Red pill and blue pill…

We should never replace the rigorous open-minded skepticism of science with an inflexible certainty of ideological commitment.

–Denialism: How Irrational Thinking  Harms
the Planet and Threatens Our Lives

Nobody can be correct 100% of the time and the first step towards true change is admitting that neither I nor you – nor your parents, nor your spouse, your children, school, boss, your government, nor your church know everything.

Dont get me wrong here. I am not advocating the overthrow of a government nor the conception of a radically new one but a rather a more personal form of revolution – a revolution in your own way of thinking.

Instead of blindly blaming national governments, international corporations, ethic groups, sexual preferences, multicultural organizations, ideological beliefs, religious institutions or political parties, what if we change the way we think?

That means to challenge all preconceived notions about right and wrong and looking beyond the limitations of your culture’s way of thinking.

• you change the way you think, you change the way you act;
• you change the way you act, you’ll be able to change the way others act and think;
• if you can change the way others think, you can help change the world one person at a time. And it all starts with you.

There is no shame in not knowing everything but there is shame in pretending we know everything when in fact we don’t and more in denying the truth in because of the inflexible ideological commitment one has adapted. We can and must learn from each other, regardless of what we look like, where we live in or what we believe.

As Michael Specter puts it, “No amount of data will convince climate denialists that humans have caused the rapid, devastating warming of the earth. And no feat of molecular genetics will make a creationist understand that our species has evolved over billions of years, along with every other creature. Common strains of denialism are even more troubling, though, because they show what happens when unfettered scientific achievement bumps up against the limits of human imagination.”

Open honest communication is the only way we can change this world for better. Books, computer and the internet can open your mind to new worlds that you’ve never dreamed of – or turn your mind and funnel your thinking down the narrow confines of a fantasy world that you only choose to see.

Either choose the blissful ignorance of illusion or embrace the sometimes painful truth of reality. The choice is yours.

Beyond close family ties and multigenerational pitfalls

Our educational set up is not about teaching us how to lead and make a difference; It’s purely about being stable – about fitting in. But who can blame our academic institutions? Our economy wanted you to fit in, it paid you to fit in, and it took care of you if you fit in. This, compounded by our ridiculous set of cultural values we so proudly call “close family ties”, is what beats the genius out of us.

As a child, I was raised and taught to consider even the farthest degrees of our kinship as extended family and take pride and value that relationship as something useful for getting favors, grants and advantages.  I was led to believe  that having an influential ninong is a sure ticket for me to avoid being caught up in the complex, interweaving fabric of Philippine society.

We are trained, at a very young age, to be loyal to our parents and elders by blindly obeying their authority and the conditions that they impose within the family. It is inculcated that family is the foundation of our existence and that it comes first above everything else.

“Walang kapa-kapamilya, walang kama-kamag anak” do not reflect on our judgements and how we form our choices. “Blood is thicker than water” is a more familiar mantra, however, that resonates throughout our lives in making moral decisions which often tear us apart between our personal interests and happiness against the collective’s; between your own decision and your family’s decision; between our morality and their morality. The individual cannot separate from the collective – a slave, a conformist, and investment.

The handful few who find the bravery to defy this tradition are, more often than not, disowned, outcasted and rejected. Often vilified as ingrates and blacksheeps for not conforming. But now, everything is different. The very cornerstones of our society are shifting. Everything is redefined. Nothing is staying as it is.

This is a personal manifesto. A plea from me to you. It’s about a choice and it’s about your life. This choice doesn’t require you to quit your job, but it challenges you to rethink everything that is taught to you. Be brave enough to go outside of conformity. Let’s all wake up to the reality that family ties are not meant to evoke affection between family members but rather to take advantage and leech those that are successful and in power. It is corrupting us with laziness and being dependent.

The system we grew up is a mess and it’s falling apart at the seams. The things we thought would work, no longer do. Holding back would only drag you down with the falling paradigm. We’ve been pawns for too long for a senseless system that uses us up and undervalues our worth. We are more than their cousin’s sons and daughters. It’s time to stop complying to conformity and draw your own map.

Stop settling for good and start creating that matters. Stop thinking what is in it for you. Then, and only then, will you have achieved your potential. Start moving outside the box even if it is against the morality of the collective you grew in. For hundreds of years, the population has been seduced, scammed and brainwashed into fitting in, following instructions, and exchanging a day’s work for a day’s pay. That era has come to an end and just in time.

You have brilliance in you, your contribution is valuable, and the art to create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must. Stand up and choose make a difference. To mooch from those who labor and think; to ride on and claim from the accomplishments of others because they are your kin or “kababayan” and disguising it with “proud to be pinoy” phrase is a product of mediocrity, laziness and self-respect to become independent self-determinist.

Make a change.

You get what you pay for…

It’s an old adage: “you get what you pay for.” More accurately, though, you don’t get what you don’t pay for. So it is not a big surprise when the March edition of PIDS (Philippine Institute of Development Studies) Economic Policy Monitor reports that many higher education institutions in the country do not meet international and even local quality standards.

It was argued in the paper that low expenditure in higher education is considered to be a major factor to higher education’s deterioration and underperformance. The Philippines spent less than 10 percent of per capita gross domestic product on higher education in 2007 compared to Indonesia and Malaysia. It also noted that positive developments peppered the education sector in recent years, but progress remained sluggish and inadequate. the current financial systems are designed to ensure that funds provided to a university for a specific purpose are used for that purpose, not to provide accountability for performance.

Around my place even university graduates are hardly conversant in simple english. Even the functional literacy of 10-15 year-olds is at 62 percent. If such a trend would continue, the country could fail to honor its millennium development goals committment of achieving universal primary education by 2015.

Even the Aquino administration’s apparent rush to implement K-12 program is very short-sighted. It looks over the fact that many publicly funded education programs would be affected negatively ultimately straining social equity. This stems from the fact that many Filipino families do not reach this level of educational attainment.

Moreover, some experts have also expressed fear that DepEd might be spreading itself too thinly and might lose administrative concentration by implementing too many reforms altogether, thereby risking similar reform failures as in the past.

Increasing the funding and fortifying the incentives for selected institutions are the more obvious ways of addressing the problem – reflecting the priority given to the function of higher education in ameliorating society, instead of spending more in trivial things like hikes for government workers clothing allowance and nationwide development of parks.

What is School for?

Let us therefore study, my countrymen, for although the art of learning is somewhat difficult, yet if we are persevering, we shall soon improve our knowledge.

-Tomas Pinpin, Librong Pagaaralan nang mga Tagalog nang Wicang Castila

Form where I came from, our educational system was directed to create a constant stream of compliant workers to man the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it’s not a goal we need to achieve any longer.

Our society is fundamentally changed by the connection economy and the advent of the Internet. The very things we assumed to be baseline truths were in fact recent inventions and unlikely to last much longer.  The TV-Industrial Complex is no longer perceived as the pillar of the future as what most of us were trained to expect. Scarcity of access is destroyed by the capacity of fast information exchange at the very same time the skills and attitudes we need from our graduates are changing.

Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence – it was designed as an investment for our economic future;  Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Every year, we produce millions of workers who are trained to do 1925-style labor. Our youth is trained not think but rather cultured to follow a set of rules handed down by an obsolete 1900s industrialist mentality.

Of course it worked it worked well within the system. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

If we continue heading to this direction, we would inevitably enter an Innovation Dark Ages. I’m getting this second-hand, but apparently he compared the number of innovations catalogued each year in a standard reference work to population, calculating a rate of innovation over time.  It turns out that the rate peaked in 1873 and has been declining steadily ever since.  By 2024 the rate will be what it was in the Dark Ages.

Some people argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they’re told. Even if we could win that race, we’d lose. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you’re capable getting there.

My years as a freelance programmer taught me that if you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, he will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

As we get ready for the ninety-third year of universal public education, here;s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push, or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of creating predictable, testable, and mediocre factory workers?

As long as we embrace and accept standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership, and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?