Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts

I do believe you are completely incorrect, but we will have to see what others assume.

I feel that book smarts is say, memorizing how to peel an apple. But if someone gives you an orange to peel, you don't know because you only learned about the apple. Street smarts would be learning by yourself how to peel an apple and figuring out how to peel an orange because you know how to peel the apple. I have an example of this. This girl I know is the most book smart person I know. However, somebody said, "Hey, we should have a group study session" She literally did not understand what they were talking about until they explained that it was when you study in a group. She then said "Oh, you mean a study group. I get it!" She didn't even understand what that meant with the words only reversed.

Pretty much. Hence the Genius Ditz trope (and I can vouch for the truth in television of it).

If that's how you want to define the terms, I see no reason to call it "street" versus "book" smart, since they have no relation to anything about a street or a book. It seems more like, there is an attempt to constantly redefine street until it sounds better than those "stupid" book smart people. If that's how you want to define it, almost everybody in top level university classes are all street and not book smart, which would seem to imply you've poorly named the term.

I think book smarts is more like learning about the concept of peeling in an abstract way, and then when you're given a fruit for the first time, perhaps it would take a second to actually get the hand motion, but you can apply the general concept of peeling and then peel that fruit, whatever it is.

Street smarts is growing up around fruit, having to peel them all your life, and then when you see a fruit you instantly know both what to do and how to do it. The drawback to this is that you can only learn so much by hands-on experience.

Both are necessary, but if I had to say one's better than the other, I'm going to go with the "street smarts" (if the definition here is "stuff learned by doing it") for one simple reason.

Every piece of information you are given in any medium (books, television, the internet etc.) has to come from someone, and that someone has an agenda. They don't know you, so there agenda ain't educating you. It's probably making money, or furthering a viewpoint which may or may not be healthy for you to buy into.

Ergo, if you're really curious about how something works, get out and do it. Or accept that you'll never really know for sure.

Book smarts have their place. And it's closely behind street-smarts, IMO.

@Drunk: That's a good point, especially when it comes to things you have to do everyday, like cooking, or beliefs that will affect your life/country, like politics, but what about things like math? You'd have to be a real prodigy to teach yourself math skills, but they're pretty important to function in the modern world. I think it depends on the situation whether I'd choose book smarts or street smarts.

edited 31st Jan '11 7:56:10 PM by OnTheOtherHandle

@Other Handle: True, but one becomes better at math by actually working the problems, yes? Instead of merely reading about it? That way, you know for certain it works.

You're right, I guess I forgot to count doing problems as "learning by experience". Damn, if we include that, a huge chunk of school learning is actually "street smarts".

Hands-on experience can mean a lot, especially in things you'll be expected to do regularly, but the knowledge gained tends to be very narrow and you're open to forming bad habits. Prior book smarts are helpful for starting out, especially in things with huge potential pitfalls, and for a greater understanding of the picture beyond just your part.

edited 31st Jan '11 8:08:35 PM by Pykrete

I've always viewed both as equally important, myself.

I wouldn't say equally, so much as that the knowledge and proper priorities of what each can give you in any given situation is more important than both.

That is true, as knowledge is useless in and of itself if one does not know how to properly apply it.

It'd be like putting personal lubricant on parts for one's car.

Er, sorry metaphor failure there; cold medicine is having adverse effects on my metaphor-building skills.

See, "don't fuck cars" is one of those things you could pick up through personal experience, but it wouldn't be the best idea.

After thinking about it, I'm more inclined towards book smarts, actually. I don't want to have every imaginable bad thing happen to me to learn that all those risky behaviors are bad. This applies heavily to Health class, which is having a huge impression on me. I started exercising because of that class, because I didn't want to end up like that poor guy whose autopsy they showed us - he had died of a heart attack, and had no unhealthy habits other than sedentariness. There were gobs of fat being pulled out of him the color and texture of rotten cheese. You don't exactly want it to get that far before you realize that you should start working out.

Well it's impossible to do many salary-based jobs without significant academic theory or abstract knowledge. Practical application and "hands-on" learning is figuring out how to apply that theoretical knowledge. If you don't have that foundation, what you have is a myopic view of the world and a narrow set of skills. If you're a steelworker and only learned to do that, suddenly the company goes belly up 5 years down the road, now you've no useful skills and remain so until you get new hands-on experience. Fine if you're young but once you hit middle age, you're practically screwed.

Unless you live in an agrarian society, there's just no way to avoid having to learn abstract knowledge whose application is not immediately beneficial. We should focus heavily on book smarts because everybody gains practical application knowledge just by doing anything, so why would you bother teaching them that? Just have people do internships and co-op during summer time, while they learn academic knowledge while in school.

Some things you literally can't learn about through 'street smarts'. What about the masses of microbiology knowledge? You can't see those things, let alone manipulate them, without heaps of ridiculously expensive equipment.

Okay, I wasn't saying that book-smarts were totally useless and should be abandoned. Just that if I had to say one was more valuable, I'd pick street-smarts.

I still read a lot, people. My original point still stands for most things in everyday life.

^^ And not only do I agree let me further that point. Take a university with its labs and other resources. You learn all sorts of information for many different degrees, that say only 5-10% will be useful in any salary-job. Maybe even none of it is useful. So then if you went by the whole "street vs book" smart false dichotomy (as if you had to choose between the two), and you went with street smarts, the problem is that now you're stuck with people who are only capable of job-related skills. Who is going to research a new medicine? Who is going to improve anything? Who is going to start up the next Google or RIM? Nobody because everyone is only capable of working in the economic machine as it is today and if something breaks, well it's gone forever.

EDIT: Well I got post-ninja-ed but basically my point is that we should focus primarily on improving book smarts because it's totally pointless to focus on street smarts. You get a job, you get practical knowledge. So we really don't need to care about improving it.

edited 31st Jan '11 10:35:40 PM by breadloaf

@breadloaf: I think the opposite is true. People are too afraid to take a little risk to learn things firsthand, when they can google it and take someone else's word for it.

I have this feeling we're not using the same definitions at all in this discussion :P

Most things in everyday life? Well, let's see, today I went to the U (took the bus), had some classes, had a meeting with the professor in charge of my research, then I had a dentist's appointment, took the bus back home, played some video games, and now here I am on the internet. I think every single thing I did here relies on people who came before me who had the "book smarts" to come up with things like the combustion engine to run the buses, the math theorems that I learned about today, the equipment for me to do my research, the knowledge that the dentist used to check my teeth, and making the video game console and programming the games I played. The way I see it, everything around us is built on a very sturdy foundation of "book smarts." I suppose you can get by on "street smarts" alone, if you decided to go with the false dichotomy and had to choose just one, but then, you'd just kinda be mooching off the people who work to increase our knowledge.