If asked if “the ability or result of an ability to think and act utilizing knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight” (dictionary.com) can be taught to another person, how would you answer? Teachers teach students to understand the curriculum, and apply the basic skills to questions they have not seen before, parents teach their kids life skills, and religion teaches insight. All these examples point to yes, this “ability” is taught all the time, but in today’s society, the word that this definition belongs to is constantly labeled as not being teachable, and only acquired from life experiences. 

Wisdom was first described as “[unable to] be imparted” in German author Hermann Hesse’s 1922 book “Siddhartha”, While it’s understandable why some, or most, people take this to be true, ultimately you can learn wisdom like you can Chemistry. Wisdom may not be able to be taught to a discouraged soul and mind, and any attempt will be nonsense to the corresponding ears. But to an enlightened, eager soul and mind, the ears will always be ready to sit, listen, and appreciate the advice of someone more well-versed in life than them. “Wisdom comes with age”, is what we hear most people say today. While that holds true in some cases, but you can learn wisdom at any age. When taken as a generic, mainstream piece of wisdom, “Live in the moment” may only occur to some people in their seventies, when sitting on the porch regretting all the times they blew off family for work, but you can learn it at 10 also, when your grandma is teaching you her takeaways from life before she can’t anymore. If you take that wisdom to heart, and practice it in your daily life, you’re just as wise as if you came across it at 70. Perhaps even wiser if at 10, you are practicing it, whereas at 70, you've never considered it before. 

Additionally, it’s not that people can’t learn wisdom, it’s that people learn it no more. With most American youth in secular public school, not learning the values of the Bible on a daily basis, they are not being taught how to fight themselves and the urges of the appetitive will, but the tribulations of society that always seem to be out for “poor oppressed, little you”. The telos of public school has shifted from equally meaningful to secular, and empty, as it teaches contemporary students how to fight  the prejudice in society, and how to promote equal treatment. In principle, those are good values, but when replacing the lesson of controlling and working on one’s own soul and desires first, students cannot master that without learning how and why to apply those teachings to their daily lives. Not to mention, public school teaches the corrupted values of equality and functioning in society and perpetuates the idea of never ending, so it’s not even introducing useful, real topics actually important to further human flourishing. For further explanation, Dennis Prager expands on this in his “Master’s Program”. 

Moreover, if wisdom isn’t taught, how does it come to be present in one’s mind and part of one’s nature? Commonly thought of as two distinct concepts, a life experience and instruction embody each other. Wisdom seems to be gained both from experience and instruction, where the instruction is an experience, and an experience acts as instruction. Even if one is to believe wisdom can be “absorbed” solely from life experiences, then an experienced person has still learned it, just not in the way “learning” is conventionally thought of as today. His circumstances have taught him to be wise, and make the right decisions. What’s more, when learning wisdom from a work like the Bible, you are having a life experience, that is, the reading of the Bible in front of you. This all may sound similar to knowledge, which is because knowledge and wisdom are very similar things. As previously established, wisdom can be taught as well as acquired over time. The same goes for knowledge as well. The only difference between the two is simply that wisdom is more suggestive than knowledge is. One who is wise knows the ways to carry out his life according to values, whereas one who is knowledgeable knows the methods to carry out logic. Wisdom is faith in God when knowledge is certainty in a statistic, or historical fact. Nevertheless, the two practices go hand in hand.

All in all, wisdom is not something that can never be examined and controllably obtained. Although places like public school, which will still remain popular for quite a long time, are the places wisdom goes to die, bringing it into our personal lives, and surrounding ourselves with more theoretical, conceptual things, for lack of a better term, is a great way to learn wisdom. You don’t need to wait until your senior years for wisdom to be bestowed upon you from your many experiences. Make experiences now, which require you to use wisdom you've learned to make difficult decisions, or where you’re considering the validity of a certain thought. After all, Jesus is one of, if not the most wise person in the history of the world, and he was crucified around the young age of 33. Although he is the Lord, he is still a worthy example, as he still had to learn wisdom before imparting it on others.