Machine learning is an area where both symbolic and neural approaches to artificial intelligence have been heavily investigated. However, there has been little research into the synergies achievable by combining these two learning paradigms. A hybrid system that combines the symbolically-oriented explanation-based learning paradigm with the neural backpropagation algorithm is described. In the presented EBL-ANN algorithm, the initial neural network configuration is determined by the generalized explanation of the solution to a specific classification task. This approach overcomes problems that arise when using imperfect theories to build explanations and addresses the problem of choosing a good initial neural network configuration. Empirical results show that the hybrid system more accurately learns a concept than the explanation-based system by itself and learns faster and generalizes better than the neural learning system by itself.