Education: The Overcoming of Experience

"Experience is the best teacher." In U. S. education, there is a common belief in the educative value of firsthand experience. Teachers, for example, claim to have learned from classroom experience most of what they know about teaching. Children, too, are seen as learning best when firsthand experience is the basis for what they are taught. This essay questions the presuppositions that favor firsthand experience. First, we look at what is entailed when education and firsthand experience are described as if equivalent. Beliefs in such an equivalence presuppose a commonsense theory of knowledge and mind that philosophers of science have found to be inadequate. Second, we use research on the social psychology of judgment to identify faulty inferences that frequently result from learning by firsthand experience. These pitfalls are illustrated in a discussion of learning to teach. Third, we consider how firsthand experience can close avenues to conceptual and social change. For example, to learn from firsthand experience is often to confound whatever happens with necessity. Thus, in the history of vocational education, learning by doing was advocated as a means of fitting students to the real world, thereby curbing their aspirations. Finally, we argue that ideas based on secondhand information are more likely than firsthand experience to manifest both the real and the possible. Education gives access to thoughts and theories that are beyond the scope of firsthand experience.