How Universities can Help Create a Better World

I reviewed Nicholas Maxwell's Understanding Scientific Progress in the last issue, and in this earlier book he focuses his thesis more particularly on how universities can help create a better world by shifting their focus from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry, so the aim of education becomes wisdom oriented towards solving our most pressing global challenges related to living together on a finite planet. The author would agree with EF Schumacher when he said that humanity was now too clever to survive without wisdom. He begins by recapitulating the enormous problems we face which at one level have been exacerbated by scientific and technological development – think of the destructiveness of weapons - even while human nature is relatively constant. As it is, the pursuit of knowledge is underpinned by the general aim to improve the lot of humanity, but the danger is that this can become purely theoretical, divorced from practical application and the creation of more enlightened, wise and civilised world.

A first and fundamental step is clarity of aim, and the cultivation of aim-improving methods. One basic issue with knowledge-inquiry is that it excludes values and aspirations from the intellectual domain of enquiry, thus undercutting its own potential ethical orientation and tending to lose sight of the wood for the specialist trees. Wisdom-inquiry seeks to articulate our problems of living and then propose and critically assess possible solutions from the standpoint of practicality and desirability. The author provides a detailed blueprint of how universities can transform themselves, recommending that each university creates a regular seminar or symposium devoted to the sustained discussion of fundamental problems that cut across conventional academic boundaries. The next chapter looks at how wisdom-inquiry can help solve global problems, focusing in particular on global warming, war, population growth, world population, and destruction of natural habitats and the extinction of species. There are some encouraging signs that what Maxwell calls the wisdom revolution has got underway with interdisciplinary centres in Oxford, Cambridge and his own University College London - and one could observe that such interdisciplinary conversation still takes place Oxbridge high tables, even if this is largely theoretical. The final chapter looks at policies for a wiser world. Such a short review cannot do justice to the rigour and thoroughness of the argument, and the book should be compulsory reading for vice chancellors and senior management of major universities.