Education Comes, Not From Books, but From

Education Comes, Not From Books, But From Personal Experience

Education Comes Not From Books, but From Personal Experience

Knowledge is the ultimate goal of any education, and there are many approaches to learning, from relying on books and traditional teaching to relying on life experiences. Many of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and small business owners insist that personal and life experiences or what they call "the school of hard knocks" was the best education they ever received. Others, including many of the worlds' leading CEOs and founders of companies believe in education and book learning. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two founders of Google, both have PhDs from Stanford University. The intent of this essay is to evaluate each of these approaches to learning, showing which are the most effective for specific types of learning.

Book Learning and Traditional Instruction

The founders of Google show how powerful innovation can be when it is based on solid book learning and traditional in-class instruction. The two founders were strong students who excelled in their computer science classes, and stumbled upon on the idea for Google when they were working on their dissertations. Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to find a way to quickly isolate which references to other articles had been cited the most. Using the in-depth knowledge they had from their book learning, the two devised an algorithm to track which articles had been referenced the most. Without book learning and traditional instruction, both founders would not have had the opportunity to get their PhDs at Stanford University. They would have also not had the insight and foresight to think of how to quickly rank all the pages on an academic database to see which had been most cited or referenced by others. That was the beginning of the PageRank algorithm and is today the basis of how the company references each known page on the Internet. Without traditional book learning, Sergey Brin and Larry Page might not have ever seen the potential to rank pages on the Internet.

Life Experiences Are The Best Teachers