Developing Wisdom and Humility
in the Lucky Ones
Developing Wisdom and Humility
in the Lucky Ones
Sunday, 20 April 2008
Our 2nd Year students finished their classes on Friday and they have now begun study leave to prepare for their final IB Diploma examinations that will commence in a couple of weeks. Friday was a great day with the 2nd Year students in fancy dress before morning break, followed by a frighteningly perceptive outdoor performance as the 2nd Year students played the roles of each teacher at a staff meeting where a discussion focussed on the imaginary board concern about students going off campus dressed as pandas.
After the now traditional swim in the pool (fully clothed), the students enjoyed a great lunch in the canteen. That evening, there was a student-organised program of performances in the canteen, followed by a late-night canteen party. It was a fitting farewell to a wonderful group of impressive students.
The United World Colleges are highly selective, with students chosen from all parts of the world on strict criteria of merit. The resulting study body is both a joy and challenge to work with. Although the criteria of ‘merit’ are much broader than simple academic performance, the reality is that almost all our students fall into the top few percent of gifted students on a world-wide basis.
Most UWC graduates get the opportunity for higher education, and large numbers of them study in the world’s most prestigious universities. However, according to Dr Charles Murray (the WH Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Unit, a conservative US think-tank), the problem with the education of adept students involves not their professional training, but their training as responsible members of the community.
At a meeting in Sydney last year, he said this:
“We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, and this sounds elitist. Because of this reluctance to acknowledge intellectual differences, no-one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift, and that they are not superior human beings but lucky ones. They are never told that their gift brings with it obligations, and that the most important and most difficult of these obligations is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom”.
His comment that more able students are the “lucky ones” is intriguing. One of my fellow UWC Heads likens being selected for a place in a UWC to winning the lottery. The odds of being selected for a UWC may be a little better than winning the lottery, but the consequences are potentially of the same order of magnitude!
Of course, giftedness can take many forms, as is apparent in the selection criteria for UWCs where ‘merit’ is interpreted differently in various countries as a reflection of their cultural differences and aspirations. By focussing only on intellectual giftedness, Murray is adopting a dangerously narrow view of authentic education. I see his approach as similar to referring to one sentence in this blog as being the only worthwhile sentence. There are many useful sentences in this blog (well, I think so anyway), and we need all of them to get the full picture – it is the same with giftedness.
Anyway, setting aside this irritation, Murray went on to say that the development of wisdom requires a special type of education that recognises one’s own limits and fallibilities – or to reduce this to one word – humility.
I was struck by this comment because it triggered a memory of a meeting with several senior members of UWC National Committees in Singapore a couple of years ago. As a UWC Head, I was asked why it is that some graduates of UWCs appear ungrateful for the scholarship opportunities they have been given, and seem arrogant and critical rather than humble and appreciative.
At the time, I saw this tendency towards arrogance in only a minority of students, and I tended to shrug it off as the downside of developing the kind of self-confidence one would hope for after two years of living away from home in a community with more than 80 nationalities represented.
To develop humility, an accomplished student must encounter the feeling of hitting an intellectual wall – as many IB Diploma students do at one time or another. Perhaps this is one of the great hidden benefits of the IB Diploma – the very thing that many students don’t like about it (its rigorous demands and insistence upon deadlines) is actually the factor that is forcing students into humility ‘the hard way’.
Charles Murray would agree with UWC Founder Kurt Hahn that highly able students need to be educated with each other, not to be indulged, but because that is the only setting in which they can be pushed beyond their comfort zones. Hahn’s vision was to establish schools that would harmonise the social and intellectual differences between its students by operating as a community of participation and active service, the aim being to foster world citizenship – an interconnected leadership of people who had experienced a collective life of active dialogue and peacemaking service. In the words of Thomas James, who analysed and wrote about Hahn’s educational aims in 2000, “taking an image from Plato, Hahn likened himself to a midwife of educational projects as he sparked ideas for new endeavours and then left much of the development and maintenance to others”.
Murray develops this notion further in a practical sense by arguing that if students are to understand their responsibility towards others in a spirit of humility, they must be steeped in the study of ethics. To use his words:
“It is not enough that students learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good… Unfortunately, most of this is antithetical to the mid-set that now dominates mainstream educational thinking. To be wise, students need to learn how to make accurate judgements, but many educators want to teach them to be non-judgmental. To be wise, students need to be exposed to the best that has come before them, but many educators insist on treating all cultures as equally valuable and avoid discriminating between them.”
At this point, I think Charles Murray begins to show an unfortunate elitism that some might argue undermines many of the good points he makes. I agree that students need to be taught ethics, and probably in much greater depth than we do at the moment in the Theory of Knowledge course – and coincidentally, ethics is the topic I am currently teaching in my Theory of Knowledge classes. Furthermore, I agree that students need clearly defined boundaries and consequences if they are to develop consistent behaviour patterns towards others and themselves, because the alternative is hyper-consequentialism at best or sheer anarchy at worst. However, to encourage discrimination by one culture over another, as he seems to be doing in this statement, hardly seems consistent with his calls either for wisdom or for humility.
Murray’s true but unfortunate agenda is shown near the end of an article that was written about his visit to Sydney last year in which he was quoted as saying “What I am calling for is a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty”. Despite his helpful calls for a conscious, planned, practical and deliberate development of wisdom and humility among students, his plea for ‘an elite to do its duty’ sounds archaic and elitist to the point of abhorrence, and to turn his arguments against himself, lacking entirely in either wisdom or humility.
There is a tendency these days either to glorify or to vilify people in public life, exalting or demonising them according to one’s personal agenda. We see this at at the moment in the US presidential primaries, and the same thing can even happen to school principals :-) The reality is that most people are a mix of good and bad, right and wrong – even if the mix is seldom as precise as the Chinese government’s official verdict that Chairman Mao’s life was “70% good, 30% bad”. Charles Murray’s ultra-conservative leanings and elitist agenda should not mask the virtue in his plea that schools with students of high merit should work consciously and explicitly to develop wisdom, humility, and a strong sense of ethics so that – as Kurt Hahn expressed it –the decline in compassion in modern society can be arrested.
Faces of LPCUWC students, interpreted by Janice Shiu displayed at today’s Art Show