Wisdom Schools Are About to Go Mainstream. Here’s Why.

They’re an integral piece of the infrastructure for our emerging life-aligned culture

As our extractive empire culture disintegrates and dissolves in many ways, I’ve written in previous blog posts about

(1) how that creates the necessary openings and catalyst for our new life-aligned culture to emerge, and

(2) what’s beginning to show up in those openings.

Chip Conley’s 8/14/25 post Why Wisdom Schools Are About to Go Mainstream is the latest example I’ve seen of the second idea. This is more evidence that the “imaginal cells” in our cultural “caterpillar” are connecting and starting to form our cultural “butterfly.” For an explanation of what I mean, see my description here.

In his post, Chip quotes Isaac Asimov: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." Then he shares an excerpt from Andrew Murray Dunn’s Substack column 10,000 Wisdom Schools for Innovators:

“Many of our greatest minds and hearts have said something to the effect of how at the end of the day, our greatest problems are spiritual, cultural, educational in nature. That we can’t have the power of Gods without the wisdom, love, and prudence of Gods. So where’s the training for founders and changemakers, engineers and designers, activists and influencers to cultivate such wisdom?”

Chip goes on to say:

“. . . intelligence, unlike wisdom or compassion, is rooted in a mind that grasps at thoughts and fixed beliefs. It seeks to reduce the living universe to a model—a map that inevitably fails to capture the full territory of life. In trying to fit what is sacred and ineffable into mental constructs, intelligence alone becomes a force of destruction. . . . As intelligence scales, how do we ensure that wisdom and compassion lead the way?

“. . . Similarly to how the visionary Krishnamurti believed that right education comes down to educating the educator as a whole person, perhaps what’s most needed is not a new school but a Wisdom School accelerator decelerator CULTIVATOR to cultivate healthy soil for wisdom school entrepreneurs and their visions to flower.

“. . . A training program to empower innovation education entrepreneurs, to learn and practice wise innovation, in the process of building new schools capable of teaching it effectively. . . .

“. . . In the nearly eight years since I hatched the idea for the Modern Elder Academy, the world’s first midlife wisdom school, I’ve seen an acceleration of two major trends around the topics of aging and wisdom. The obvious trend is the new fascination on longevity. . . . The less obvious and more nascent trend (which is just starting to grow like a baby bamboo shoot) is how do we create wisdom schools as the balance to AI domination? . . . today, there’s a burgeoning curiosity about creating new educational institutions and communities dedicated to wisdom to be the human balance to AI.

“. . . From time immemorial, Wisdom Schools have emerged in times of global crisis or on the cusp of great leaps in human consciousness in order to help shepherd our planet through the transition. While there is academic teaching that goes on here, that is not the primary business of a Wisdom school; the primary business is to help anchor human wholeness and to work with the core practices that sustain the transformation of consciousness.” 

Our schools and educational system naturally reflect the Newtonian industrial-age consciousness we’ve been operating with for millennia. The cultural transformation we need and that’s starting to emerge is based on a different paradigm of right relationships and sacred reciprocity with the Earth and all other beings.

Wisdom schools that “. . . help anchor human wholeness and . . . sustain the transformation of consciousness” could well be an integral part of that.