Perspective turns knowledge into wisdom
Imagine a city announces a new flyover to reduce traffic congestion. The traffic engineer is pleased: traffic will move faster. The economist calculates the savings in travel time. The politician points to a visible symbol of development. Pollution experts measure the reduced emissions due to smoother flow of traffic.
Now ask the shopkeeper whose storefront will disappear beneath the flyover. Ask the pedestrian who now has to cross six lanes of traffic. Ask the bus commuter who wonders why the money was not spent on public transport, as flyovers serve a minority of the population. Ask the residents of the neighbourhood who will live with the noise and pollution.
Suddenly, the problem looks very different. This is the paradox of complex problems: the more we know about them, the more we may discover that there is to know. Expertise tells us how to solve a particular problem; perspective provides clarity on what the problem actually is.
Universities trying to improve student learning, governments tackling inequality, companies managing organisational change or challenges posed by AI, and societies responding to climate change-all confront problems that cannot be adequately understood from a single vantage point.
A traffic engineer sees traffic, usually only vehicular traffic. A sociologist may observe patterns of inequality and access. An economist perceives incentives and trade-offs. A political scientist sees institutions and power. An environmental scientist sees ecological costs. The commuter, pedestrian, shopkeeper and resident see something else again: the consequences of decisions made by others with little consideration for their well-being. Perspective begins with a deceptively simple question: Who is affected, and in what ways? Perspective is not merely about collecting different opinions. It requires empathy-the ability to imagine what a problem looks like from somewhere other than where we happen to stand. What is a solution to one group of stakeholders may actually be a problem to another.
And empathy alone is not enough. Different perspectives come with different amounts of power to serve populations and to design specific solutions.
Hence, we must also ask: Whose perspective is heard? Whose is missing? Who gets to define the problem? Who benefits from a solution, and who bears its costs? This is where perspective becomes a question of justice and equity.
That is also why education should be more than the accumulation of specialised knowledge. History, economics, sociology, political science, philosophy, literature and the sciences offer not merely different information but different ways of seeing. A broad education should teach us to move between these ways of seeing-and to recognise the limits of our own.
Diverse experiences-through fieldwork, community engagement, collaborative projects, literature, case studies and encounters with people whose lives differ from their own-can deepen this process. Classroom discussions, field experiences, community engagement, collaborative projects and encounters with unfamiliar social worlds can all become occasions for this kind of learning.
This requires the classroom to become a space where a diversity of experiences becomes a source of evidence, rather than merely something students are invited to mention. The teacher can deliberately design questions for which students’ different locations, family backgrounds, social experiences, disciplines or observations produce genuinely different answers. That is a powerful moment of learning about perspective. The classroom becomes a small laboratory of perspective.
The writer is Dean, Office of Academics and Professor, Nayanta University; Views presented are personal.
