freethinking.me

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

I’m sure a lot of you have heard about the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People popularized by Stephen Covey, or the 21 Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell. But have you heard about the 64 different ways of thinking?

Just the other day, I “met” a new friend online and through the wonders of the internet, had an interesting conversation with him about thinking. His name is Atty. Camilo Miguel “Bong” Montesa and he runs the De Bono Thinking School in Loyola Heights, Quezon City. Bong is the first Filipino trained and certified to teach Edward de Bono’s Thinking Systems to students in the Philippines.

I encountered a link to his website from a friend who posted it on Facebook and I was intrigued. What in the world was a “thinking school?” I wondered. So I had a short chat with him and we agreed to talk face to face via Skype.

“We often complain today about people being too narrow-minded and lacking creativity and innovation,” said Bong. “But can we really blame them? It starts with our kids. Our schools have not taught them how to think.”

He further explains that enrolling your child in a Math or Reading or Science Tutorial program may be beneficial but it is not enough. Thinking is a skill that needs to be taught independently and can form the foundation for all these other subjects.

This idea was conceived and popularized by Edward De Bono, a highly accomplished author, recognized worldwide as an expert in the field of conceptual thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. Some of his more popular books include Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking. Over 20 countries have adopted his ideas and incorporated them into their school curriculum.

“There are 64 different ways of thinking,” said Bong, which surprised me as I could only think of a handful. “We divide these into 8 different modules with 8 sessions per module. Each session deals with a specific thinking skill complete with activities for kids to apply the concept.”

One of the tools that Bong shared to me is called PMI, which stands for Plus-Minus-Interest. When someone presents us with an idea, the usual response would be either to accept the idea or to reject it, sometimes without really considering the idea. PMI provides a framework for us to evaluate the idea thoroughly before accepting or discarding it.

Plus – Ask yourself, what’s good about the idea? Every idea has something positive about it, no matter how bad it sounds..

Minus – Ask yourself, what’s bad about the idea? Every idea also has something negative about it, no matter how good it sounds.

Interest – After everything has been analyzed and evaluated, what is interesting about the idea such that even if we discard the idea, we can probably form a better idea with whatever we find interesting?

I immediately saw the relevance of this when looking at what’s happening in our country. We’ve had lots of controversies regarding the Cybercrime Law, the RH Law, Charter Change, Freedom of Information, and so on. Many people hold rallies and give speeches either for or against these issues, and usually those who are pro want the whole thing implemented and those who are anti want the whole thing incinerated.

A better (and perhaps more rational) way of going around the matter would be to apply PMI on it. Surely, there are some good things about it and some bad things as well. Let’s proceed with what is good, improve on or replace whatever is bad, and see what other interesting issues can be addressed from it.

Bong’s vision is to introduce and incorporate these principles into our schools. Imagine if our kids are equipped with all these tools of of thinking, decision-making, and creativity. We will probably have a better generation of leaders and decision makers. And wouldn’t that be a grand legacy for our generation to impart to them?

 

Andy Uyboco is a businessman, trainer and speaker. To learn more about the De Bono Thinking School, visit their website at www.debonoschool.com. Email me at andy@freethinking.me. 

Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.

— Voltaire

Originally published in SunStar Davao.

The Parable of the Missing Question

The disciple asked the master, “Do you believe in God?”

The master did not reply.

The disciple thought the master had not heard and repeated the question.

The master remained silent.

The disciple then asked, “Master, why do you not reply?”

The master said, “Because there is no question.”

It Depends

Today, when people ask me whether I believe in God or not, my usual reply is, “It depends.”

“Depends on what?” You may ask.

Well, it depends on what you think the word ‘God’ means.

Ask a Christian if he believes in God and he will say yes. Ask a Muslim if he believes in God and he will say yes as well. Ask a Hindu if he believes in God and you still get a yes. In fact, you can go ahead and ask a Jew, a shaman, a Zoroastrianist, a Rastafari, a Sikh, or mostly anyone affiliated with a religion and they will all say yes.

It is quite obvious though, that they do not all mean the same thing. The question, “Do you believe in God?” is therefore rendered meaningless unless the questioner first clarifies what he or she means by the word “God.” Only then can the question be properly answered.

That is why in the parable above, the master declares, “There is no question.”

Religious People are Atheists Too

Some people who have been following my columns have labeled me an atheist (in approval or otherwise). But let me turn the tables around and say that religious people are also atheists with respect to the gods they don’t believe in. To Hindu, a Christian is an atheist with respect to Brahma or Krishna. To a Christian, a muslim is an atheist because he doesn’t believe that Jesus is God. Most people are atheists with respect to Zeus because practically no one believes in him anymore.

Richard Dawkins, a biologist and self-proclaimed atheist, says “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

Something (or Someone) Out There

Strictly speaking, atheism is a statement of belief. A theist believes in some sort of god. An atheist doesn’t. In this regard, I am undecided and I sometime oscillate between the two poles.

On the one hand, I am open to the possibility of a “higher power” who may be the creator or designer of life. It may be the “force” that generates love and compassion. It may be the “essence” from which all goodness comes from.

On the other hand, I have no direct sensory experience of this being and whatever mystical experience I may have had can be reasonably attributed to an overactive imagination.

Personally, I see myself more as an agnostic rather than an atheist. Agnosticism is a statement of knowledge rather than belief. An agnostic claims no knowledge (or lack of it) of god and I can certainly make that claim. Belief is a trickier matter though, and for the time being, I am content to reside in the comma that sits between belief and unbelief — until further knowledge or evidence.

If you are the type who enjoys debates and discussion, watch this:

That should keep you entertained for a while.

 

Andy Uyboco is a businessman, trainer and speaker. So do you believe in God? Email me your answers at andy@freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Angry raindrops vent their rage on our rooftop as I write this piece. Strong rain has been falling non-stop for the past 30 minutes and by now, I could imagine the floodwaters rising in different parts of the city. A quick check on my facebook feed showed several friends posting about rising water levels in their homes, or of being stranded somewhere. Some even took and uploaded photos.

This got me thinking about a different flood that supposedly happened a long time ago. I say “supposedly” because it is a story I no longer believe to be true, or even if it were true, it had to be wildly exaggerated.

I am, of course, referring to the story of Noah’s ark — a story most people raised in a Christian culture would know about.

You can read about it in Genesis chapter 7 to 9, but in a nutshell, here’s how the story goes. God looks at the world and sees how wicked it is except for Noah and his family so he commands Noah to build a big boat which is then filled with two of every kind of “unclean” animal and seven of every kind of “clean” animal. On the day the rains began, Noah and his wife, along with his three sons and their wives, went inside the ark. The rains went on for forty days until the whole earth was drowned and every living thing was wiped out. All in all, Noah and company stayed in the ark for around 200 days while waiting for the flood to recede. When they finally came out, God made a rainbow to signify his promise that he would never flood the earth in this way again. And from those 8 people and pairs of animals, the whole earth was repopulated.

It embarrasses me to say that for the most part of my life, I had believed in this story as true, that I had never thought to question or study it thoroughly. But when I did a little thinking and a little research, it wasn’t difficult to disbelieve:

• By the experts best estimates, the ark is around 8 to 9 times smaller than the Titanic in terms of total volume. Yet the Titanic had a maximum capacity of around 3,500 people with food and supplies good for 14 days (2 weeks). In contrast, the ark would have contained thousands of animals with food and supplies good for 200 days (conservative estimate by a creationist website puts the number of animals at 16,000 — which is still highly debatable as they had to do a lot of logical acrobatics to come up with that figure). Let that sink in your head for a while.

• Imagine these 8 people caring for all those animals every day – feeding them and cleaning up their body wastes. That’s a whole lot of poop.

• Many animals have specialized diets. How Noah would have gotten the food to feed them is a wonder in itself.

• How did the marsupials of Australia, the penguins in Antarctica, or the polar bears in the arctic get to the ark? Did they just stroll over?

• Many insects depend on plant life for sustenance. Did Noah have a mini-garden in the ark as well?

• Many animals are climate-sensitive. Unless Noah had isolated, temperature-controlled rooms, I fail to see how these animals would survive.

• Salt-water creatures do not survive in fresh water and vice versa. A worldwide flood of rain water (fresh water) would have mixed with ocean water disrupting the salt and water balance and would have probably killed off most, if not all of the sea creatures. So why do we still have fish of both kinds today? Did Noah have separate freshwater and saltwater aquariums in the ark as well?

• Can you imagine the sheer amount of corpses and animal carcasses there would be on land when all the water dried up? Noah and sons would have walked out to a scene akin to that in a horror movie.

• Regarding the rainbow, which we now know is caused by the refraction of water droplets in the earth’s atmosphere, it is quite difficult to believe that there were no rainbows before the great flood. This natural phenomenon can even be observed near waterfalls and fountains and does not need rain to occur. The story that it was specially created as a sign from God is clearly the stuff of myth and legend.

Of course, you could go to the internet and do your own research. By all means, please go ahead and do your research where you will see the arguments from both sides of the fence — both the profound and the ridiculous. Just remember to do an extensive and careful study, not just a couple of sites. Just because it’s published in a website does not mean it’s true. You have to see who is making the claim, and what possible motive could there be for doing so. Then use your head and common sense to judge which is the most sensible explanation.

Andy Uyboco is a businessman, trainer and speaker. You may flood his inbox at andy@freethinking.me or visit his blog at www.freethinking.me.

I dream of putting up a school in Davao.

It will be a free school and it will be the first of its kind here.

It is not “free” as in being without cost. It is “free” in the sense of being democratic.

In a nutshell, this is how it works. Students come to school and they can do pretty much anything they want — of course as long as it’s legal and doesn’t harm themselves, or anyone else.

Anything? Well, yes.

If they want to play computer games all day, they can. If they want to sit around and talk to their friends, they can. If they want to read, they can. If they want to play basketball, they can. If they want to sleep all day, they can. And if they want to learn new things or listen to an adult talk about Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (or watch it on Youtube), well of course they can do that as well.

“But how will kids learn anything in such an environment?” You may wonder.

Before I answer this, consider the environment of a traditional school. Children are forced to sit through 6 or 7 different lectures in one day and they have no say on the topics of these lectures. They are forced to learn things that have little bearing on their present or future lives. They are then tested and graded, whether they like it or not, whether they are sufficiently prepared or not. And children are then treated differently by their parents, teachers, and peers depending on their grades — whether they admit it or not.

Ken Robinson, a world renowned expert on education and creativity, says that the traditional school is modeled after a factory. In fact, the idea of school bells comes from the factory bells. Children are educated in batches of the same age group (a “production line mentality”) when clearly many children even of the same age have varying degrees of interest and abilities. But they are forced to go through certain lessons at a certain pace just because of their age. (See Ken Robinson’s talk)

Now in such an environment, what do kids learn? They learn conformity instead of creativity. They learn to cram and memorize. They learn not to rock the boat. They learn not to ask questions (or too many of them) because it makes them look stupid, ignorant or even rebellious. They learn to copy instead of being original. They learn that their own interests are not as important as what adults dictate they should be. They learn to live in drudgery instead of dreams. And the worst is when they learn to despise school and see it only as a necessary evil.

American journalist H.L. Mencken says that “the aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

Now let’s go back to the question of whether children really learn anything in a school that lets them do pretty much anything. The answer is a resounding ‘YES!’ Learning need not only take place in the classroom but happens all the time, even when kids are playing or just talking with each other. In fact, there have been numerous studies highlighting the benefits of playing games, music, and discussion as valuable learning tools (yes, even video games). People learn more when they are having fun.

Democratic schools are not as new as you might think. The first democratic school opened its doors in 1921, in England – a school called Summerhill founded by A.S. Neill. One of the more prominent democratic schools in the U.S.A. was founded 1968 by Greenberg, Rubin and Sadofsky and is called Sudbury Valley School. To date, there are over a hundred democratic schools in more than 30 countries worldwide.

Jennifer Schwartz conducted a study of Self-Directed Learning and Student Attitudes in a Sudbury-model school called Sego Lily School. She published the results in the Journal for Unschooling and Alternative Education. She notes that “students in these environments do not suffer from the stresses of traditional schools, nor do they lose interest in learning simply because information is forced upon them. Graduates of these environments go on to earn degrees from prestigious universities such as Harvard and Stanford, and/or pursue careers that are important to them, such as being a professional musician or forest ranger.”

As a former teacher, I have witnessed how a child’s love for learning is crushed and deadened by an educational system that ironically purports to foster it. I and a lot of fellow teachers have felt generally helpless in fighting this system, although we did the best we could to work around it. Still, one can only do so much in a system that has, in my opinion, outlived its usefulness.

It is time to break free from the old ways of thinking and change our paradigms of learning and education.

It is time for a new kind of school.

Andy Uyboco is a businessman, trainer and speaker. You may email him at andy@freethinking.me.