Learning from Experience  

Oleh:

Bradley, Benjamin

Jenis: Article from Books - E-Book
Dalam koleksi: Psychology and Experience, page 17-45.
Topik: Learning; Experience; Psychological Education; Dominance of Technical-Rationality; Experience-Based Pedagogy; Role of the Teacher; Dynamics of Learning
Fulltext: Learning from Experience.pdf (399.21KB)

Isi artikel

Learning from experience sounds circular. What is there to learn from if not experience? Thin air? Even book-learning relies on one’s having read, that is ‘experienced’, the book. Learning about something by reading a book however, particularly a textbook, or listening to a lecture or scanning the web, is liable to yield a far skimpier sort of understanding than living that thing at first hand. You may know a lot of facts about suicide or about war, but unless you or someone dear to you has fought in a war or been in life-threatening despair, your knowledge is going to miss out on a whole dimension available to those who have ‘been there, done that’. And that dimension is peculiarly central to the discipline of psychology. For experience, life as it is made up of events lived at first hand, is the stock in trade of psychology. It is what first attracts us to the discipline. And the kinds of problem psychologists’ work confronts them with are problems that have to do with the ways people experience their worlds. Psychological problems are problems because they make living difficult. Experience must hence be the ultimate proving-ground for the fruitful- ness of all our conjectures. Sexual passion, violence, bullying, anxiety, depression, boredom at work, addiction, post-traumatic stress, paranoia, they all have to do with the ways that individuals or groups take in their surroundings. And it is far from a simple matter to change these patterns of experience. Indeed, some of them appear so immovable that we conclude they are ‘hard-wired’ from birth. Despite repeated lessons from experience, we make the same mistakes again and again, whether it be forgetting a name, drinking too much, driving too fast, losing one’s temper, provoking others, missing heaven-sent opportunities or getting in bed with the wrong guy. Repetition-compulsion, stupidity, weakness of will, call it what you may, a moment’s reflection shows that learning from experience is anything but a foregone conclusion.

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