Who Provides Wisdom?
Teaching, knowledge, parenting
Wisdom is the godly, practical use of knowledge. Knowledge is power.
Parents translate the world to their children. The world is confusing and untruthful. What to do? How to do it? What is meaningfull and what needs to be ignored? One challenge for parents is believing they have to learn all the information all at once.
Parents learn and then teach learning strategies: they create structure! Structure is a major task for every adult. It’s easy for us to be overwhelmed by the masses of data confronting us, even as adults. Yet we must create meaning and power for our children. If they cannot read, for example, they should just write “victim” on their foreheads. They are powerless in a hostile world.
Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and Power Shift, detailed his worldwide, 25 year study of the power dynamics found in knowledge. Knowledge, in his book Power Shift, is one of three sources of power in the world. Violence and money are the first two sources of power.
Parents and children cannot afford ignorance. The power shift now is to manipulation of information sources and conclusions drawn from data. Imbedded commands, for example, can make weather data look like man-made global warming when in fact, a report of 500 experienced weathermen indicates that global warming is merely a natural cycle–not man-made.
Global warming has impacted whole populations long before our life styles included cars, etc. Thus, we can choose to forfeit our liberties to lazy thinking, or we can look carefully into high impact issues for ourselves. Unfortunately, the same media which has informed us also anesthetizes us into passivity.
Who has not been hypnotized by television? If we are in a habit of passivity, why should we bother to dig deeply for truth and then act on it?
Parents and teachers are the ones to interpret the meaning behind the flood of data which overwhelms everyone in this dementedly hasty world! Without building meaning, there is no wisdom to be found in the constant stimulation of random data which batters our conscious minds from dawn until midnight.
Where do you find your wisdom?
