What is Wisdom Worth?

Get wisdom, . . .

                   Proverbs 4:7

Atul Gawande is two things at once, a philosopher surgeon. He can operate on your colon, and he can write about how doctors face human mortality (well, maybe not at the same time). He is equally at home on staff at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at The New Yorker–a scientist with the heart of a humanitarian.  

I would love to see his tribe increase, this tribe of philosopher scientists, or scientific philosophers, if you will. And I think Trinity School is uniquely positioned to help that happen. That’s what I want to talk about tonight.

Gawande is not a Christian–you’ll have to read his book to get a sense of how he lives into his Hindu heritage. But he bridges a divide that I is growing in our cultuer, an unfortunate divide:  the chasm that separates math and science from the humanities. In fact, my argument is that in the future the world has a deep need for people who can master both the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and the traditional Liberal Arts like literature, history, and philosophy.

Gawande is a teller of stories, and his book, Being Mortal, an exploration of the limits, failures, and possibilities of the medical profession’s approach to aging and death, is full of stories. Some of them are very personal, like the one he tells about his own father, a physician with a tumor in his spine. 

His father “interviewed” more than one neurosurgeon. He ended up choosing Edward Benzel of the Cleveland Clinic. Why? In his book, Gawande tells how Benzel modelled what experts call “shared decision making.” Benzel was as confident as other physicians they had seen, but he was more patient with the elder Dr. Gawande’s questions. Here’s what the younger Gawande wrote in his book:

He recognized that my father’s questions came from fear. So he took the time to answer them, even the annoying ones. Along the way, he probed my father, too. He said that it sounded like he was more worried about what the operation might do to him than what the tumor would.

Benzel had a way of looking at people that let them know he was really looking at them. He was several inches taller than my parents, but he made sure to sit at eye level. He turned his seat away from the computer and planted himself directly in front of them. He did not twitch or fidget or even react when my father talked.  He had the midwesterner’s habit of waiting a beat after people have spoken before speaking himself, in order to see if they are really done.

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Gawande contrasts this with two other models of medical posture: the paternalistic (“Trust me and do what I say”) and the informative (“I offer no opinions here, I’m just giving you the facts and the data”). Both of these models fall short of serving human patients well. The paternalistic model lacks humility and empathy; the informative model is robotic and uninvolved, as though the doctor were only a walking-talking Google search. As Gawande says, “We want information and control, but we also want guidance.” And guidance requires skills like listening, asking good probing questions, discernment, patience to go beyond the first-order desires of patients, ability to listen for deep fears and cares. These are much more like the skills that are developed in a humanities seminar tackling complex texts than in a highly technical and demanding science class. No one is questioning the physician’s need for a deep understanding of organic chemistry and pharmacology; but our brilliant doctors will need other skills that only the humanities can develop.  

Bill Roper, the Dean of UNC’s Medical School and CEO of UNC’s Healthcare System (and also a Trinity alumni parent), tells me that the kind of medical practice that Gawande is talking about in his book is the kind of education that medical schools across the country are working hard to provide now. Physicians need not only the hard skills of math, organic chemistry, and biology, but also the softer skills of empathy, good listening, and the ability to frame good questions. 

A classical education has always been good at both sides of this challenge. Both the liberal arts of learning and the sciences have flourished in institutions of classical education. Like Trinity School.  At Trinity, our commitment to and success with the liberal arts has been intentional and most effective. Listen to these two Trinity grads talk about their experience.

What you hear is the fruit of a great education in the arts of learning: the skills of attending well, of reading and writing, of public speaking, of thinking critically. All of our classes and the entire arc of a Trinity education from TK-12 contribute to this success.

Now on the other side, with Trinity’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education, I give you our Robotics program, which has flourished now for about eight years, since the founding of Trinity’s Upper School. I don’t know how many of you know about this program, and I want you all to take a close look at it and what it is doing for students. In the first year of Trinity’s Upper School, Trinity parent and scientist Mark Butler proposed to start, on a volunteer basis, a Robotics program that was part of the nation-wide FIRST Tech Challenge. I had never heard of FIRST, but the more I learned about it, the more excited I was to see it grow as a “sport of the mind.” Under Mark’s leadership, the program took off, and other leaders have taken the baton from Mark and passed it on. Trinity alumnus faculty Derek Skeen now runs the program. Here are some things you should know about the Robotics program:

• 19 students are currently involved.
• We have a Middle School Resource class and a MS Engineering Club that teach students the Engineering Design process--great prep for US Robotics
• A number of students have gone from Trinity robotics into Engineering and Design fields in college and beyond.
• The project-based learning that happens in this program is a beautiful and missional thing--talk about engagement!

I wanted to share this program with you also because I think it provides a model for the way we plan to grow other STEM-based programs at Trinity. That model? Start with small bets, prototype some classes, and if the students come and thrive, support and scale the program. Next year we are hoping to do just that with a set of new Engineering Design courses which we hope to pilot for our Upper School. The vision for this class and for others that may sprout from the same root, is to enable students to use computer aided design (CAD) software, 3-D printers, coding languages, and an array of digital, woodworking, and machining tools to envision, design, and build products and solutions to real-world problems. I attended a cross-departmental meeting recently where faculty from the science, math, visual arts, music, drama, humanities, and theology all brainstormed how such a space and such a program might integrate and enhance the good work we are already doing in all those areas.

This is all very exciting, and I’d say that one of the focuses of our leadership here at the school over the next 3-5 years will be in developing and growing this kind of good work in applied math, science and engineering. And also to build Lower School and Middle School programs that feed into this.

So what do you get when you put a strong humanities focus together with a robust education in applied math, science, and technology? Well, for one thing, I think you get good preparation for being the kind of doctor that Atul Gawande is talking about in his book. In other words, you get widsom.  

What is Wisdom?

I had a professor of Old Testament Wisdom Literature–that’s Proverbs and Ecclesiastes–who said that wisdom is the “art of driving well through life.” Do you remember when you first learned to drive? (Or do you remember when you taught a son or daughter how to drive?)  How to stay between the lines, how to slow before a curve and accelerate into it, how to hit the brakes gently, how to turn left in traffic--these are things that come only with enormous practice. There’s an art to them.   

Driving well through our lives is not easy. There are dangers and challenges, and there is no rule book that we can follow all the time.  We all need wisdom, whatever “road” we are driving on:

• The judge who has to decide whether to make an exception to recommended sentencing guidelines needs wisdom.
• The teacher who suspects that some of her students are not making friends needs wisdom.
• The venture capitalist who is trying to decide how much control and information to demand in exchage for investment needs wisdom.
• The clinical trials project manager who is faced with an ambiguous interpretation of informed consent needs wisdom.
• The social scientist whose experiment may cause harm to the participants needs wisdom.  
• And any parent who is trying to decide when to give her child a cell phone needs wisdom.

In the classical tradition, wisdom is a moral virtue. It’s one of the four cardinal virtues–the other three are justice, self-control, and courage. At Trinity we talk about these four virtues a lot. Here are two places where we reference them as the points on our moral compass: in our use of technology, and in athletics.  In these spheres, as in others, the habits that students form by their repeated actions either promote or detract from their ability to “drive well” through life. 

If we dissect wisdom, we find that it consists of two skills:

• First, the ability to deliberate rationally about one’s choices;
• And, second, the ability to discern which choices serve one’s true purpose best.  

In order to deliberate, students need to be able to think critically and well--that’s what a classical education does. And in order to discern, they need a clear sense of True North when it comes to their life’s purpose. How can anyone act wisely and discern whether an action serves one’s purpose if they don’t know what that purpose is?

And here’s the thing about purpose: Common culture would tell us that students need to define their own purpose.  But purpose is not something we invent; it is something we discover. Our purpose is a gift.  We were created by God to glorify him by enjoying him forever. We were made for God, to serve him first and others second. Ourselves, well, we flourish when we are third. This is what Trinity’s motto of Non Nobis means: “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory.”

There is an idea abroad that virtues like wisdom can be developed in “values-neutral” spaces like our public schools. I am not a denigrator of public schools–any institution that educates 80-90% of our state’s students deserves our respect and support. But I would not be honest if I said that I was confident that school with absolute commitments to being “values-neutral” will be able to develop wisdom, self-control, justice, and courage in our young students. Why?

Because we learn to live morally by living into a particular story. Stories inspire us and guide us.  And in the Christian tradition, we believe that One Story shapes us: the story of the crucified Son of God.  Values neutral spaces are embarrassed or offended by the particularity of this story. But we at Trinity believe that it is the story that we are all graciously invited into, and we keep telling ourselves this story.  It shapes all we are and all we do. The motto that stands above the door of our gym makes no sense apart from this story: “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory.” But within a community shaped by the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, this makes so much sense.

  

People get all lathered about teaching good science in our schools. They want to make sure that we are teaching students the way reality is when it comes to something like climate change. It’s dangerous not to tell them the truth about reality. I agree.

And I also think that we must have the same kind of commitment to teaching about other parts of reality, including the reality of the human person, created in God’s image, guilty and enslaved by sin, redeemed only by the grace of God in Christ, through his life, death on a cross, and resurrection to life. These ideas, if true, are as important as gravity and thermodynamics.

I will end with another story, the story of another Trinity graduate. I think these stories of our graduates are so important and helpful to us as we think about the value of a Trinity education.

I’d like you to meet Chris Wu. Chris graduated in 2015 and enrolled at Stanford. I met up with Chris recently when I was out in California (I have some grandchildren out there!) for study leave. I try to meet Trinity grads whenever I travel, and I’ve always come away from these meetings with a deep gratitude for these students and appreciation for what Trinity has meant to them in their education.

  

But Chris’ story is a great one to show us the value of a Trinity education. After two years majoring in Electrical Engineering, with a plan to apply for medical school, Chris took the fall of 2017—what would have been his junior fall quarter—he took that off to intern for SpaceX. Then, two weeks into his January term, a friend and former roommate asked him to take the spring semester off and work for his small start-up.

Turns out that this friend had taken a high school science project (through Google’s Science Fair) and turned it into a real idea for a biomedical start-up company called Athelas (named for the healing plant that Aragorn applied to Frodo’s wound). After we had lunch, Chris walked me over to the start-up space and I got to see the work in progress. They have built an in-home device about the size of Amazon’s Alexa, and its purpose is to measure blood platelets and other blood cells for patients with rare blood diseases and those whose pharmaceutical treatments affect the blood and need to be constantly regulated. Before this device, such a patient would have to go into a clinic and have blood drawn intravenously. With this device, the patient simply pricks her finger, smears a drop of blood on a glass slide, inserts the slide into the device whose optical microscopy instantly reads the sample and uploads the data to a program on the patient’s computer.

Chris’s role? He is tweaking the electronics in the device. And he is helping the team perfect the way that they read the slides—apparently blood platelets get pretty sticky when the blood is smeared on the slides and this makes them hard to count.

So maybe that’s more than you wanted to know about this project, but I thought it was really cool. And I want to just highlight a few things from this story and from the conversation I had with Chris that afternoon, things that demonstrate what we are talking about when we say that a Trinity education helps shape young people who can live wisely in the world.

I see Chris learning to “drive well” through his young life, designing it wisely. His decision to hit the pause button on his studies and practice a few things in the working world—I know that will be controversial to some, but I see it as eminently wise. If he ends up in medical school, as he hopes, he won’t have the freedom to prototype some things as he’s doing now. I pray that this year will be clarifying for him as he sorts out his calling.

When Chris was a Trinity student, he was a stellar STEM student and pushed Trinity’s curriculum to the limits. But he was also a fine writer and reader of texts, and I remember teaching him a unit in Theology class—his paper was one of the best I’ve read over the years. I asked Chris about the value of a humanities education for someone so invested in the STEM world. He said it was really important. We talked about hard decisions that people in the tech and VC world have to face all the time. At a tech start-up like the one he’s working on now, there is this huge pressure to be first to market. But what methods do you use to get there? What corners can you cut–or not?  What sacrifices are you willing to make? And it’s not just the temptations to do something wrong—in a way, those decisions are easier. But it’s the good versus good decisions that are the hard ones. Like the greater good of the product versus the particular good of subjects in a trial. For these kinds of decisions, a Trinity humanities education is invaluable. And a Trinity Christian education may be the best thing of all.

My goal is not to put Chris on a pedastal, but to allow you to see a Trinity education through the lens of his life.  

And I’ll say this as I close: I am glad that Chris Wu is in the world. I’m glad that he is bringing his Christian faith and his education in wisdom, the liberal arts, and the sciences to bear on relieving the pain and suffering of a particular group of people. And when it comes time for me make the hardest of life’s health decisions, I’d be glad to have Chris as my doctor. And I’m grateful and glad that Trinity has played some part in his education and in the education of hundreds of students who will lead in the next generation. Non nobis.