William Blake wrote Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Today, we could write, less poetically, Songs of Information; our children’s innocence is quickly and largely lost to the information in and with which we live.
It used to be that life gave us experience, from the school of hard knocks on up. Until recently, historically speaking, more than 9 out of 10 persons worked in agriculture, and everyone knew a great deal—how and when to plow, till, sow; how to herd and heal, how to shoe, how to hunt, trap, tan, weave, sew, dress, butcher, cook, how to mend a wagon wheel or a fence, how to build, how to clear, and on and on. Those who didn’t farm knew a trade. Experience filled a life.
But if we wanted information we had to go to school (or church, but that’s a different topic). We could say that the job of schools was to provide information that life experience did not—literacy, numeracy, the content and interpretation of books, “subjects” like history, geography, science, philosophy, theology, and on and on. Information filled a school.
Without quite realizing it, we have turned the world upside down.
For young people, especially, information is everywhere and experience is hard to come by.
This makes the job of schools and schooling different. We need to reorient—we are reorienting—education to provide experience, and trust that none of our students will suffer from too little information in the next lifetime or more.
Experience allows us to discern and sift and sort the information flowing past our eyes. It allows us to live as human beings in a world that increasingly seems not to need human input. Schools that offer experience—and trust that we no longer need primarily to be the arbiters of information—will serve their students best.
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