Kowledge or Experience?
By free_forward
@free_forward (199)
China
August 15, 2007 8:41pm CST
Which is more important in life,knowledge from the books you read,or personal experience you gain in reality?The answer may vary from person to person.The young,educated may emphasize the formaer,and the old may stress the latter.But in my opinion,they are of the same importance.
Experience is priceless.It helps one deal with the problems with ease and condidence .Especially for students who frow up in the ivory tower,to get involved in prctical activities and to accumulate experience of different kinds is more crucial.Experience,however,is limited in terms of time and space.For one thing,it is impossible for anyone to experience all the important events and meet all the famous people.For another,the society is develoing so fast that depending too much on it only leads to narrow-mindedness and prejudice.One way to compensate for it is to read books.Books of various kinds cand bring us almost unlimited additional experience.From books we can not only trace back to the wisdom of our antecedents.but also keep up with the latest developments of science and technology.To be sure,it's secondhand experience.Btu it is the ideal supplement to our own limited experience.Both book knowledge and personal experience are essential.While experience makes one more resourceful,book knowledge makes one more learned.
6 people like this
18 responses
@leia2007 (6)
• Philippines
16 Aug 07
They are both important, this is like drinking a coffee, u cannot drink the coffee without the water. theoretical without application is no-sense at all. of what we've learned we apply it to the things that we encountered everyday. other says that the best teacher is our experience. the bottom line is all the things that we've ;earned in the books and what we have experienced should be our guide to become a better person.
1 person likes this
@sudiptacallingu (10879)
• India
16 Aug 07
Both knowledge and experience are equally important and depend, as you said, on the person concerned. Again knowledge itself can be of two types- one that is gained through academic education and the other through verbal demonstration and practise. Academic education is incomplete and may not be able to give you experience, but verbal demonstration and practise would definitely. The farmer who passes on the skills of farming to his son, the fisherman who teaches his son how to read the weather from the formation of the clouds, the illiterate drives who guides his students through the difficult bends, the mother who tells her daughter how long to steam a dish…they are all depending on experience gained through non-academic knowledge and are passing on the same to their progeny. Knowledge without practical implementation adds no value to society and individual lives. And once you start practical implementation, you start gaining experience. So both are kind of intertwined, but I would definitely put experience on a higher level than knowledge.
1 person likes this
@vinzen (1020)
• India
16 Aug 07
Hi, yes there has to be a good combination of both things for a preoper, full and over all development of the person, from all aspects. If we simply get bookish knowledge and just read things without pratcial knowledge, we dont get to know if what we have read is true or not,and first hand experience is first hand and nothing can be compared to that. Same way if we dont have knowledge and just experience, that too takes lots of time to come into form as the proper knoweldge isnt generated then.So it has to be a combination of both things.
1 person likes this
@jitendrasatyam (21)
• United States
16 Aug 07
knowledge and experience are like espouses. No one is complete or perfect in the absence of other. Knowledege give us entry or push you can say but it is the only experience that lead you to right path and help you to achieve the goal. Experience is very gradual process. you can not have experience in one day or two. Knowlege is like just to know something not to be master of something;mainly awareness of fact. It gives you the vicarios feeling of the facts but experience is something that prevails the reality.
1 person likes this
@ranitam22 (1146)
• United States
16 Aug 07
i agree that they are equal in social situations, but I think in the job market, for the most part experience is most important. I have a college degree, but I somehow end up working at jobs with people who don't have a degree and get paid more than me just because they have so many more years of experience at the job than i do because they came straight outta high school. you can read every book in the world on every topic, but it still won't prepare you for life's lessons as much as living through it does. Take care.
1 person likes this
@rogue13xmen13 (14403)
• United States
16 Aug 07
Experience tends to trump knowledge. Yes, it is great to be book smart, but if you want to survive in the world, book smarts will not always to it. That is were common sense comes into play. Common sense is a combination of knowledge and experience.
@luv_krrish (89)
• India
17 Aug 07
both are important..knowledge helps one to take a great start in career while experience helps one to excel and fare better in life.they are the two sides of a coin.its important to have both,one complements the other.if i say it in hindi then it goes like""dono ek hi sikke ke do pehlu hain" "ek dusare ke purak hai"
@lyndee22 (1210)
• Philippines
17 Aug 07
Knowledge and experience are important things in ones life. Thru knowledge we can gain more experience and thru experience we learn more thus enhancing our knowledge. They work hand in hand.
@faith210 (11224)
• Philippines
16 Aug 07
Hi free_forward! I also feel that knowledge and experience are of equal importance. Education will give you the necessary tools to use in the practical world and experience will give you the nessecary skills to deal with humanity. Education will make you smarter and experience will make you wiser and they go hand in hand to make you a better person. Education will build your mind and experience will build your character. Well, this just my view. Have a nice day and take care.
1 person likes this
@LAWise520 (275)
• United States
17 Aug 07
Look at it this way: a psychiatrist who has read all the right books and seen all the mental disorders may understand the workings and how people act and the list of symptoms, but he will not know how it FEELS and be able to relate to the patients unless he himself has gone through a mental disorder. You see, it is not experience OR knowledge. It is the mixture of both that allows us to be a well rounded person. If that doctor knows how it feels to be depressed, he can relate to patients, but if he does not read the books, he will not be able to heal the patients. By having experience AND knowledge, he is able to understand what has worked for him when he was depressed and also what he was trained in order to help the patient the most.
The most ignorant and obnoxious psychiatrists, btw, are the ones who have never experienced mental hardship. You will rarely find someone who has experienced a life of depression who is obnoxious and simply wants to get you in and out of his office. (experience tells me that)
@raviivar (66)
• India
17 Aug 07
yes you are perfectly fight. both the experiance and knowledge have to be given the same importance in my openion.but they will be used in different situations . in this world it is impossible to face all the types of experiences.the experience we got means we are studying our life as a book. so getting experiance means to gat the knowledge with lot of rememberance.for living in this world we need knowlegdge of any one thing what ever its may be. it may be a theoritical knowledge ,or technical knowledge or life living knowledge any thing.we need some knowledge. but the knowledge we got by experiance will never leave a person for ever. so every person has to get his knowldege by minimum of small experinces in his life about that knowlwdge then only he will learn every thing and a lot thing about that knowlwdge. so in my openion to getting knowledge with experiance is a difficult thing and is a great thing in life.so in my openion the experiencs which you got by knowlwdge is nbot more greater than that of the knowledge we got by the experiance.so try to get such type of experiances and knowledge by living in them.
@samtaylorskykierajen (7977)
• Canada
16 Aug 07
I have to agree that they are equally important in life . Personal experience helps you to relate and understand more of what you are reading in books and what you read helps you to understand something you haven't yet felt . Knowledge doesn't always give you the experience you might need in life but it helps prepare you for what you may need to know . As you gain more experience the knowledge of what you know grows as well . In my opinion you can't have one without the other as they are both equally important to each and everyone .
@RobinJ (2501)
• Canada
16 Aug 07
I would have to say that experience wins, because while reading gives us a lot of information, only experience gives us the know how, and to prove my point, whom would you sooner have operate on you a surgeon who has studied for 8 years and has a thorough knowledge of your ailment, or a practicing surgeon, who has performed the operation. I am going to have cataract surgery in October, and I assure the man who is operating on me is not only very knowledgeable but has preformed this surgery several thousand times.It is the same for cooking, you can read a million recipe books but until you have mastered working with food you might be able to boil water, it all takes practice.I would prefer to be able to say I have done that rather than just I know all about that. knowledge is useless until it is applied with experience.Good discussion
@kyutstudph (1263)
• Philippines
16 Aug 07
Hi free_forward! For me knowledge and experience plays a very important roles in our life. We can both learn from the knowledge we can get from the books that we read and we can also learn based on the experienced we had. By means of learning from reading materials we will be able to apply it in every way. By means of experienced we will be able to realized something like if we want to apply something based on our own experienced as well as we can also learn from the experienced of others.
@raychill (6525)
• United States
16 Aug 07
I think Experience is more important. I mean, that's difficult to say really because Knowledge and Experience are pretty equally important. But I'd rather have Common Sense (a.k.a experience) than a bunch of book knowledge.
Just because you've read a bunch of books won't help you completely get by in life. Social situations don't require book knowledge. Relationships of any kind don't require book knowledge. I think there are plenty of situations where having life experience and common sense that you didn't learn from a book will get you by more than having read a ton of books.
