On "Wisdom" and "Knowledge"

Mr Whitehead said in The Purpose of Education: "You can't be smart without some basic knowledge; You can easily acquire knowledge, but not necessarily wisdom. "

"Wisdom is the way to master knowledge. It involves the processing of knowledge, the choice of knowledge when determining related problems, and the use of knowledge to make our intuitive experience more valuable. This mastery of knowledge is wisdom and the most essential freedom that can be obtained. "

In fact, I thought about this question before I saw this passage. The ancients were smarter than us, because they created knowledge from scratch, and we imitated, memorized and used it more. After reading this passage, I feel that I have found the source. How appropriate it is to distinguish "wisdom" from "knowledge"!

It takes a lot of time to form wisdom. From the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age, a simple polishing action took millions of years! The ancients created knowledge with great wisdom, passed it down from generation to generation and accumulated it, which has become the knowledge we learn today. We stand on the shoulders of countless giants and know the world. We can learn about the history of all mankind in a few years, learn to solve complex calculation and geometry problems in more than ten years, and experience another civilization effortlessly ... We are just learning and applying knowledge. How much is truly innovative? Now, we all know that innovation is difficult, because we are used to learning knowledge, but we can't develop wisdom with our brains.

What's wrong? Come to think of it, we teach our children knowledge every day. Why are you learning this? The child doesn't know. Where will this knowledge be used? The child doesn't know. Such knowledge is dead. It is the requirement of the new curriculum standard to make knowledge come alive and attach importance to the development of students' ability. Therefore, we began to pay attention to reappearing the formation process of knowledge in the classroom, combining theory with practice, so that knowledge can be applied ... The effect seems to be there. However, such careful design is like grinding wheat into the finest flour. They are used to solving small problems and will have indigestion in the face of rough big problems.

Before listening to the lecture, I learned that human thinking patterns can be divided into mother thinking and child thinking. Mother's thinking is innate, and children's intuition, intuition and epiphany are acquired, thinking abstractly, reasoning and analyzing. For learning, using mother's thinking can definitely have a good learning effect. However, in our current teaching, students are allowed to apply thinking prematurely, that is, they are directly exposed to abstract knowledge and acquire knowledge by memory. Students should be encouraged to use their mother's thinking, acquire knowledge through their children's intuitive observation and epiphany, and pay attention to developing their spontaneity, understanding and creativity.

I first learned the concept of "epiphany" from chimpanzee experiments. After countless failures, chimpanzees suddenly thought of a new way to get bananas, which is "epiphany". If "epiphany" works on children, children should try more, but the class time is limited. Many times, we will rely on the guidance of excellent students and even teachers to achieve our goals. For a large number of students, this has become a mechanical imitation, and has not achieved the effect of "epiphany". Problems such as limited classroom capacity, large class size and separation of subjects limit the generation of children's wisdom, which is also a helpless move.

I remembered the book "Little Peas by the Window". What did these children go through in the school bus? They observe nature and learn biogeography knowledge, learn chemical physics knowledge through hands-on experiments, and design their own classrooms to learn Chinese mathematics knowledge, so that children can always observe the world with the question of "why" and make life a classroom all the time. What a vivid process of wisdom formation! How happy children can receive such education!