent that people, for themselves or their families, view education only in terms of its effect on future income, not as knowledge acquired for its own sake, as a liberal arts education has long been viewed.
However, people are increasingly aware that many of the jobs they can get with many of the degrees with which they graduate do not pay enough to effectively pay back their student loans. (Unfortunately, many learned only in retrospect.) And many people – employers in addition to potential employees – recognize that the amount of actual learning gained from a four-year college degree (increasingly taking five or six years) may be scant, with a diploma representing not so much a transformation but a signal of mere competence and willingness to go through the process of becoming employable as a professional.
We increasingly decry the actual outcomes of a college education
In other words, we increasingly decry the actual outcomes of a college education. Let’s face it, schools at all levels of education today impart precious little knowledge, much less wisdom. It’s often up to the personality, commitment, and aspiration of individual students (and so often their parents) to excel – not relatively, but absolutely, truly excel in school. Pundits justifiably recognize that many people shouldn’t bother with bachelor’s degrees, and people more and more turn to other means to learn, including apprenticeships, technical colleges, certification courses, and other such educational transformations, often made available by employers. They want actionable knowledge and practical wisdom that actually improves their lives, that fulfills their aspirations for learning, working, and living.[iii]
Knowledge & wisdom – that’s the proper, most expansive name for this sphere of transformation, of helping people gain knowledge, turn it into wisdom, and thereby reap an impact on their lives. It’s what education is for.
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Knowledge & Wisdom
This sphere involves everything having to do with education, and not just formal education in schools at any level (public, private, or parochial), but tutoring, teaching, and training wherever and whenever it might occur, whether in classes or outside of them, in physical environments or online, at home, at work, or out in the world. It’s not just about facts, figures, and bits of information, but should go far beyond that. Knowledge requires understanding learned from experience and applied to experience, including kinetic/embodied, know-how, emotional, and other forms of experiential learning. Wisdom comes from the ability to apply the proper aspects of knowledge to situations in the right way, making appropriate, effective, and impactful decisions that advance flourishing. This sphere usually, therefore, requires not just parents and instructors but mentors, coaches, advisers, and guides.
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