Jean: I don't know if you have the answers to this but I’m going to ask. A lot of people who stay in the profession are mediocre teachers. What's saddening is that teachers know what's right and what's happening is good teachers are leaving. How many times do we have to make the same mistake before people figure out this is not the way to get what you want?ĭr. As we know from education, all these efforts to make it worth teachers while for the kids to do well on standardized tests…all it has produced is kids who do better on a test, but absolutely no better in the classroom. Incentives are an incredibly blunt instrument. You need good judgment about what a particular person in a particular situation needs so that you can improvise around the rules. And what it takes to improvise is what Aristotle, and we shamelessly borrowed, called ‘Wisdom’. If you want to be a good teacher, you're asking yourself, "How do I tailor this curriculum so that Johnny will get the most out of it, and Janie will get the most out of it even though Johnny and Janie are really very different kids?” You need to improvise around a set of standard operating procedures. Here it is.” Does that mean you just slavishly follow the curriculum? Well, if you want to be a mediocre teacher that's what you do. You will never be a successful doctor, because you won’t get patients doing their part to manage chronic diseases.įor a teacher, “This is the best curriculum for teaching Math. If all you're going to do is diagnose, you can't make patients ‘partners’, This is especially important in modern affluent societies where mostly we're trying to manage chronic diseases. The way you make patients ‘partners’ is by having enough empathy and insight into what life looks like to them and to know how to find a way in. It’s also how to get the patient to lose weight, exercise, quit smoking and stop drinking. A doctor may have a set of rules for how to diagnose cardiac disease, but the question is not just diagnosing the disease. You can’t craft rules and incentives to make allowances for the incredible diversity of situations that you face. We think that in any domain of life that involves interaction between human beings, there is no set of rules and there is no set of incentives you can design that will get you what you actually want and need, because people are different. If we force you to do the right thing with the threat of various kinds of sanctions, you'll do the right thing. If we make it worth your while to do the right thing, you'll do the right thing. This incentive side is entirely embraced by economists and adopted from economics. Schwartz: What we think in modern America and most modern states is that we can get what we want and need if we only come up with the right set of rules, bureaucratic structures and procedures and/or the right set of incentives. Jean: What do you feel is wrong with our current systems and institutions, and how may they benefit from practical wisdom?ĭr. Schwartz discusses how generalized incentives fail to enact change in human behavior, and describes his approach to teaching students about the importance of wisdom, and how practical wisdom may be cultivated in professional training programs through hands-on, real world experiences and mentorship. His book Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to do the Right Thing, co-authored with Kenneth Sharpe addresses how to identify and cultivate wisdom and make ourselves healthier and wiser. He appeared on the “ Colbert Report” shortly after his book A Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less was released. As one of the most notable public scholars on wisdom, his TED talks on wisdom and on choice collectively have been viewed more than ten million times. His interests lie in the intersection between economics, morality and psychology. As a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College for 45 years, Barry Schwartz, PhD has focused his work on decision making, wisdom, and work satisfaction.
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