Revival: knowledge without wisdom

How does a doctor tell a daughter that her mother's life support needs to be withdrawn? It takes more than just knowledge of physiology. It also requires an understanding of loss. How does an emergency room doctor avoid despair when faced with a baby battered nearly to death by its own father? Such horror requires a faith in humanity that cannot be learned in the anatomy lab.

It's not just doctors who could benefit from a broader education. Everyone can.

Studying drama would not help financiers devise the complicated financial schemes that periodically plunge the economy into financial crises. But if they were familiar with Goethe's Faust, they might think twice about the consequences of their actions.

Being able to quote poetry will not help politicians get elected (certainly not in Australia). But what if they had the opportunity to read Shelley's Ozymandias? Perhaps it would make them more humble and thoughtful about their accomplishments?

As I say this, I'm looking around the audience, and I can see the raised eyebrows of my academic colleagues. A generation of graduates familiar with the great works of history, philosophy and literature is a wonderful vision. But they doubt that reading Goethe and Shelley, not to mention Shakespeare, guarantees wisdom.

They are correct. Reading, by itself, won't make anyone wise. Experience is also required. As Odysseus learns on his journey back to Ithaca, some important lessons can only be learned the hard way-through bitter experience.

Nothing has changed. Youth start with sex, drugs and rock and roll, and with experience, they eventually come to appreciate the Delphic prescription "nothing to excess". Tragic exceptions only serve to prove the rule.

There is a problem, however. Experience alone cannot guarantee wisdom any more than reading books can. The lessons of life are only available to those who are ready to learn them. If wisdom is the goal, then students must "walk 10,000 miles, read 10,000 books", said the 17^th-century Chinese philosopher Gu Yanwu. In other words, becoming wise requires more than a set of adventures but a cultured mind that is open, ready and able to absorb the lessons that experience teaches.

Pasteur famously said that "Chance favours the prepared mind", and our job as university academics is to take his words seriously. To prepare students to learn from experience, we need to go beyond vocational training.

Life, death, tragedy, love, beauty, courage, loyalty-all of these are omitted from our modern vocational curricula, and yet, when it comes time to sum up our lives, they are the only things that ever really matter.

On Ash Wednesday, the priest admonishes the faithful to "remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return." A salutary reminder of what we all have waiting for us. In the meantime, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, we spend our years trying to find some meaning in our lives.

It is easy to fall into the pit of nihilism, to consider life "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". But before we let our students reach Macbeth's conclusion, we should at least try to provide them with the intellectual foundation they need to make such a judgment.