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i think the opposition at the center of the op--"academic" vs "real life"---is false.
why do folk bother with such nonsense?
people think: i have passed through an education or an apprenticeship it doesn't matter and now i have knowledge or expertise. what i know, then, is an object.
maybe this thing is like a machine. a pork grinder makes strange string-like forms of pork from other forms of pork. it's automatic. it's like that. turning on a switch is a process, the way a machine operates a process, the same goes in, the same comes out, change of state so no change.
but knowledge seems little more than sets of parameters. you know, assumptions that let you reduce information in particular ways, make it discrete; procedures for generating relations between the elements you create through this reduction. patterns for moving through the collages you make. what you process is in time, so what you make, your experience, is open-ended. which is not at all like shoving meat through a grinder.
if you are engaged with a process the way you are engaged with it is yours: you see about what you are doing what your experience and understanding and practical/muscle memory allows the process of being engaged by something to open up for you. it doesn't matter how you got there. there's no particular hierarchy between modes of access, really. different modes of access generate outcomes that explore particular ways of being in the world.
maybe as you work your way along you come to feel that you've few limitations to what you do but then one day encounter outcomes of another way of working that causes you to maybe rethink your approach. this would happen because your own trajectory enables you to see something in the work of another that triggers you to think differently about what you've been doing.
or it doesn't happen, in which case it doesn't matter that these other ways of working are out there. for you they're not particularly available.
i think most people are one way then another.
i think we're continually moving, even if we live inside frameworks that make that moving difficult to see. something happens in the transition from being to statements about being. if i say i am sitting in a chair watching little white letters track across a green box, that says almost nothing about what i am doing but at the same time it is not wrong. sentences make what they refer to seem stable and continuous. you know, continuous with themselves: a rock here is a rock there is a rock in this third place too. so knowledge becomes machine and we become pronouns and interactions become like those strange verb things that link them. but none of that is accurate and everybody knows as much directly but for some reason it is convenient or easy or automatic (what can be more convenient and easy than that which is automatic?) to pretend that isn't the case.
on the basis of stupid distinctions that we know are not true other stupid distinctions can be built.
what the op is about i think is an attempt to make some evaluative statements that involves entirely arbitrary notions like "real" or "authentic" or "hands on" as over against "abstract" or "bookish" or "ivory tower"--what makes cliches fun is that you can string them in nice little rows and they seem to do something the way those bizarre little lights seem to do something on an xmas tree. the evaluation seems to follow from some social or psychological matter. personally, i think both a waste of time.
you do what you do in the ways in which you do them. if you learn something from how other people operate--if it appeals to you, if you find it interesting--then fine. if not, then fine. why waste your time trying to figure out some way to decide which is "better"?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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