“You may learn the lesson, but learning does nothing when you haven’t dealt with such things.”
Is that true? No right? Do people believe that learning is not enough, but actually doing and experiencing is better?
Have you witnessed that in fiction and/or reality?
Thoughts and feelings?
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Is both better? To learn yet also to experience things? Does it depend?
Speaking as a teacher and someone who has to deal with certain morons of the human race, while both can be good on their own, it’s also good to have both together. Context dependent, of course
Interesting.
What is a way that can be utilized in daily life?
I think that it’s not an either/or situation. You need to learn and do and learn more. It’s continuous learning throughout your life.
An example I’ll bring up is studying as an adult.
I went back to college in my mid thirties. There was a course about systems, kind of a cross between business/project management and IT type of a subject. Lots of reading was required, and I found my textbook fascinating, which was a first for me. Whenever I’d read about how something should be done and how, I’d think back about my work experience and compare. I would get to see, oh, this is what we did wrong, or oh, we could have done this instead. Or I’d see an example of something we did do and would say, yes, this works, I’ve seen it work.
I think that I got a lot more from my education than students fresh out of high school because I had the concept of the real world application to help me understand the course material.
There’s no substitute for practice, but learning and practicing at the same time is the ideal.
I think “Education v Experience” is a flawed premise because both education and experience are means of gaining knowledge. Both are important, and oftentimes they are inseparable.
I’m a sociologist (or social-anthropologist according to my supervisor because he has an agenda to multiply the anthropology department for internal political power).
My role is gathering people’s lived knowledge and collating it with existing academic knowledge to gain better understanding. Which through policy-making and reforms, improves both people’s lives and academia. So yeah education & experience are crucial to me.
I think a fairer statement would be: “Put knowledge into action”. It could be as simple as sharing the knowledge. I agree with that.
It’s a double-edged sword. Experiencing war without the ability to process trauma is not good, for example. But academics telling people what they are dealing with in the trenches is exactly why the uneducated don’t trust them, because they don’t know.
The bigger phrase I use is “The person with experience is not at the mercy of a person with a theory.”
As in, if you’ve done it, you know it works, and someone who is educated says you can’t? You’re dismissing them.
Another way to look at it is bumblebees flying. Everyone has seen them fly. Acedemia didn’t understand HOW they flew with the information they had on flying for quite a while. The statements were always “Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly.”
And that statement was wrong–academically or experientially. Bumblebees were flying. The academic answer SHOULD have been: “we don’t know the mechanism or law that allows them to stay aloft.”
And if they had stayed in their lane like this, instead of making proactive statements, they’d be trusted more.
Well, my family had to use trigonometry when building our house (it’s one of the things that people say “but why would I need to know THAT?”). Creative writing: you learn it in school but it’s very different in the real world so you need to relearn the basics and have practical experience. Cooking: it’s all well and good to know a recipe on paper and the ingredients, but it’s pretty useless until you actually do the cooking part.
They’re both a form of learning but you need the background info and the practical knowledge. I guess you could say it’s like high school chemistry. You know two chemicals can get explosive but it’s a very different experience when your teacher does it an the entire class screams 
Or the theory of carbon monoxide poisoning. You know it can happen but you don’t realise how easily it does happen until it happens to you (that was a weird day ).
But then there are always idiots. Like the people who think cloud seeding is the government putting the literal seeds of plants into the clouds . . . Or people who think Australia doesn’t exist and Aussies are paid actors by NASA for the “big conspiracy” . . . Or people aka the Americans I was stuck with for a week in Egypt who think kofta is an “exotic meat” . . . Or people who walk behind a horse and spook it and then go “bUt WhY diD iT KiCk mE”
People with knowledge can be idiots at times, too. Like when you think a can of WD40 is empty so you throw it into the firepit only to find out the hard way it wasn’t empty Or misjudging how steep the slope is when you’re on a triple black run skiing
These are tamer examples, of course
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I am going to use an interesting example.
Two people handle the same problems differently from each other. Life, society, environment, and trauma from the same issue is experienced and taught differently depending on the two people. I like to use mental health as a good example because I agree that no two people are the same. I half believe in luck while the other half is circumstances that can alter a person’s life. It doesn’t have to be mental health either. Another example is a controversial one. Those who learn about what it likes for people who experience varying types of discrimination, do get told by people that learning about it different that going through it.
For some people, learning isn’t enough, you need to know what another has gone through in order to get the sense of what that hell was like for someone.
Of course, not everyone thinks that way, yet others do.
I feel that is where comparing situations comes into play.
Forgive me if I am not making sense.