There has been an ever growing battle among teaching professionals, businesses and even students as to what is more important, being book learned in a subject or having some practical hands on experience. We're not going to try to answer that question in this article, only present both sides and allow you, the reader to come to your own conclusions.
With computers, unlike many other subjects, such as accounting, where without theory you simply can't make the correct journal entries, there is a growing number of people without formal training who have very productive careers in the field of computers. In spite of this, there are those who argue that these workers will ultimately not be able to keep up with the ever-changing technology because they have not had formal training and don't know how to read and understand a technical training manual.
Those who believe that understanding the theories of computers, whatever the discipline, is more important than actual hands on use this as their argument. A student who simply gets a hold of a computer and begins working on it is working in the dark and only by trial and error and chance stumbles onto the correct procedure for whatever it is they are trying to do.
In some disciplines, like data entry, this may not be too difficult. After all, most data entry programs have menus to guide the user along, and specific text boxes for each form of input that is required. A person with basic reading skills could probably walk his way through a data entry screen and manage to perform simple data entry tasks.
But what happens when the student tries to tackle a more complex task like installing a hard drive in a computer. Without understanding the basic theories of electricity and grounding, it is quite likely that the student will end up shorting out the drive and possibly every component in the computer itself.
Those who argue the other side of this tricky coin, say that if a student were to try hands on without the aid of formal book knowledge, he would certainly have someone there to show them just how to install that hard drive. The overseer would explain to him along the way the main points that he would need to know in order to do the job correctly, without all the technical stuff that is usually 90% useless in most situations.
However, their more compelling argument for hands on over book knowledge is this. That same student, with all the book knowledge in the world, has still never physically handled a hard drive. In theory, he knows what's going on electronically and understands about grounding but until he actually gets his hands on a drive and tries to place it into that computer, he has no idea if he'll actually be able to handle the task. Maybe his hands will shake. Maybe he has poor eyesight and can't see well enough to make the right connections. Maybe he has trouble hooking up wires. Some people just aren't mechanically inclined.
Even in the field of programming a computer, a person may have complete knowledge of the language he is programming in, but without actually writing a program in a real business environment he has no idea of the complexities of a real life business application. That is why so many computer based products have patches upon patches of bug fixes, because many programmers working their first job simply aren't ready for what's involved.
No doubt the argument of book learning versus hands on will continue until time itself stops, and while no actual answers are given here, it is hoped that this article will give the reader something to think about when taking one side or the other.
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