This is an old idea in education reform. More than two hundred years ago,
Rousseau (1979) championed the idea in Emile as he described the education
of a mythical child, whereby townspeople were used to engineer appropriate
situations for learning about honesty, property, numbers, and astronomy. “Do
not give your pupil any verbal lessons; he ought to receive them only from
experience” (p. 92). This is a key antidote to the Expert Blind Spot: “We never
know how to put ourselves in the place of children; we do not enter into their
ideas; we lend them ours and . . . with chains of truths we heap up only follies
and errors in their heads” (p. 170). Sharing one’s understandings and passions
about how the world works is doomed to fail without the right experience: