Prefer experience over unbacked opinion

Young people are flooded with opinions about life choices that someone else will not have to carry. On questions that reshape a life, I would rather they ask people who lived both sides of a choice than treat social media as a substitute for lived report.

Avoid opinions not backed by experience. That is a small rule with a large application. Wherever the cost of being wrong is paid over decades, testimony from those who paid some version of that cost should rank above fluency from those who only theorised.

The same rule applies to schooling and reform. Anyone with strong opinions on how education should work should try teaching in a school long enough to feel the constraints. Blame is cheap without that contact. Opinion without classroom friction is another form of cheap certainty.

Drawn from writing on X as devendrasm on experience, opinion, and teaching before redesigning schools.