Introduction

"Wisdom" is an outgrowth of thirty years at the chalkboards and amazement at how so many sincere people with so many impressive combined credentials as educators can concoct and perpetuate a system as ineffective as schools. When over half the juniors in our high schools cannot recall and use concepts they were offered in Seventh Grade, we can assume that over half our young people are screaming silently through underachievement and defiance that something is fundamentally wrong. They are at serious risk. In sad fact, the majority of young people are at some degree of risk. While all risk youngsters do not become adults at risk, adults at risk were youngsters at risk.

Within this book, we take the stand that:

1. The educational system is wanting.
2. Schools are models for our-below-potential jurisprudence, research, organized religions, counseling, political manufacturing, merchandizing, media, and bureaucratic entities.
3. The systems are products of both individual and corporate input by people who believed, by and large, that they were doing the right thing.

Fundamental to the systems are our decision-making processes which follow false precepts.

Who can tell false precepts or false prophesies from those which should be heeded? To determine the difference, Humanity has for centuries endorsed one system of logic or another and we are as good or as bad as we are because of them. While we have created a civilization and complicated technologies far beyond our other-animal earth-mates, we have not emerged from a world which is prone to solve its problems by war, in which earth's bounty and welfare for the fiscal elite are out of parity with our poor, in which crime erodes us all, and in which multitudes of children are under-parented.

Three underrated statements express a limiting part of our situation. Josh Billings opined: it ain't the truth which hurts us, its what we believe to be true which ain't so. Julius Caesar maintained that people believe what they want to believe. And from Thomas Piane: A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.. These observations show how much our decision-making processes are like playing poker. Bad ideas like bad hands can be discarded right away. The drama begins when players each believe that his or her cards are the best; that is, each wants to believe his or her hand is the best and bets on the hand. Without further complications, the best hand will take the pot. Holders of the worst hands have lost little and have a stake for the next deal, but holders of the second-best hands have bet and lost. Their resources are less. What they believed to be true hurt them. Civilization progresses and exists on tenets we believe to be true. Some are true and valuable; many are not.

We can carry the model of the poker game further-- the best hand does not always win!

Through bluffing or subterfuge, with or without ethical considerations, a second-best hand will sometimes take the pot. We painfully see this in the amount of junk among the prized nuggets which becomes published or aired by our mass media. Believing themselves to be correct, many people invested time and talent to create the mountains of discarded material. Authors of the junk which became published better purveyed their work. They won the pot.

Like the poker hands which some players thought were winners, many systems of logic have survived history, each with some credibility, all with failings. Either they did not cover the gamut of human needs satisfactorily or they were so improbable and complicated that they couldn't be followed. Players in these philosophical games include people like Aristotle, Plato and political theorists, poets, cynics, scientists, mathematicians, moralists, and founders of our many religious sects.

No human enterprise exists without philosophy. Philosophy may be non-structured--one person living alone on the planet needs no structure. But with two people, rules for getting along are either established or that rudiment of civilization will perish. On a planet infested with six billion people, the philosophy must be highly structured to accommodate multitudes and simplistic enough for individuals to follow. The alternative is chaos.

Among such systems of logic as syllogistic, deductive and inductive reasoning, Boolean logic, fuzzy logic, existentialism, pragmatism, solipsism, stoicism, science, or mathematics, another philosophical hand or player may be superfluous. However, through Wisdom , humanity is dealt a new hand.