It has been said, “Not everything that is learned is contained in books.” Compare and contrast knowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?
People need to gain knowledge to lead better lives. Experience and books are two sources of information through which people can acquire new knowledge. Each one has advantages and disadvantages. Albeit, I am not going to underestimate the significance of books, in my opinion, knowledge gained from experience is more important than knowledge gained form books because it is practical and stays with us forever.
First of all, knowledge gained form books is theoretical while that of experience is practical, and real life needs practical knowledge. Books contain valuable information about a variety of subjects. However, in dealing with real world situations, most of it is pointless since it is abstract. In everyday life people need to solve problems rather than just reading about them. For example, after getting my university degree I was looking for a job, for almost any company job experience was more important than university degree. So, it took a long time to find a job, although I had studied in one of the best universities of my country. Eventually, I landed a job with an international transportation company. After I started working, I found out that nearly all knowledge I had acquired from books was irrelevant to my job. I had to handle shipments to different parts of the world. Each shipment was a new case and caused new problems. I could not find anything in the books about how to deal with those problems so I had to learn from experience. Thus, knowledge that you get from books won’t help you much in dealing with practical problems.
Secondly, the knowledge which we obtain from personal experience remains with us longer than that we get from reading. Every student reads a lot of books in university but they cannot remember almost anything after a few years unless they review them again and again. On the contrary, once we learn something from experience, we will never forget it. For instance, I remember when I was a child, one day, I wanted to steal a cookie from a store, but the salesperson caught me shoplifting and called my father. Needless to say, my father scolded me for the wrongdoing. After that, I never forgot that stealing is morally wrong. So, as you can see, I have not forgotten the important lesson that I learn from this bad experience.
In conclusion, I strongly believe that knowledge gained from experience is more important than that gained from reading books. This is because knowledge obtained from personal experience is practical and also tends to linger in our minds.