IELTS Writing Task 2 with sample answer.
You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.
It has been said, “Not all learning takes place in the classroom.” Compare and contrast knowledge gained from personal experience with knowledge gained from classroom instruction.
In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
Write at least 250 words.
Sample Answer:
Learning, in common parlance, is an act of obtaining knowledge from anywhere at time. Generally, people gain knowledge in two ways: knowledge acquired from personal experience and from classroom instruction. Although classroom instruction broadens our horizontal of knowledge, everlasting quality of personal experience makes it better source of knowledge, I think.
To begin with, both personal experience and classroom instruction open us to a broad range of learning. Every day we learn so many things from our personal experience are very crucial for understanding the world. Our empirical experiences teach us how to respond to a particular situation. Not necessarily we learn from our success, we equally lean from our failure. For example, toddlers learn walking after making lot of falling down.
Likewise, classroom instruction too stretches our horizontal of knowledge. In the classroom, we are taught different subjects. For instance, when we are taught history, our teachers explain various aspects of a particular event of the past. We learn from our ancestors’ success and mistakes as well; we learn what we should do and should not do. In the classroom, we learn theories ranging from Newton’s law of motion to Einstein’s theory of relativity which had been accomplished after centuries. Like experience, we also learn from our mistakes done in the classroom. When we have done a mistake, our teachers explain our mistakes and provide us with solutions.
Although there is many similarities between personal experience and classroom instruction, many aspects apart them at the same time. We learn in the classroom that failure is the stepping base to success, but most cases we do not know how to overcome that failure. It is our experience through which we know how face a bitter situation. So if we learn in the classroom that life is not a bed of roses and we have both success and failure, our real life experience teaches us how tackle those harsh situations and overcome them without much difficulties.
Now, the reason why I believe that personal experience is more important than classroom instruction is that the lesson we learn from personal experience is usually long lasting or some cases everlasting. Take traffic manners for example. We can learn those manners from both classroom and personal experience, and also can know that if we disobey the rules, we will be punished. Though personal experience will be bitter in this case, but we will keep this lesson in mind during the rest of our life. Actually, human being tends to remember what he or she gains from his personal experience. The reason behind this is that we feel our personal experiences more vivacious and thus, these are remained in our memory for a long period of time than any other indirect experiences from classroom instruction.
To wrap up, we learn both directly from our experiences and indirectly from classroom instruction. Both the forms widen our knowledge to a great extent, though knowledge from personal experience is more durable. That is why, I stress on personal experiences that prepare us to deal with real life situation.