Knowledge, Experience, and Reasoning = Wisdom
Knowledge plus experience, run through our own reasoning, is roughly how wisdom gets made. We might wish otherwise, but memorizing material by rote does not turn people into people who can actually use it. Rote learning has its place: it fixes the things we need to pull up fast, and what any given person commits to memory varies with their work and what they need at their fingertips. Learning a stock of words and their meanings so you can draw on them every day is the plain version of this. That stock is what we usually mean by knowledge.
Most of the learning a person does happens when they are very small. Children form little theories, run the hypotheses, and test them, probably before they can say a word. Adults tend to reason in language, but a child is already working out how the world behaves before speech arrives. How exactly that happens, with or without words, is something science will likely pin down eventually, if it isn't picking it apart already.
Reward and punishment teach children which of their ideas hold up and which don't. Animals learn the same way, even though we once assumed their behavior was fixed by instinct. Instincts are real and inborn, which makes sense given that most animals have to manage a few things on their own from the moment they're born.
Each of us is a separate individual before we are even born. The DNA we carry sets up a lot of our strengths and our weak spots, which is why no child turns out to be a carbon copy of a parent. Trouble starts when a parent wants the child to love what the parent loves, except the child arrived with a different brain, a different body, different aptitudes. That wish can be set up to fail, and the child can end up carrying the blame for not managing something they were never built to manage. Growing up feeling worthless in a parent's eyes, the child may never get around to becoming his or her own person.
My own mother was the younger of two daughters, no sons in the family. Her older sister was kept busy with chores inside the house while their father counted on my mother to help him out on the farm. He was not being cruel. The problem was that she was frightened of horses, and in those years everything on the farm still ran on horses.
Long before parents catch on, children are already thinking, reasoning, and making plans. A child reads tones of voice, faces, the set of someone's body, and the way people react, and from all that figures out whether a thing is safe to do. Parents, meanwhile, sometimes say one thing and mean the opposite. Picture telling a child to go kiss someone when the child can plainly see that the person dislikes them, or that the parent dislikes the person. That is a double bind: one message in the words, another in everything else.
We can pick things up from our own experience, and we can pick them up from other people's. The catch is that somebody else's conclusion or theory may not slot neatly into how we already understand the world. In the end, though, most parents do want their children thinking on their own and making sound decisions, so the children can stand independent and need less and less watching over. Parents, after all, usually die first.
Children should get to the point of weighing what they have learned and lived through, then reworking their stock of knowledge, some of it borrowed from others, some of it their own homemade theories, to fit new facts as those facts arrive. The other option, the one people reach for too often, is to bend or toss out the new information because it clashes with the theory already in place.
Time is part of how wisdom accumulates, along with having learned to think for yourself as the knowledge and the experience pile up. New or strange information can be unsettling, and rejecting it is the easier move in the moment. The bill comes due later, and it runs higher than if the person had sat with the scary or painful thing and worked it through. People do exactly this with their own health, and sometimes when they finally act, the window has closed. We all have a right to our mistakes, and some of them teach us something. But fear of change, or fear of what might follow, can stop us from so much as attempting the thing.
Were you brainwashed as a child?
Colleges and universities were once places you went to meet new ideas and try them on. The point was a safe room for open discussion, somewhere a new idea could be floated without much risk. Professors held their own opinions about how things ought to be, and debate in class was welcome. You were still expected to master certain material, especially in a field or profession where you had to know those things to graduate and move on, otherwise the school wasn't doing the job it was paid to do.
A good deal of wisdom simply isn't available through study, and some of it never shows up inside a university, a medical school, or a law school at all. Individuality seasons it too, down to personal taste. Trying something you suspect you won't like rarely does any harm. I have gone through experiences I wasn't fully ready for that handed me strengths I doubt I could have built any other way.
You are never truly ready for anything. At some point you go ahead regardless, because the moment of being completely prepared may simply never arrive. That is where wisdom actually comes from. I did not understand grief in any real way until my best friend, her unborn child, and her young daughter were killed in a car accident.
I may be older than you, and in a fair number of ways I may be wiser, which is part of why I write this blog. Do I expect you to swallow everything here? No. I would settle for putting something in front of you that nudges you to act or think a little differently in a way that does you some good.
I teach, and teaching has shown me how unalike students are, in the knowledge and the experiences they walk in with, and in how they think about learning itself. The differences get loud around the time grades are handed out.
Think for yourself. Weigh what you have been taught instead of accepting it unexamined, and test it in real life where you can. There is a reason every science course comes with lab sessions: students need experiences they can tie back to the lectures. That habit has a name, critical thinking, and it is precisely the habit dictators would rather their people never pick up.