Wisdom Academies

 Welcome to the Wisdom Academies! 

The concept for Wisdom Academies grew out of an idea related to teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, which he inherited from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle: that the intellectual virtue of docilitas (docility/teachability) is a necessary condition for being educated. St. Thomas maintained that the moral virtue of prudence, which, he held, is a species of common sense, causes docilitas.

Before being taught outside the home, children generally learn some docility from parents and from their individual conscience, which, according to Aquinas, is the habit of prudence acting as judge, jury, witness, and prosecution of personal choices. In learning docility, we all acquire some common sense.

Common sense is simply some understanding of first principles that are causing some organizational whole to have the unity it has that causes it to tend to behave the way it does. It is an understanding common to anyone who intellectually grasps the nature of something, the way the parts (causal principles) of a whole incline to organize to generate organizational existence and action. Strictly speaking, common sense is the habit of rightly applying first principles of understanding as measures of truth in immediate and mediated judgment, choice, and reasoning! Considered as such, it is the first measure of right reasoning!

Contemporary Enlightenment colleges and universities are essentially designed to drive out common sense from the psyche of students, convince them that the only species of understanding (common sense) is mathematical physics. In doing this, it causes students to become anarchists, unteachable, people out of touch with reality who cannot tolerate to listen or to speak to or with anyone who disagrees with them.

The only method that can possibly work to correct this problem is the one these academies essentially use. This is not because these academies are proposing them, but because they  are evidently true to anyone with common sense about human education: such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.

Peter A. Redpath, PhD

CEO, Aquinas School of Leadership


See course list for uncommon commonsense wisdom being offered by CWLAA starting in September 2021; their educational consultants may be contacted through the Aquinas School of Leadership at:

peterredpath@aquinasschoolofleadership.com.

Syllabi for other courses are presently being prepared. As they start to near completion, their course descriptions will be added to this catalogue.

NOTE: To make more accessible direct contact between talented students and talented educators, as far as possible to remove administrative interference between these individuals, CWELLA/CWECA courses are not designed according to the standard Enlightenment Western college and university 15-week format of semesters and weekly lectures, which include mandatory final exams, term papers, and final grades. They are designed according to an Eastern Martial Arts format of 15 Lessonswhich, according to the level of advancement of the student and permission of the instructormay be done in 15, or more or less, consecutive days or weeks. With the permission of the educational consultant, students in the same class can complete the same course asynchronously. The same class may also have rolling enrollment for the same class, or the educational consultant may continuously open one or more other section(s) throughout the year.

Once a student completes the 15-Lesson course, the educational consultant will meet via email, phone, or in some other online manner, to provide the student with an assessment of the level of development in mastery of the subject the student has achieved. He or she is not required to give the student a final exam, term paper, or a formal grade. He or she may do so if he or she wishes. Instead, if he or she wishes to do so, the consultant will tell the student the grade the consultant would have given had this class been a college or university course. As in Martial Arts, the educational consultant will tell the student whether he or she is ready for advancement to another course within the CWLAA or CWECA curriculum. If a student wants a final exam or to do a term paper and the consultant has not assigned one as a course requirement, the consultant and student may enter into a separate agreement for those activities for which the consultant will be financially remunerated.

Once a student acquires the equivalent of 60 college or university credits (completion of 20 CWLAA courses, including required course Ph 101), the student will be eligible to apply for a Certificate of Completion in the CWLAA part of the CWLAA/CWECA program. At present, no higher level CWECA courses are being offered.

Ph 101 is the orientation course for the CWLAA/CWECA program. Taking it is not required before enrolling in other classes. It explains in detail the nature and rationale for creation of this program. For this reason, only those students who have taken this course will be granted a CWLAA Certificate of Completion, which is required to be admitted to Level 2 (and beyond): Global Leadership and Executive Coaching courses to be taught in CWECA.

Finally, the date of 15 September 2021 does not indicate the start of a new semester. It marks the formal start of the CWLAA/CWECA academies as open to the general public for enrollment in courses, for which they can pre-register. Also, this date does not indicate the first day of classes for any course; although it might be the start date for this or that course, if students have registered for a course before 15 September 2021. Educational consultants decide the  start and end dates for their respective courses. These do not necessarily run consecutively with other courses in the program.