Determining the ‘common good’ in educating for intelligence, creativity, and wisdom

In the Star Wars franchise, the fictional character Yoda is often portrayed as being wise. Part of Yoda’s charm and mystique rests with his role in acting on behalf of the ‘common good’. Although wise, we could also argue that he is also intelligent and creative, his link with the ‘Force’ allowing him to find solutions in a complex and many-faceted context. Despite his solutions being sometimes flawed, Yoda’s knowledge, methods, and training to act for the universal good by ‘tapping into the universe’ allowed him to review and correct his mistakes. In a galaxy closer to our experience, we face challenges that are both deeply personal and global in nature. Yoda’s world view has direct relevance to the expectations placed on teachers to somehow enable the objectives of modern education to cultivate latent intelligence through the integration of discipline knowledge with creative and critical thinking, to lay the foundations of the development of wisdom for the ‘common good’. But what is this ‘common good’ that provides the scaffolding, or possibly even the ‘glue’ for the interrelationship between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom? In this chapter, we discuss the development of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom in formal schooling and examine the aspirations of the Australian Curriculum (AC) to support students in employing both their intelligence and creativity to produce wise solutions. We find that the potential is not yet realized, despite the opportunities offered in the general capabilities dimension of the AC. We look to aspects of the GCs that are given more emphasis in faith-based and culturally specific education contexts, particularly as they can more clearly articulate their view of this elusive ‘common good’. We determine that an over-reliance on cognitive development might be thwarting attempts to unify and actualize intelligence, creativity, and wise problem-solving in the school context and that greater attention needs to be paid to understanding what such a ‘common good’ might be. Without agreement on its contemporary meaning, there can be no development of wise problem-solving.