Educating for Practical Wisdom, Teaching What Cannot Be Taught: Critical Reflections on Fostering Wisdom in Business Schools

Introduction: The Traditional Teaching Dogma And The Need For Practical Wisdom

Every year, business schools worldwide churn out overconfident graduates, over reliant on their ability to use scientific knowledge to deal with real-life organizational and societal problems. This is how the education-to-job pipeline has managed to fit the job market by teaching people specific knowledge for a given professional track.

Business school programs are built on the premise that students should acquire technical capabilities and scientifically grounded methods to deal with real-life managerial and business issues. Thus, a cursory examination of the dominant teaching curriculum in business schools reveals the overemphasizing of analytical tools, inducing that management situation can be apprehended as neat technical problems (Raelin, 2017). This focus on enshrined scientific solutions comes at the expense of other approaches, such as character education, ethic, and practical wisdom (Bennis & O'Toole, 2005). This percept is criticized by many thinkers and researchers (Flyberg, 2001; Ghoshal, 2005; Pfeffer & Fong, 2004; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011), who question the capacity of business graduates to deal effectively with the complexity and ambiguity of the world. Given the ecological, ethical, and political mayhem caused by highly educated business leaders, it is legitimate to raise the question: Do business graduates learn enough wisdom in university to allow them to manage wisely, let alone live accordingly?

Some scholars argue that management students trained to become executors of economic and organizational management theories and principles are causing bad corporate governance and moral decline (Baden & Higgs, 2015; Ghoshal, 2005). The dearth of character education is problematic regarding the pedagogical pattern of management curricula and the outcomes of such design. Students seem to learn the wrong things in the wrong ways because they are being taught the wrong things in the wrong ways (Schwartz, 2010). Education that puts much stock on knowledge and technical skills can be detrimental to individual and societal welfare. It hinders compassion and common good orientation and reinforces cultural, political, and economic forces that shape students into alienated empty suits (Taleb, 2008), relentlessly competing with others to pursue unexamined and market-manipulated desires.

In recent years, a growing stream of organizational research has sought to shift the goal and the process of business school education away from information transfer and toward holistic wisdom-oriented approaches (McKenna & Rooney, 2014; Nonaka & Toyama, 2007; Schwartz, 2010; Sternberg, 2001). Over the world, numerous universities are considering developing character-based and ethically driven approaches to deal with modern society's increasingly complex and wicked problems. Educating for practical wisdom is a deliberate effort by institutions to assist students in developing expertise in fundamental pragmatics of business life (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Brooks et al., 2019; Chia & Holt, 2008; Schwartz, 2010).