Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Is It Worth Being Wise?

Is It Worth Being Wise?: "Human knowledge seems to grow fractally. Time after time, something
that seemed a small and uninteresting area experimental error,
even turns out, when examined up close, to have as much in
it as all knowledge up to that point. Several of the fractal buds
that have exploded since ancient times involve inventing and
discovering new things. Math, for example, used to be something a
handful of people did part-time. Now it's the career of thousands.
And in work that involves making new things, some old rules don't
apply."

I like that his opening story is about Gauss and how he messed with his teacher's head when she gave him a time waster exercise. He got to go to the playground early.

There is certainly a divergence between being wise and being intelligent. There are untold numbers of nerds who can figure out any computer problem but can barely talk to someone about the weather.

Intelligence is usually measured against the logical-mathematical component of our souls and not is only a part of who we really are. Wisdom, to me, is a more balanced thing, with major components of not just logical-mathematical, but the inter- & intra-personal and also spiritual, components.

We all have inside of us one or more Talents that we can and should excel in, but wisdom is to not let the rest of ourselves atrophy. There have been a great many great athletes that have not been wise, squandering what they were able to do, but then they sustained a career ending injury and were left with nothing. But those that were wise saw beyond their sports career and got more education in something they could do afterwards.

Einstein did not just sit in a chair and think all the time, he went for walks, played the violin and other seemingly mundane things that everyone can do.

Is it worth being wise? Yes, it surely is. For me it means not just being good at what I do but also learning new things al the time and doing new things that involve my body.

How am I relating this to the education of my children: They should learn a musical instrument, play on a team, and create art. Through those things she will learn wisdom.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your daughter already has wisdom. It is just not in language form. You are teaching each other. You her in the structure of a language, she you in form of mystery.

Stephan said...

Ah, yes who learns more the student or the teacher. I have taught several classes and I usually learned the most when teaching, mainly because I want to nail down as much as I can to preempt any stumper questions.

Anonymous said...

It's not exactly the more than
teacher/ student that i was thinking of.

I never noticed some things on my babies. I think mostly because I was worried about feeding and clothing and comparative schedules of development, even between siblings.

However with my grandchild, I am aware of different things in the first year because I am removed from that first person caring and concern and enthralled in skip-a-generation amazement. I can't explain it, but there is something that you notice in how they communicate and throw out stumper question as actions and patterns even at the youngest of ages that is different when one is a generation removed.

Of course, this may just be my wanting to apply passion to simple counting and also go beyond applicable reason why grandparent and grandchild are used in the Flatland story. A good story problem afterall should be just that... a good story.