Do you tell your children to look both ways before crossing the street, or let them learn from experience? Do you warn them against eating holly berries and drinking antifreeze, or do you let them learn from experience? Do you caution them about pots on the stove, perhaps filled with boiling hot liquids, or let them learn from experience?
Obviously, one of the problems with learning from experience is that you first have to survived the experience. If the only way we can learn not to jump from a tall cliff is by experience, few people will learn not to jump from a tall cliff. If you expect your children to learn by trial and error, they may or may not learn to look both ways before crossing the street. And if they do learn it, they might not survive long enough for it to matter.
But there's another problem with learning from experience, and that's what you learn. If you vaccinate your kids and, soon after, one of them is diagnosed with autism, what do you learn? You should learn nothing from that, since there's no evidence vaccines cause autism. Children are given vaccines and children sometimes get autism, but that doesn't indicate a link between the two. You might as well connect autism with drinking milk or playing games.
If you have a bad cold, and you go to a homeopath, an acupuncturist, or a faith healer, after which you feel better, what have you learned? Again, nothing. Obviously, there's no evidence that the treatment actually cured the cold, especially since colds normally go away on their own. (Experience might teach you that, true enough, but if you catch something serious, it could easily be another story.) Or maybe it was simply the placebo effect.
In the Middle Ages, if you were very lucky, you might have survived the plague, but what would you have learned from it? Since the Jews were frequently blamed (human beings are always eager to find a scapegoat), you might have "learned" to burn the ghetto and keep Jews out of your town. Jews tended to avoid the worst of the plague, simply because they were cleaner than Christians. They had fewer fleas and their homes had fewer rats. But, ironically, you might have "learned" to stay dirty, so that you wouldn't be mistaken for a secret Jew.
We human beings have language and culture, so we don't have to learn from experience. We teach our children. We learn from others. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We build on our store of knowledge, so that we know far, far more than any individual could ever learn from his own experience. And one of the things we've learned is a better way of acquiring knowledge: science.
The scientific method is easily the best way we've ever discovered of determining the truth. We've almost certainly learned more from a few hundred years of the scientific method than from all of human history - and prehistory - before it was developed. We've learned more than faith has ever taught us. And experience,... well, experience is part of the scientific method, no doubt, but we don't each have to learn from experience ourselves. And experience without the scientific method is unreliable.
Experience is not the best teacher, far from it. Sometimes, people refuse to learn any other way, but even then, they might well learn the wrong thing (i.e. not really "learn" anything at all). Most people, in fact, will cling to their own biases, rather than learn from their experiences. We need to recognize that, and guard against it happening to us (another reason to value the scientific method).
Here's an interesting take on this, with a slightly different perspective:
The old joke says "Experience is the worst teacher. You get the test first, and the lesson after." And that little jest has more than a grain of truth. Many people assume, as you do, that you learn by doing, that reading is a poor substitute. But reading allows you to learn how many people in many different circumstances have lived their lives and dealt with the complexities of life. You get to experience what it is like to be another person, to live in different centuries, to be old, or young. or dying or in battle. The really important lessons of life have been explored and re-told for centuries. Why should you blunder ahead and make the same mistakes others have made (for the "experience") when a thousand books can bring you the wisdom to make wiser choices. Learning trivial things (how to tie shoelaces) are probably best learned first hand - but the really big things, how to think or love or be kind or value what's important - first get some advice from Shakespeare and Moliere, from Dickens and Updike, from Frost and Tolstoy and a thousand others.
I've always been a reader, so I certainly agree with this. I doubt if reading can ever give the full experience of some things - like dying - but then, I doubt if we really want to learn those through experience. This is a more literary take on the question, while I focused on the scientific. But with either perspective, experience is not the best teacher.
Hi Bill, everything you say is true, but to be fair I think the phrase may have been intended to apply in a more limited sense.
ReplyDeleteThere is another saying whose exact wording I forget but it is to the effect that reading or being told about some action or process gives you limited knowledge, watching it being done gives you more knowledge, but doing it yourself is the best way of learning how to do it.
There is a very good reason why soldiers have to practice stripping down and reassembling their rifles over and over again, rather than just reading about how to do it.
True enough, Tony. John pointed out much the same thing elsewhere, although muscle memory (also called motor learning) is not quite what I was addressing.
ReplyDeleteActually, this post may seem odd because it was written in reply to the discussion in our ClassicScienceFiction Yahoo group. Since I needed to give it some thought - and some considerable time - I decided to make it a blog post, too.
But I see where this might not make as much sense in a standalone blog post - not so much in what I say (I hope!) but WHY I'm saying it. And I certainly don't mean to disparage hands-on learning! Not at all.
But hands-on learning doesn't mean it's untaught. Ordinarily, learning-by-doing is still guided learning. There's still a teacher, or at least instructional materials of some kind. I suspect that soldiers aren't just handed a rifle and told to figure it out by themselves.
Likewise, an apprenticeship isn't a matter of turning a beginner loose in a room full of tools and expecting trial and error to eventually teach him everything he needs to know. It's just another way of teaching, that's all. It IS "learning by experience" in a sense, but not really what I was addressing.