Education and Intellectual Wisdom

Several critical intellectual skills that teachers don't often think to model for their students or even attempt to inculcate:

●the way to discern the fundamental human questions that lie beneath a text

●the way to discern between primary, secondary and tertiary matters and to maintain those distinctions

●the way to listen to the tone of an argument and to take that tone appropriately into account in giving an assessment

●the way to bring aesthetic sensibilities to bear upon any object of inquiry

●the way to attain knowledge through belief and to know what kind of knowledge that is

●the way to practice the “willing suspension of disbelief”

●the way to translate between different authors (i.e Calvin and Aquinas, Locke and Rousseau, or Hegel and Descartes), between different disciplines (i.e philosophy, theology, and poetry), or even between different fields (i.e. sociology and theology, poetry and science, or mathematics and philosophy)

●the way not only to distinguish between the True, the Good and the Beautiful but also to listen to their essential harmony

●the way to convince yourself to care about everything and anything

●the way to adjust even the base of an intellectual structure without toppling the whole structure

●the way to understand, order and direct your emotional responses to texts, authors and ideas

●the way to understand and work with the differences between organic and mechanical systems

●the way to understand the complex interactions between instinct, experience and knowledge

Any other intellectual skills you wish your teachers would have modeled or attempted to inculcate?