Learning from experience, including or especially from one’s mistakes. This term comes from the nineteenth century, when advanced education was for the privileged few but many rose through the ranks of industry to considerable achievement. J. A. Froude used it in writing about politics: “The school of hard knocks. Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes” (Short Studies on Great Subjects: Party Politics, 1850). It was more often heard from successful businessmen who had relatively little formal schooling and proclaimed quite proudly that theirs had been the “school of hard knocks.” In the 1940s and 1950s Ray Herrick, a Michigan businessman who had only a grade-school education and created a million-dollar business, would proudly announce that his alma mater was “H.N., the school of ‘hard nocks.’”