Importance of Experience

Several months back one of my writing group members posted a prompt on our blog inviting us to create an imaginary conversation with someone famous. I spent quite a bit of time agonizing over it, starting several pieces and scrapping them all. Finally, my writing buddy told me to let it go. She said I was probably forcing it and if it wasn't coming to me, just to let it go. So I did. We agreed it might materialize at some point. I guess this is sort of that point. The poem below is not a response to the prompt as it was presented, but I do think it's my version of what is to be. I suspected way back, even after trying several other people, that my conversation would be with John Dewey. This is not a conversation, but rather a finger walk through one of my favorite Dewey books. I revisited portions I underlined, marked, or made notes near. What follows is a sort of found poem, I suppose. Enjoy.

Experience

A found poem by Laurie J. Kemp

Genuine education comes about through experience,
yet not all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
Everything depends upon the quality.
Just as no man lives or dies to himself,
so no experience lives and dies to itself.

Every experience takes up something from those before
and modifies in some way those which come after.
Each lives on in further experiences.
Select the kind of experiences that live fruitfully
and creatively in subsequent experiences.

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information
about geography and history, to win ability to read and write,
if in the process the individual loses his own soul:

loses his appreciation of things worth while
loses the values to which these things are relative
loses desire to apply what he has learned
loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

We always live at the time we live
and not at some other time.
Only by extracting at each present time
the full meaning of each present experience
are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.

This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.
The mature person has no right to withhold from the young on given occasions
whatever capacity for sympathetic understanding her own experience has given her.

She must, if she is an educator,
have that sympathetic understanding of individuals as individuals
which gives her an idea of what is actually going on
in the minds of those who are learning.

To discover what is really simple and to act upon the discovery
is an exceedingly difficult task.


Work Cited:
Most of the these words are taken directly from
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Kappa Delta Pi.

There are some rearrangements, small omissions, and pronoun changes.