Pursuing Wisdom: An Investigation of the Relationship Between Some Ancient Religious Concepts of Wisdom and Current Notions of Critical Thinking Within Information Literacy

In a recent research project, I asked first year college students if they felt they used wisdom when doing research on the Internet. Coming from faith-based contexts, they did not consider the question an unusual one. However, in my discussions of information literacy at the library school, the concept of wisdom was not as common. Following the work of Maxwell and Targowski, this article will investigate connections between current discussion on critical thinking and some ancient ideals of wisdom from the Book of Proverbs and the Analects of Confucius with the hope that such insight will inform and improve our perspective and practice of information literacy.