Balancing scholarship with experience

What kind of value can we place on personal experience when used as evidence of argument in a classroom? The answer, judging by the instruction and admonishments from our graduate instructors, seems to be very little. The reasoning seems to be that personal experience, anecdotal evidence, is simply unreliable and specific to a small cross-section of human experience. Would Locke and Vico support such a view of knowledge and education today?

According to Locke, in his tabula rasa theory, we aren't born with innate knowledge. Rather, humans develop knowledge through their experiences. Everything we know and understand, then, is dependent on personal experience. "The mind gets its ideas of particular, concrete objects through one of the five senses; it gets all other ideas by reflecting on its own operations." When we attempt to strip away that personal experience from the learning process, are we doing a disservice to students? In composition classes, we as teachers attempt to wean students away from depending on anecdotal evidence to prove arguments. But it is possible that we impede learning and make the process of writing a dry and empty process rather than a rich, fulfilling experience in and of itself. Perhaps we should seek to expand and encourage personal experience. As Corbett says in his essay on Locke, "If our students sometimes fail in doing our writing assignments, their failure may be due, not to the malfunctioning of whatever heuristic system they may have used but rather to the narrowly circumscribed range of their experiences." And if we go to all that trouble to encourage experience for the sake of learning, does it then make sense to stifle that expression of experience completely?

For Locke, experience was knowledge. For Vico, self-discovery was knowledge. What is experience if not self-discovery? "[Vico] also wanted to start a movement of autonomous self-development in the student. The latter must rediscover his soul himself, and must seek the connection between human nature and the Divine. The study of the classics and their expressive formulas becomes a mean of intellectual development and not an end it itself." He respected the classics and saw their value for a well-educated individual, but learning the classics wasn't the end. As we learned from both the article on Vico and the presentation, he believed strongly in sending his students out into the world to utilize their hard-earned knowledge for the sake of their people and society. Again, there is that emphasis on experience and utilizing that experience for productive means.

I don't advocate a progressive form of education that focuses entirely on self-expression to the exclusion of research and presentation of authoritative sources. To do so would be to disregard the rationality and wisdom to be found in scholarship. As Maiullari says of Vico's theories, "The interest and primary aim for every man must be to achieve a balance between his own nature and his own actions, between theory and action." I would suggest that such a strong exclusion of experience is a detriment to the knowledge and development of our students and that we should seek a balance between scholarship and experience.