For experience to become learning

Why is knowledge education necessary?

Creativity and Repetition

It is not easy for a child to have a chance for human maturity by looking around homes, schools, and academies and looking only at textbooks and reference books. The possibility of becoming a creative talent will be even slimmer. It is difficult for a child who studies only for exams to become a writer when he grows up. It is not easy to feel interested in learning with education separated from life. This may be why public education, which is aware of the limitations of entrance examination education, is trying to lower the school fence and communicate with the local community.

Various hands-on learning is becoming an opportunity for children to experience the world outside of school. It will have the effect of broadening the range of experience. However, it is usually only a “taste ceremony” experience. For example, you visited a farm and experienced digging potatoes or sweet potatoes for an hour or two during the harvest season; we cannot say we have experienced everything. You can’t share the value of every valuable thing just by participating in it for an hour or two.

You can taste the hardships of life with just a moment of hard work, but the daily experience of tasting without a livelihood is not everything.

 
Children’s hands-on learning is worse than TV programs, so they usually only “do it” for an hour or two. The pottery making experience is sometimes named “My Cup” by drawing only patterns with brushes on a bowl almost completed in the workshop. It is a way that many children can do in a short time. Most of the crude bowls made by children so that they can experience the entire process a little more are aesthetically and functionally unavailable, making them a “tort of trouble.” Most of the children who made them are discarded because they do not visit. A bowl of chaebol, covered with glaze, does not rot even after thousands of years. In other words, it is making “pollution” rather than crafts.

Creativity does not necessarily require new experiences or stimuli. Real learning occurs in repetitive events. Touching the soil for an hour or two can hardly learn about making pottery. Potters remove air from the ground and hit the soil to make the tissue dense before making a bowl. In the process, you learn the soil properties little by little and learn the skills. If you massage and knead the soil, the relationship between soil, water, and air can be read, and you can feel how the soil condition changes depending on the temperature of the palm. It is the same with the process of making bowls. In the process of endless repetitive work, ordinary people can only make a bowl of the desired shape by experiencing a change in the form of the bowl due to the pressure difference of the fine fingertips that are difficult to recognise.

Knowledge education and experience education.

It is not very desirable in the educational field to give a variety of menus to attract children’s interest and ask them to choose freely. Children often quite easily when they are less interested in this and that. Child-centred and interest-oriented education is a trap that is easy to fall into. As a result, children may not have the opportunity to experience the work appropriately by remembering that they have only had a wide and shallow tasting experience. It’s like a case where you think you’ve read the book after licking it with a summary, and you don’t have a chance to read an important book properly forever.

In the process of learning something in any field, you are bound to face hardships several times, and you can grow one step at a time when you overcome the difficulties. The role of the teacher is to help it. A child who has overcome problems will overcome difficulties in other things. This is the most critical learning given by experiential education. To overcome the challenges, patience alone is not enough. You can try better when you know where you tripped. If you don’t have the power to reflect on and think about failed experiences, you’ll easily get frustrated. Without thinking about the incident, the expertise disappears like smoke. We’ll leave only a faint memory.

Even if you experience anything, you have to go through a digestion process to learn, which requires thought. When a subjective experience is established in a context, it becomes an objective experience. Sometimes accidental experiences change the direction of life. In that sense, it may not be harmful to experience various occasions, but it is not possible to educate in anticipation of such a “coincidence.” It is challenging to treat sick people in a “or not” way. Education should be done carefully. Although the intended effect may not appear or there may be side effects, it is the role of doctors or teachers to do their best to prescribe effectively.

To learn properly, you have to go beyond tasting and dig deep. You have to break through the difficulties and move forward. It is education that fosters its power. As we enter the era of globalisation and information service, the depth seems to be gradually disappearing. It is a world where the “wide and thin knowledge for intellectual dialogue” series becomes a bestseller. The tendency to go around the world and pursue various experiences is also in line with the social atmosphere of seeking “wide and thin” knowledge. You can’t learn anything properly just by snooping around and touching this and that. Experience does not soon become learning. To learn something properly, you must read patterns and contexts from individual experiences.

Humanities are thinking, or scientific knowledge becomes a tool for grasping and interpreting the context of incomplete experiences. This is why experience-oriented education should not neglect knowledge education. The deductive ability that understands the two principles and laws cannot be obtained from experience. The study establishes a hypothesis based on incomplete knowledge acquired from experience and deduce it to find general principles. A leap occurs when moving from inductive learning to deductive learning. The context is visible as the scattered things are connected, and the work can be done.

Basic knowledge is needed to enable deductive learning. Although cramming education has many harmful effects, consolidating learning can also help acquire fundamental knowledge. Effective knowledge transfer can be achieved through lecture-style classes, not unconditional memorisation. Creative applications are also possible when understanding principles and laws correctly. Just as only those who have mastered playing can improvise, true creativity blooms when they know the regulations and rules and are free from them.

Source: Trinity Tuition College (www.trinitytuitioncollege.com.au)

Written by: Donghyeon Lee