issue57 学院知识 VS 街头智慧 求大虾们拍

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issue57 "The depth of knowledge to be gained from books is much richer and broader than what can be learned from direct experience."

Which is a more effective way for learning--from books or from experience? The speaker held the view that learning from books, which could gives you much richer and broader knowledge, is more beneficial than from experience. While, in my opinion, each learning method has its own merits and defects, the best way is to combine them together.

To begin with, knowledge from books and experience are not fully substituted. On the contrary, they are, under most circumstance, complementary. Books only tell people methodologies, principles and the predictive results. Well, in reality, transforming these rigid principles into real productive factors needs practice which helps the accumulation of experience. For example, a university student who just graduates from finance department of Columbia University and gets a very good job in an investing bank as a trader, although he has mounts of knowledge on financial theories and is very skillful on Math, will still do not know how to make deal with other traders and make money, due to the lack of experience. Thus, academic knowledge needs practice. While, on the other hand, experience needs to be condensed and generalized to a high cognitive level. Agriculture, in the past, always relied on the condition of weather. If a rain came in a sudden at harvest time of wheat, then the farmers would have a very difficult year. Then people in the past made summaries of their experience on weather, found the rules in the change of climate and used these rules to avoid the potential hazard and enhance the efficiency of productivity.

Additionally, there are different wisdoms behind learning from books and experience: book smart and street smart. They are both useful and play important roles in our daily life and separately reach the depth in different field the other can not get to. Book smart is usually good at using numbers, formulas, models and theories to analyze problems and make decisions. The biggest advantage of book smart lies in that it can be very accurate, which could show a concrete number to illustrate a solution. The annual prediction of economy growth rate serves a very good example, where book smart play its extreme by transforming nearly every activity into numbers in money to calculate the result. To do this job, you can not count on a person who is only old enough experiencing more ups and downs of economy. On the other hand, street smart is easier to be understand and more flexible. Comparing with the tedious numbers in book smart, you can find more knowledge about human and social practice in street smart. Street smart's decision grounds more on the knowledge about real people with flesh and blood instead of rational people who are like supercomputer in Economics. When they start an adventure, say, open a restaurant, they know how to communicate with the arrogant government officials, how to tackle with the local mafia, and how to cut the operating cost. Similarly, a scholar, who is lack of government or mafia language, is not a good candidate to tackle those things.

Furthermore, book smart and street smart can achieve their success separately. Most professors, engineers, financial experts and high officials in government have high degree of diploma. While, many businessmen, especially those entrepreneurs from bare hand, do not finish their study in college, or even in primary school. However, we should be aware of the fact that those successful professors and experts seldom have little experience related to their field. And most successful businessmen who do not graduate from schools read a lot of books and hire knowledgeable people to help their business. Thus, in practice, both learning methods and the wisdoms in them should be employed at the same time.

To sum up, both learning methods are very important. Without experience, the rigid principles in books are hard to be useful in real life. Without book knowledge, we will lose ourselves in the chaos of complicated phenomenon. These two learning methods and wisdoms behind should be applied together to get a better understanding of the whole map of what we are going to learn.