. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Voicings Publ.
Business students at a large university were assigned the task of interviewing a cross-section of the local community and submit a report on the experience.
One student was less than enthusiastic about the assignment. "I considered it to be a complete waste of time," he said, "until I asked a farmer in his late 70s, ‘How much education have you had?’ He answered, ‘Well, I had six years of schoolin` and seventy-two years of learnin`.’"
Schoolin`and learnin` (acquiring knowledge and acquiring wisdom) are not the same. In our present day society, we seem to have little or no time in our busy schedules for practicing the pursuit of wisdom through serious, uninterrupted, quiet reflection on the mystery of life: who we are and what we ought to be doing with our lives. We are crippled in our search for wisdom by a society which insists on describing success as the ability to acquire knowledge and to skillfully apply that knowledge to the pursuit of personal gain.
…As we acquire knowledge at breakneck speed, are we wise enough to realize the need to slow down, and seriously reflect on how to handle it? Are we wise enough to know what to do with it? Are we wise enough to use it to uplift the human spirit and to better our human relationships? Are we wise enough to apply our learnin` to our schoolin`?
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