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There are people for whom news that evangelicals are reading The Chronicle of Higher Education might well be taken as a bona fide sign of the end times. For reasons of charitable deference therefore, some of us sneak our peek after hours at the online version. In June there appeared an article by Robert J. Sternberg, director of Yale's Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise, entitled "Teaching for Wisdom." Unaccustomed to that particular noun in the Chronicle, I read on. All too soon, alas, I began to recognize the familiar and usually well-intended confusion which results when a sermon embraces too warmly the character of the folly it presumes to denounce. As anyone routinely subjected to rhetorical sabbaths can attest, the "rousements" which attend such enthusiasm tend less to resemble those of the biblical Dame Wisdom (Proverbs) than those of another Dame (same book).
The necessity which appears to have mothered invention in Prof. Sternberg's case is a sharp decline in the authority of "Abilities, Competencies and Expertise" as he and others have been peddling it. Since market value tends to rise and fall with credibility in these matters also, the crisis occasioned for such a curriculum by the felonious demise of Enron (et al.) is as real as that which attacks the professorial pension plan. Perhaps considering this entailment, Sternberg's observation is tart: "traditional education, and the intellectual and academic skills it provides, furnishes little protection against evil-doing, or, for that matter, plain foolishness."
Pressed as we evangelicals are to overcome our well-earned reputation for anti-intellectualism, carrion comfort like this is hard to pass up. Here, it seems, is an Ivy League professor offering pronouncements more or less equivalent with those of a red-neck rural preacher of the 1950s. To be sure, the preacher might have said it more colorfully (e.g., "show me an educated Baptist and I'll show you a backslider"), but the point of the criticism is surprisingly harmonious.
The learned Dr. Sternberg is a little more nuanced. Ardently advertising à la mode a book he has edited—Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid (Yale, 2002)—our author claims to have discovered four reasons for this pathology. Concisely, these are: (1) that smart [i.e., educated] people are self-centered; (2) they think themselves "omniscient"; (3) they act as if they are "omnipotent"; (4) they think they have overcome the problem of consequences. But this, too, sounds familiar—almost like plagiarism from an old-fashioned sermon on Romans 1. Until, that is, the altar call. No unpleasant denunciations of pride or "playing God" ensue here, and nothing quite so gauche as a call to repentance. The call is rather for a more general teaching of ethics—not in any such way as to suggest a hierarchy of values, mind you, or virtue (a similarly embarrassing term), but a dialogical approach to values clarification. Sternberg believes this exercise will produce the "wisdom" of "a socially desirable use of. … knowledge."
Thoughtful readers of the Bible are unlikely to disagree with Sternberg that wisdom is to be sought after, and that much good comes of it, personal as well as social. On the biblical account, wisdom always has ethical implications. Respective conclusions about how to find wisdom, however, are sharply divergent. Christian educators should carefully consider that the biblical prescription (when followed according to the Manufacturer's directions) depends upon forthright acknowledgment that there is a God, and that all our usurpations of his prerogatives are at best unworkable.
