The Gift of Experential Learning

I am just beginning to understand the concept of "balance" as it pertains to a moving race car. Don't get me wrong, I understood the concept theoretically speaking. But after this last year of racing, I am finally understanding balance in a whole new way - maybe as something that approaches "embodied learning" of some sort.

It's one thing to understand the physics of car balance; it's quite another thing to be able to feel it, manipulate it and begin to refine it.

Matthew Crawford spends an entire book (The World Outside Your Head) trying to explain the difference between conceptual knowledge that comes from an intellectual understanding and the knowledge that comes through participating in a "practice." I think he has something interesting to say about how this practical knowledge is worth preserving (not that it is any real danger of disappearing...) But the knowledge that we tend to value these days is getting to be a bit more abstract.

It's time we revisited Aristotle's concept of "techne."

The bottom line is that learning to balance the car using the three inputs at your disposal (steering, brake and throttle) is not something you do with your head. You might explain it after the fact using your head. But, actually doing it requires much too fast a response to think about it at the time. In fact, some of the things you are required to do to balance the car are somewhat counter intuitive to the way you probably learned to drive a car on the street. (I don't know about you, but I can't remember anyone ever suggesting that hitting the gas as you entered a curve was a "good thing." Who knew...)

There is something that is deeply satisfying in nurturing techne - whether it is in a race car or some other embodied practice.