Essay on the topic for the freewriting task

Topic: It has been said that not all learning takes place in the classroom. Compare and contrast knowledge gained from personal experience with knowledge gained from classroom instruction.

  Human being can learn. It can acquire knowledge through some meaningful processes. However, not all knowledge is acquired through same procedure. Thus, there are mainly two types of knowledge, depending on where and how it is acquired. One is knowledge that a person got from his own experience alone, and the other is knowledge that a person obtained through lectures given from an instructor. The two types of knowledge are quite different from each other, but they also have some common points. Thus, in this essay, I would like to discuss one of the common points and one of the differences that the two types of knowledge have.

  First, the two types of knowledge are similar in a way that they both can improve a person’s ability to think more seriously. When a person acquires knowledge through his own experience, it could be concluded that he got the knowledge by thinking hard alone. This surely means that he now can think about the subject of the knowledge deeper and more seriously, so that he got the knowledge successfully without any help from other people. Also, if a person gained knowledge by listening to a lecture in class, this also means that he now understood new information about a subject. This can also be concluded that the person now has a new knowledge upon which he can build on some new thoughts and thus, expand the scope of his thoughts.

  However, the two types of knowledge are also different from each other in a way that the source of knowledge is different. For the knowledge that a person gained through his personal experience, it is gained through the logical thinking process in that person’s mind. This means that the person now truly understands the new concept, since he got it by himself. However, for the knowledge acquired through instructions in class, a person can have a hard time understanding the knowledge because it is now his own idea – it is someone else’s idea that he is learning. The person needs to put more effort to sufficiently understand the idea and to think as if it were his own idea.

 To sum up, there are mainly two types of knowledge: knowledge gained through personal experience and knowledge gained in class. It is quite difficult to say which one is the better, but we can definitely say that they have some characteristics in common and some differences.