Wisdom, or knowledge?

Ken Myers, in his book Signs of the Times, makes the following distinction between knowledge and wisdom.

"Literary critic Cleanth Brooks, in an essay on literature and technology, once obverved: "Secretly we may  hunger for wisdom, but our overt craving nowadays is, of course, for information." Later in this article, Brooks later made mention of the famous lines from T.S. Eliot which lament the loss of wisdom in the growing flood of public knowledge, and the loss even of knowledge in a deluge of sheer information.  Mere knowldege can easily be mistaken for wisdom, just as the accumulation of info-bits, factoids, and trivia can replace the pursuit of knowledge . 

Richard Weaver, a thinker committed to the recovery of the tradition of wisdom, wrote in 1948 that, "Having been told by the reeltivists that he cannot have truth, [modern man] now has 'facts'....the acquisition of unrelated details becomes an end in itself and takes the place of the true ideal of education." Weaver believed that our view of reality had become thoroughly fragmented; modern culture had forgotten (or rejects) the context of truth within which individual facts make sense.  Education itself has become an elaborate form of Trivial Pursuit for credit."

Citation: Myers, Ken. Signs of the Times: the Table Talk Columns. Mars Hill Monographs.