TWE 4
2,000 years ago, Kongzi, an famous scholar of China, said,“To believe all what books say is worse than not to read them at all.”He suggested us attaching importance on personal experience and reading books with critical attitude. From this view, therefore, knowledge from experience is more important than that in books. As far as I am concerned, however, I do not agree with such point of view. I strongly believe that the importance of knowledge in books far outweighs that from experience. This I support with the following reasons.
First of all, knowledge in books is easier to reserve and transfer. An undeniable fact is that books have been the most effective and frequently used tools to transfer knowledge of human beings even before paper was invented. With such benefit from books, human beings are able to accumulate their knowledge generation after generation, and descendents can stand on the shoulders of their ancients to look into this world and make possible what ancient people think as miracles. A good case of this point is the space travel. Soaring in space has been a dream of human for thousands of years, but not until 1960s when people absorbed all most advanced technologies of human beings at that time and before, did this dream come true. There is no doubt that without knowledge gained from books, civilization of human cannot develop at such a stunning speed.
Another reason is that knowledge in books is more generalized knowledge while knowledge from experience is more personal. People who emphasize knowledge too much may make ridiculous mistake sometimes. Let us take a folk as an example. A king never went out his palace. One day, his minister reported him that many people had died because they had no rice to eat. The king asked, “Why not eat meat?” He did not know that meat is rarer than rice for the people. Bias is often a twin of experience.
Furthermore, most knowledge in books, generally speaking, has been tested or challenged by logic thinking. Large part of Knowledge from experience, however, is just experiences. Some of them are authentic insights, but others are only misbelief.
Of course, knowledge from experience also has some advantages. Among them the most significant is that knowledge in books, ultimately, origins from experience.
But if all factors are contemplated, the importance of knowledge in books carries more weight than that from experience. From above discuss, we may finally draw the conclusion that knowledge in books is more important than knowledge from experience.
修改意见:
好文如怡。
孔子： confucius
儒家： confucian
孟子： mencius