ABSTRACT
Wisdom? It is a gauche term to use in an age of postmodern irony and scepticism. And yet without some sense of justifying value how can one begin to talk seriously about the arts or about education? The last word particularly carries connotations of advance, development, of irreducible value. To educate a person into cynicism or nihilism sounds like a contradiction. Even so, we are deeply uneasy with the notion of wisdom. It isn’t employed in our educational documents, nor is it invoked by postmodern academic critics.
