Education: life vs. academia
 

what are your thoughts on school of hard knocks vs academia? experience vs. book knowledge.

i think of the scene in back to school in the business class where rodney dangerfield is talking about paying people off and kickbacks and how things really worked, as opposed to the model the teacher was teaching, of how things are supposed to work.

i think of a college graduate i talked to who had never been to africa but read a bunch of books about how to build a country tell me what it's like there and why it's fucked up, and when i told him what it was really like, and what it took to make things work, since i spent quite a while there trying to make things work, he told me "you have no idea what you are talking about." it was rather funny.

he had book knowledge that i didn't have, he knew certain causes and effects, trends, how things should work. i had actual knowledge and experience that he didn't have, i knew how the people would react and what they would actually do. if i knew what he knew, i might have been more effective. if he had the experience i had, he would know what knowledge he had would be applicable.


do you think one way is better or has an advantage over the other? both have merits and weaknesses. does one's merits or weaknesses outweigh the other, do they equal out in the long run, or is it comparing apples to lamps?

I think that personal, hands-on experience will always trump anything you read in a book. Sure, books have their purpose, and there are plenty of things to be learned from them, but if you actually do it and live it, well, you could write said book...

Isn't there a thread for this already?

I really don't see much to compare here when there will always be something new to be learned and neither hands-on nor formal education are sufficient enough to consider oneself an expert in a particular field. Both have their place but are best when combined.

I don't know about you but I'd rather consult a licensed doctor with a thorough formal education and sufficient supervised hands-on experience than some back alley hack who will perform the same procedure for a fraction of the price because he lacks certification.

I didn't say that education and books don't have their place. In fact, I said the opposite. I just think that the supervised hands-on experience will teach more than the book will.

I wouldn't say that hand-on always trumps a formal education but I know what you meant.

It's comparing apples to lamps. First of all, it depends on the job you're dealing with. For some jobs, it's perfectly reasonable to go straight to "experience" right out of high school. For others, it's much more important to have a higher education. Beyond that, higher education is about far more than just learning more facts. It's about further developing your critical thinking skills and getting more exposure to other forms of thought.

A liberal arts education may not make someone a better worker, but it certainly exposes people to the basics of more fields and can lead to greater cultural understanding, among other things.

Regarding the college graduate dismissing your experience in Africa, a big part of that may have had more to do with a character flaw on his part than the result of his education. It's also very likely that you were each discussing from a totally different point of view, without realizing your views are not necessarily contradictory. It's kind of like pro-life people arguing with pro-choice people: the debate goes nowhere because they're not even talking about the same thing. Likewise, with many topics it's easy for an academic to see only the big picture while someone with only experience sees only the "reality" of the details. The truly intelligent and successful are those who can combine the two.

I wrote an intelligent and well-thought out post, but then Secretmethod70 said precisely what I was going to say and stole my thunder.

I wonder if my lack of formal education is somehow responsible for this.

I think that book learning is slightly better because the people who have the real world experience can write the book and someone can read that book and learn from it. Lessons that took the writer years to learn can now be learned in the time it takes to read and understand a book.

I agree that both are necessary to do the best job possible. That's one reason I like DeVry. I'm going there to get a degree in game programming and they teach out of a book, but then back it up by making you apply what you learned in a program, which gives us the book learning of why some peice of code works while also giving us the experience of writing it to show how it works.

I think we may be forgetting that there are many levels to the academic process. If you're talking about a bachelor's degree in pretty much any field then sure the person will be in the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" territory.

For graduate level work you're pretty much required to be as hands-on as possible. So it's the best of both worlds there ... you have a panel of learned people who have all gone through the process guiding you in your area of expertise while at the same time you're actually doing work in the field. At least you would hope. Graduates do a lot of grunt work in the very beginning of their careers.

Technicals schools also use a hands on approach--but you probably won't find a tech. school with an international studies program.

This is precisely why there are graduate degrees out there that follow up a year of book learning with a year in the peace corps. If you want the experience to go with your book knowledge, you have to seek it out.

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"?

i bother because everyone has a different way of arriving at the point of "themselves" and "what they know." yet so many people cannot agree on how something should be done, what something really means, what something is. so the way i see it, knowledge, reality, is almost subjective. if that is the case, then why is it so important to people who has a degree in what, who has experience in what, etc?


the op is totally about making evaluative statements involving notions like "real" or "authentic." i just don't see them as being arbitrary.


i wasn't trying to figure out which is better. i was trying to figure out IF one was better, if they equaled out in the end, or if it was comparing apples to lamps.

based off your answer, you say it's comparing apples to lamps (unless i misunderstood). and so you've answered my question. thanks.

But this IS a false dichotomy. It is not about whether one is better than the other, but whether they are separate things. Academia IS life, as well. Cutting edge academic knowledge is created not just through books, but by doing as well.

Medical research involves doing real medicine on real people every day; cutting edge business research involves real business; and so on. As Keynes once said:

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. "

In the real world, the stereotype of the clueless but book savvy nerd and the charming street smart uneducated outsider really rarely exist, though the stereotype is often invoked as a sort of anti-intellectual rallying cry.

For certain things, of course first hand knowledge is important, and generally in those things academia includes that first hand knowledge experience. In others, like complex societal level stuff, there is simply no amount of personal experience that will substitute for "book knowledge." No one will ever understand Africa without understanding its history, for example.

Now, the real question is can academic knowledge be obtained outside of academia? In some instances, yes, but they are far from the majority.

I would trust the recent vet school graduate with my pets a lot more than a butcher with 20 years of experience...

nice. yes. go with that.

I keep hearing about this distinction about academia and "Real world." I am in academia, and last I checked, my work was real work, my bills were real bills, my salary is a real salary, and so on.

When I went to college my best professors had "real" experience. College teaches you to think. Problem solving is the basis of many jobs in the real world. College teaches you that. I have the greatest admiration for those who have learn on their own. School can provide alternatives to problems that you may not consider on your own.

I don't think the distinction between academia and "real world" knowledge is important as long as one acknowledges that there is always more to learn.

lindy---nice that you focused on the important stuff in that post.

let's follow your example. say a professor was to try to work in a butcher shop. would you imagine that the butcher would say nothing about what to do, that the butcher would have so little regard for his or her own skill that there'd be no effort to transmit it? or do you think that the situation would be set up around watching the pointy-head fail? if that were the case, then there'd have to be some Problem between the two. or the butcher could just be an asshole. being an asshole is easy. anyone can do it.

if your scenario was inserted into something like real life, chances are that the academic would be interested in the ways in which butchering worked: these interests may or may not cross with how folk in a particular shop see what they're doing--for example, the interest might be in, say, the interactions between newer technologies (assuming there are some) and modes of sociability in a particular type of socio-economic context--so looking at a specific space in order to learn from it. if you put your scenario into the real world, chances are that there'd be some preliminary conversations about what the idea was, a period of feeling each other out, seeing if they could work together, if they wanted to work together. by the time the shop scenario started, a relationship would in all probability be in place. it'd be more a mutual project.

what you set up is like an episode out of popeye--you know, anything you can do i can do better--but even that involved a relationship between popeye and bluto and so had a context.

so your scenario isn't much of one. all it really says is that given the chance, you'd like to see an academic humiliate themselves, not because of anything to do with that actual person, but because it would gratify some psychological issue that you have. one reason people have such issues is that they enjoy them. so have fun with it.

To some extent, I agree with Roachboy that the distinction is a false one. Knowledge is gained by doing and by reading; for every theory we have learned, there is a first experience which helps us flesh out our knowledge from theory to practice; and likewise for every action we have ever done unconsciously or without thinking, there is a (at least one) theoretical context, the knowledge of which can immeasurably broaden and deepen our understanding and our ability to function.

Everyone needs both life experience and formal education. There is no getting around it, if one wishes to be a well-rounded, thoughtful individual.

Well when it comes to my family I can see my younger surviving better in the world then our other sister. For one thing my younger sister can take care of herself, she may not be really book smart but she knows what she wants and goes into the world to get it. On the other had other sister depends too much on my parents. She has always been the smart one, the one that is going somewhere (in my parents minds). And that is probably true, but she is so scared of everything that she is keeping herself back. Shes scared to drive, she is too shy to even order food at a fast food place. The bad thing is that she is getting married next month to a guy who is exactly the same way.

But there are ups and downs with both. My younger sister may not be as afraid of the world, but because of her limited education she may find it hard to get all she wants out of life. Now I didn't say she wouldn't just that it will be harder. Then theres my middle sister, scared of the world but works hard at her education. She pays for her own schooling and knows what she wants in life.

So honestly I don't know which is better off. I guess its whatever works for you.