What is a better teacher, experience or books?

While books can give you a base to build on and give you basic instructions, you have no better teacher than experience! You can read about something until the day you die, yet you won't know what it's like until you get off your fanny and go out and do it. It's like in my life, there are times I am a very slow learner, such as with dealing with my adult daughter. I have allowed her to move home with her family three different times, and each time has been a disaster and has cost me in the thousands of dollars. This last time, with the experiences I have had with the entire family, I am not allowing her or the family to move back again. Many teachers say that we learn by doing, and that is the truth. Without reaching out and touching, smelling, moving the life forces about we can't really realize what we are supposed to learn. How can a person imagine what something is like with out a foundation to build that image on? Like driving a car, as children we can imagine what it is like to drive a car by watching our parents-but if as a child we were to go out and try it ourselves it would be a totally different image. We need to experience the feel of getting behind the wheel, turning on the ignition, putting the car in gear and stepping slowly on the gas pedal. If we read about it in a book, we can't visualize exactally what the experience is like-it would be like if we were in the mountains secluded from the world and a book dropped in our laps with instructions about driving a car. We couldn't understand what it was until we actually got behind the wheel of a car and drove it. Even though experience, in my view, is a better teacher; we still need books to build the foundation of learning from experience.

A combination of both will be a great help. So, according to me none is better than the other. From experience, you learn from both your success, mistakes and failures. From book, you learn new things, strategies and methods. They help you to put new things to test.