Give Your Best - Practical Wisdom

Virtue is an old fashioned word that seems out of place in our society today.  You don’t hear much about virtue.  But what’s truly needed to rescue us is a resurgence of the practice of being virtuous. 

Barry Schwartz author of “The Paradox of Choice,” writes about psychologists who interviewed hospital janitors around the country.  They asked them what their job entailed.  The job description of a hospital janitor is a long  list of maintenance and cleaning.  Nowhere in the list is a single word that mentions or involves another human being.  Yet during the interviews psychologists discovered that hospital janitors described situations that demanded they be wise. 

There was Mark who described how he stopped mopping the floor because a patient needed to get out of bed to exercise.  There was Charlene who ignored her supervisors and didn’t vacuum the visitors lounge because some family who had been there for 24 hours were taking a nap.  And then there was Luke who mopped the floor of a comatose young man’s room twice because the man’s father who had been keeping a vigil for six months didn’t see him do it the first time and was angry.

Behavior like this whether it comes from a janitor, nurse or a doctor doesn’t just make people feel better it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well.  The janitors who behaved this way were interacting with people with kindness, care and empathy.

Aristotle said that practical wisdom is a combination of moral will and moral skill.  This group of janitors was practicing both.  

You don’t need to be brilliant to be wise, but without wisdom brilliance isn’t enough. The camera is always on when you are teaching.  As a teacher you are being observed even when you think you are not.  Unlike the janitor your job description demands the moral will and moral skill to be successful.

A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule.  As the janitors knew when to ignore their duties in the service of another person, having wisdom means you know how to improvise. Real world problems are often ambiguous and ill defined.  The context is always changing.  A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the pursuit of the right aims.

The context in your classroom is also always changing, student skills and needs shift and challenge what you believed was the norm.   So how can you bring practical wisdom into your day?

The most single important thing you can teach to your students is first to respect themselves, second to respect others and last to respect learning.

Your school community has an obligation to nurture the development of the moral will and moral skill of all its teachers.  It must recognize the even the wisest and most well meaning among you will give up if they have to swim against the current. 

A wise person is made and not born.  Wisdom depends on experience and not just any experience.  You need the time to know the people you are serving.  You need permission to improvise and to try new things and occasionally to fail.  And to learn from these failures.  Most important you need to be mentored by wise teachers.

Teachers must celebrate moral exemplars.  We are inspired by our moral heroes, acknowledge them and celebrate them  and strive to become an everyday moral hero yourself.  The future of education depends on an injection of this type of leadership.