Experience is not the best teacher, for there will be some people who have contributed nothing real and useful in their respective vocations.
Many people boast about their years of experience in their fields of expertise. But wise people always ask this question: Is it the right kind of experience or the wrong kind of experience? Wiser people query more in this manner: What kind of results did you deliver in your years of experience? Were the results beneficial or detrimental?
An individual’s years of experience in his occupation is not the sole criterion of his true capabilities. When he has delivered nothing real and useful in the form of right results for everyone to see, his experience screams only failures upon failures.
The many years of right experience in political leadership show that Lee Kuan Yew (LKY), a former Prime Minister of Singapore, left the present generation of Singaporeans a country that is the envy of its surrounding neighbours. During his political leadership, LKY built Singapore, a country with no natural resources, into a developed nation and left a strong legacy of political leadershipthat will be unmatched by the coming generations of Singaporeans.
Till today, people around the world pay glowing tributes to LKY, the architect of modern Singapore. Despite LKY’s iron rule, that right experience is political leadership at its best!
Current leaders of countries in the ASEAN region should emulate LKY’s leadership qualities.
One of LKY’s contemporaries in the ASEAN region left a legacy of filth (in his misrule) that still lingers for his coming generations to this day. Today, he is back as a leader of his country to clean up his own filth that he generated in his earlier misrule. That wrong experience is political filth at its worst!
It is the same in the field of education.
When the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) Approach practitioners, Malaysians and native speakers, have delivered nothing real and useful in improving the standard of English among Malaysians for nearly half-a-century, don’t the results show that they are egregious incompetents? They have been running in circles on the same spot for nearly half-a-century. They definitely qualify as people who have the many years of wrong experience.
In some cases, experience is definitely not the best teacher.