A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.
Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.
But isn't the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than the knowledge that doesn't? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around - walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort of thing.
There are some careers where hands-on experience means so much more than the book work of it.
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better , if less "showily." Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.
He never reckoned much to schooling and that. He said you could learn most what was worth knowing from keeping your eyes and ears peeled. Best way of learning, he always said, was doing.
The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.
Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
I'm not a prophet. I'm not a teacher. I have no degrees. My degree is from the University of Life.
Teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real - all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does.
The world is the true classroom. The most rewarding and important type of learning is through experience, seeing something with our own eyes.
All of our schools need to bring 'learn from doing' into the mainstream education, not just afternoon.
I found most of my learning has taken place after culinary college, when I travelled and met chefs and non-chefs.
However exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world.
Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
Ringo: 'I had no schooling before I joined The Beatles and no schooling after The Beatles. Life is a great education.
Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.
Well-roundedness comes not from sitting in a classroom but from experiencing the larger world.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
Gaining my education from practical experience certainly benefited me. If I had gone on to be a lawyer, my life wouldn't have been anywhere near as interesting.
I did all sorts of jobs after drama school - working in a bar, as a teaching assistant. I probably learned as much from them as I did at drama school.
Many of the most successful men and women in the world never graduated from college. They attended the school of life instead.
The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.
I haven't even graduated from high school yet - and I've realised in the last four years, with all the travelling I've done and all of the movies I've made, that the world is my classroom. I've experienced things I don't know you can necessarily get from reading a history book.
There are two schools. The school where you go and open a book, and then there's the school of life. When you learn hands-on, often you don't understand why you do what you do and what's the word for that action.
