Foundations of a Wisdom-Cultivating Pedagogy: Developing Systems Thinking across the University Disciplines

Efforts to educate for wisdom are sorely needed in order to solve humanity’s most pressing problems, as explained by philosopher Nicholas Maxwell and psychologist Robert Sternberg, among others. This paper explains that the handful of wisdom pedagogies that have been put forward to date, however, are inadequate for developing the sort of wisdom that can solve our major problems, because they fail to identify and target for development four cognitive functions necessary for wise decision-making. These functions are causal analysis, prospection, social cognition, and metacognition. I show how adequately performing these cognitive functions, which constitute the core of systems thinking, is necessary for solving our most serious global problems, as various systems-thinking experts have also argued. Drawing on recent research on learning and the development of expertise, I explain how the capabilities to perform these functions can be developed by pedagogical methods that help students construct more adequate cognitive models of (i) natural, social, and psychological systems of cause and effect and (ii) the cognitive procedures required to comprehend and effectively intervene in these systems. The basic principles for implementing this wisdom/systems-thinking pedagogy across academic disciplines are explained, and examples from different disciplines are provided.