Importance of Learning by Experience - Essay Example

College: Importance of Learning by Experience It takes people long periods of time and heavy investment to go to school. From birth, we get an education from different sources: parents, teachers, and peers among many others. However, did you ever think about what real education entails? People always learn things from teachers or books. The content of these sources must have originated due to their own thinking. In other words, it was translated by someone. There is a possibility that the translator may have made little mistakes by intuition. Intuition means understanding an issue without having any evidence that it is true. An excellent example is this: there are many stories told about historical events that nobody has ever participated in, and many authors have written about things that happened long time ago. Most people believe that these things are true although they do not have evidence to proof that. This is the intuition. In “Predictable Irrationality” by Dan Ariely, the author gives an example of his own experience in the hands of nurses. He narrates about a period when he was in a hospital after having suffered 70 percent body burn. He tells of the manner in which nurses would bandage and un-bandage his wounds. He would try to ask them to do it slowly or to give him some time to rest but they could not. According to him, the nurses ought to have ripped the bandages slowly. He thought the nurses were wrong and so he advised them to do it his way, but since the nurses thought they were right, they believed that their way of ripping of the bandages was the best for a patient of Ariely’s kind. This caused him a lot of pain. The experience also led him into researching on how to take off bandages from burn wounds. He bought a carpenter’s vice with which he could crunch people’s fingers at the workshop for short and long periods of time and then test all the different types of pain they felt. Upon carrying out numerous experiments with different people and objects, Ariely realized that ripping off bandages from burn wounds at a low intensity and over a long time combined with allowing patients some time in between to rest reduced pain a lot. The facts he got after the research showed that the nurses’ way of doing it was wrong indeed. Although the nurses were wrong, they all along had been thinking that they were right, since they believed their intuition to be correct simply because they had strong but untested beliefs. In most cases, we make a decision through intuition and we believe it to be right. What can be said about the general education? The problem with general education is that everyone gets similar ideas about something. This is as a result of learning general ideas from teachers and authors’ books. This education entails someones own idea, which originally was based on intuition. Therefore, we need to train and check that what we have in mind is right, simply because we never experience what we learn from books. I think the best form of education is personal experience. Personal experience allows us a chance to thoroughly understand the issues that are in minds and to test our intuitions. A clear example why we need to be learned by experience is how one feels if enrolled into military service. It was hideous to me, especially since I am Korean, and every male had to go to military service in Korea before getting to 30 years of age. I was so nervous because everything seemed new to me. Besides, I had heard about what soldiers do in the military over and over again. I had heard stories about assaults, irrational actions, and swearing among many others. As a result, I thought I had understood the military properly, but little did I know that most of these things were just stereotypes. They were intuitions, but I did not realize it. I cannot forget February 23rd, since it was the first day I got in the military. The weather was cold, and most people had their hair cut short. They were also accompanied by their parents. The crowd resembled a swarm of bees. I also had my hair cut short just like the rest. As my hair was being cut, I was worried. Some people literally cried. However, I had to adapt to the daily life of the military. It was so difficult for me since I was operating on an extremely tight schedule. I had to wake up at 6 am, join the morning roll call at 6:30 am, eat breakfast at 7:30 am, and exercise for basic strength at 9 am. Physical examination checkup was done at 11 am, lunch at 11:30am, training at 1pm, cleaning at 6:30pm, evening roll call at 9 pm, and sleeping at 10pm in the night. At first, it seemed impossible to adapt to the strict schedules and the tough relationship between subordinates and superiors. However, I was wrong. After 1 month in the military service, I realized I was adapting to the lifestyle. I could wake up at 5:50 with ease. I felt hungry when it was military time to eat. I also got into a lot of trouble at the military. I was drafted by military police and was selected as a member of the group whose mandate was to trace people who deserted the military. Usually, since the military works relates to military security, deserters are not released, although there are still lots of them, almost 100 persons in one year. I had never arrested anyone in my whole life before. One day, a guy deserted the army. I had to trace him alone. I felt so nervous and scared. On my superior’s command, I visited the person’s house to get some information. I interviewed his parents. I thought that was smart enough, and so I failed to search the house; little did I know that all that time he was hiding while I was interviewing his parents. I got a scolding from my superiors for taking too much time. This was my first experience in tracing deserters. It was very severe but also extremely helpful to me, since I never had to make a similar mistake after that. That is what my personal experience in the military was like. At first, I thought I could not survive there for long, but it was just an intuition, since I eventually completed my term. I was wrong, since I had believed it even before testing it. On the contrary to my intuition, I had fun in the military and also gained confidence. This is what I mean. Sometimes, people have stereotypes caused by intuition without realizing it. For this reason, I think experience is the best form of education. In Feynman’s interview, he said his father did not give him a name of a thing, because he knew knowing somethings name does not necessarily mean that one knows the thing itself (Feynman par. 4). He gives an example of stories read from the Encyclopedia Britannica concerning the existence of dinosaurs long ago. According to Feynman, the best way he understood the size of the dinosaurs was through detailed description by his father. This way he was able to imagine more clearly the image and size of real dinosaurs. Since, from the description given by his dad, he was able to imagine the size of a dinosaur and knew it was too huge to fit through a window, he would not be frightened at the possible imagination of one of them coming through the window into the house. He already knew that its head was too large to fit into the window. Very often, when we think we know the name of something, then we know what it is. Feynman gives another story of how his dad would take him to visit the woods. He tells of one day when a kid saw a bird, brown throated thrush, and asked him what kind of bird it was. He pretended not to know, and this made the kid think that Feynman’s dad does not tell him anything. On the contrary, Feynman’s father had already told him once while in the woods the names of the bird in different languages: Chinese and Japanese among others. The father later tells him that if he only knew the different names of the bird, he would not say that he actually knew the bird. He goes on to discuss with Feynman the bird and what it was doing at that time. Jonathan Drori, in his article “What We Think We Know”, tries to explain why in most cases we may not understand what we, most times, think we do. He argues that in most cases we rely upon the knowledge we get from school to understand different things surrounding us. Drori poses a question asking where a tree gets all the stuff that makes a chair if the weight of the seed equals to almost nothing. He observes that most people would obviously say it comes from the soil. On the contrary, Drori tries to argue that all that stuff that makes a chair comes from the air. Drori says, “Now, if that was true, wed have trucks going round the country, filling peoples gardens in with soil, itd be a fantastic business. But, actually, we dont do that. The mass of this comes out of the air” (1). Drori emphasizes his thought once more by giving a second example. He asks science graduates, on a graduation day, whether it is possible to light a bulb using a battery, a wire, and a bulb only. Most of saw they could not. These people were sure that it was a remarkably straightforward task, a basic knowledge of electrical circuiting. However, upon trying it out, all realized it was not as easy. This was because none of them had tried it physically before. They were relying on knowledge from books and not experience. Creating light using a battery, a wire, and a bulb only is an easy task if one has had a chance to try it out manually. Drori insists that children come with their own ideas and theories which we must work with. He argues as follows, “...were not empty vessels; the mental models that we have as children persist into adulthood. Poor teaching actually does more harm than good” (3). He argues that we have to work from the way children reason in order to shift their thinking to what we would want them to believe. He further argues that poor teaching only makes things worse than they were before a child got an education. Drori gives an illustration using the principle of magnetism. He shows how well children understand magnetism and gravity in Britain before they get enrolled into school compared to how they understand it after. He concludes that students are worse after going through teaching than before. Drori points out the need to help people articulate their models rather than just teaching them what we think is the right thing. In conclusion, Drori, Feynman, and Ariely emphasize the importance of learning through experience as comparing to reading books and taking what we are taught in schools as the ultimate truth. However, they also point out that experience can easily fool you, especially if you are used to viewing particular things from one point of view without ever testing or reevaluating them to get the actual truth. As was seen in Ariely’s case, some of the mistakes people do could easily be corrected by doing some tests on the intuitions they had before acting. Works Cited Ariely, Dan. “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions”. TED 2010. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. Drori, Jonathan. “Ted Talk: Jonathan Drori on what we think we know”. TED. Web. 17 April 2012. Feynman, Richard P., and Jeffrey Robbins. The Pleasure of Finding Things out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print. Read More