The
average adult believes that the level of human knowledge has increased many
times over, just within the last hundred years or so. We think that the human race is much smarter
today than it has ever been – we know more information about more things than
we have ever known. This is what we
believe, but is it true? We probably can
prove that we, as a race, have accumulated more facts than the ancients were
able to discover. And we can say with some level of confidence
that due to easy access to books and magazines, electronic information
transmission media such as television, and especially the internet, any one modern
individual has at his or her fingertips more raw information than anyone would
have thought possible prior to this modern age.
Yet
important questions remain. Are we really smarter today than we’ve ever
been? What is “smart”, anyway, and how
does it relate to knowledge? Are they
the same thing? And what about
“intelligence” – how is it associated?
And where does “wisdom” fit in?
Knowledge, intelligence
and wisdom. In common usage these three terms often are
used interchangeably. Though they are clearly
related, they are different. Knowledge
is about how much you know – about the accumulation
of individual facts. Intelligence is
about how much you can know – about your capacity
to acquire and store new facts. Wisdom,
on the other hand, is about how you apply what you know – about the utilization, application, and extension
of what you know in new ways and to new situations. Put another way, knowledge and intelligence
are quantitative concepts. If you were
to think of your brain as a child’s sand pail, and facts as the grains of sand,
then intelligence could be thought of as the size of the pail and knowledge as
the amount of sand that is in it.
Conversely, wisdom is qualitative.
Using the previous analogy, it (wisdom) would equate to your skill in
using the sand in the bucket to, for instance, fill sandbags, build sand
castles, or make glass. This skill is
independent of the size of the bucket or the amount of sand in it, just as
wisdom is independent of the type or amount of knowledge that one possesses.
What
potential pitfalls might result from a failure to understand or appreciate the
difference between these three concepts?
If
we confuse intelligence with knowledge, then we confuse potential with possession. This can lead to the mistaken belief that the
mere capability to get knowledge is as important as the actual getting. And this, in turn, can lead us to minimize
the value that is ascribed to those who have, or are perceived to have, less
potential to learn, in spite of any evidence to the contrary. Such beliefs have been used in the past to
deny education to Black slaves and other minority groups, to justify providing
sub-standard educations to newly freed Blacks, to institutionalize the
physically handicapped, and to limit the mentally handicapped to “special
education” programs geared to their limited abilities. This type of confusion also can lead us to
accept educational institutions that don’t educate, teachers who don’t teach,
and students who don’t learn. We become
satisfied with providing the potential to learn, and forget about presenting a
real education. This happens when we
expend great effort and spend massive amounts of money to guarantee that every
child has access to free public education, but do little or nothing to
guarantee the quality of that education.
If
we confuse intelligence with wisdom, then we confuse the capacity to get information with the capacity to use information. A potential consequence of this is that we
may believe wrongly that someone who performs well in training or an
educational environment should perform as well in real-life situations. Conversely, we can assume that someone who
does poorly in school will do poorly in life.
Yet seldom is the capacity to absorb individual facts directly related
to the ability to use those facts. The
ability to memorize hundreds of recipes does not make one a gourmet chef. The ability to memorize the components and
operating parameters of an internal combustion engine also does not make one an
expert driver. And the fact that Albert
Einstein was a poor student whose math teacher said he would never amount to
anything did not prevent him from becoming one of the most influential
physicists of all time.
If we confuse knowledge with wisdom, then we confuse facts with ability. This can lead to
the mistaken belief that someone who has gathered information on a subject
automatically knows how to apply that information. If this were true, then reading a book about
economics would be enough to make one an expert economist. This is clearly absurd. Yet we can still find ourselves assuming that
someone who has taken a course or undergone training should be, if not an
expert, then at least a skillful practitioner of the discipline addressed by
the course or training. A related false
assumption is that greater education automatically translates to greater
skill—someone at the doctoral level is assumed to be more skillful than someone
with only a bachelor’s level education.
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