Question 4: Not everything that is learned is contained in books

Question 4

It has been said, "Not everything that is learned is contained in books." Compare and constract knowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?


Answer

Certainly, books include a lot of knowledge useful in our life. I often read a book to kill time or to gain knowledge; However, I strongly believe that knowledge gained from experience is more valuable than that from books. Even if books are useful, they can not tell us all of the real information. I will write three reasons why experience is more important.

First, knowledge from experience is more valuable for children. Children learn many ways from their real experience. As an example, I will show how to climb a tree. Suppose children who can not climb a tree. The only way to be a good climber is to climb actually by themselves. They feel the tree through their five senses by touching a stem and by grabing branches.

Second, knowledge from experience is more believable. Sometimes, books include false information. Especially, old technical books have that. For example, people trusted old medical books from China in Edo age. But they were not correct. Once they practically had opened a human body to observe, they would have found out the books would have been wrong. They did not try to observe that. Only subtle experience would have changed the medical progress.

Third, knowledge from experience is harder to forget. When we read a book, we think we understand the book. But to tell a (the) truth, we forget the information just after reading it. Reading a book is less impressive than experience because we use only eyes when reading book. On the other hand, we hard to forget the experience (We do not forget the memory we actually experienced). At least, we forget our experience less than reading a book. That is because we can use all of our senses when we experience. Using more senses is better to understand in our brain.

To sum up, experience is more important than reading books. Experience is more practical, more believable, and more unforgettable. If we have a chance to choose experience or book, we should choose experience.