T. S. Eliot on Wisdom and Our Lack

“…the values which we most ignore, the recognition of which we most seldom find in writings on education, are those of Wisdom and Holiness, the values of the sage and the saint….Our tendency has been to identify wisdom with knowledge, saintliness with natural goodness, to minimize not only the operation of grace but self-training, to divorce holiness from education.  Education has come to mean education of the mind only; and an education which is only of the mind…can lead to scholarship, to efficiency, to worldly achievement and to power, but not to wisdom.

–  T.S. Eliot. The Idea of a Christian Society and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faver, 1982),  p 142, cited by Craig Bartholomew & Ryan Dowd, Old Testament Wisdom Literature: A Theological Introduction, 293

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