Category: Essays

I wonder how much faster I could have found myself without the distraction of school work. Yes, I “learned” many things in school and have forgotten most of them. Mostly I learned acting. I learned how to act interested even if I was not. I learned how to act like I respected a teacher, even if I did not. I learned how to act obedient and compliant even though I was seething inside with rebellion.

But I had to act, because reputation, grades and the beloved honors were on the line.

College was interesting because I was now living alone in a faraway city — a new environment where people didn’t know my history, and I was unburdened by having to live up to who I thought people knew I was.

Halfway through my third year, I decided to shift majors. That was such a huge thing for me because ever since high school, when I had conversations with older people (mostly teachers) about college, shifting would always be talked about in some derogatory fashion. Like, don’t be like those kids who don’t have any direction.

Yet, here I was, daily coming to a blackboard full of equations (I was a physics major), and I was thinking more and more, “This is not going to be my life.”

I now had a choice to go into something I really loved — English literature, or something that I also liked with more practical applications — Computer Science.

Practicality won the day, but I also got what I wanted by auditing additional literature classes along the way. I’ve always thought how one-dimensional it was for college to be just about one major, when people could actually pursue 2 or 3 interests.

From there, I learned that one need not necessarily give up one thing in favor of another, but that it was possible to have both. I also learned how to adjust and adapt with change, how to deal with the fear that comes right before taking the plunge, and finding out it wasn’t really as bad as I thought it would be.

I guess a lot of those lessons have carried over in my life. I’ve changed jobs, businesses, friends, religions and life philosophies. How I dealt with those has been shaped, for the most part, by my early life experiences.

Which is why I now come back to the point I started with — that answering the question “Who am I?” is perhaps the most important question of our lives, and we ought to get started with it as early in life as possible. Many kids don’t get to grapple with that question. They are too burdened with schoolwork and meeting parents’ expectations.

To grapple with that question, they need a lot of space, a lot of time, and meaningful conversation with others in more or less the same phase of life.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Who am I?

It seems so basic a question, until you begin answering it. You could start with your name, age and gender, but surely you are more than these. You could tell us who your parents are, what your family is like, where you live, but again, you are more than just these.

So you go deeper and look at your interests, your motivations, your beliefs, your passions, and still, you are more than these.

This is a question people ask, whether consciously or unconsciously, until the day they die.

As I grow older, I believe more and more that a healthy self-identity is fundamental to finding joy and meaning in life.

In my family, I was the youngest of  4 children, and I had huge age gap with my siblings – 9 years to the one next to me, and more with the others. That meant that when my oldest sister went off to college, I was still 5 years old, running around the garden with a runny nose.

My siblings would say I was lucky because I lived a more comfortable life than they did — they had more responsibilities growing up as they had to report to work on Saturdays to help my dad grow the family business. The situation was more stable when I came along so I did not really have to do that (though my dad still hauled me off to the office, but I could just sit in a corner and draw or go play with imaginary friends in the warehouse).

But I think that affected how I saw myself. I was always a shy, quiet kid in school. I had a huge stuttering problem when speaking before a group and I always hated the first day of class when teachers would make us introduce ourselves because I would feel like a total idiot when I struggled just to say my own name.

I rarely had a strong opinion on things, content to just let others argue and fight over this and that. Perhaps because that’s how it is when you’re a child in a house filled with grown-ups. What you think doesn’t really matter.

A huge step in the development of my self-identity took place when I was in high school. I was fortunate to become best friends with a fellow ping-pong player, Ritchie, who connected me to a larger group of friends and I became one of the barkada. The healthy thing about our barkada was that it was a healthy mix of boys and girls where most would be all-boys or all-girls.

That helped me a lot because I was always shy around girls and could never carry a conversation with them. Having girls who were friends boosted my confidence in more ways I could imagine. Of course, this is all in hindsight as I couldn’t see it this clearly back then.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

“But, Andy, you went through school and you came out all right.”

I hear this often when I talk about the problems of our educational system. My answer to it is, well a lot of us came out “all right” depending on what you think that means. But I think that is a product of our lifelong learning journey and interacting with people out of school and meeting reality head on. Many people turn out “all right” despite having gone through school, not because of it.

School robs us of a precious time in our life where, instead of going through the process of finding out who we are and what we are passionate about and what we are capable of, we are made to sit still, be quiet, and copy notes, and do drills on things that do not interest us (and still don’t up to this day).

Much of school is a waste of time.

Dr. Kirsten Olson, president of the Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), recently released a book entitled Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture.

She started writing her book with the idea of recounting joyful experiences in school of accomplished individuals but when she started interviewing them, she encountered more pain than joy. People told stories of hurt and disappointment that still lingered and affected their present lives. It was so prevalent that it became the new direction for her book.

In a nutshell, she lists seven ways that schools wound us:

1. Wounds of Creativity – students are not free to pursue their own passions and interests. In fact they are often told to suppress them in favor of more “important” things like Science and Math.
2. Wounds of Compliance – students are forced to follow rules, do homework and projects, and are tested on things that make no sense to them, in terms of their own learning needs and inclinations.
3. Wounds of Rebellion – instead of complying, some students rebel against the meaninglessness of the system. This hurts others and even the students themselves when carried too far, especially when it leads to drug addiction, alcoholism, bully-ish behavior, and so on. Students with this wound are often very angry at others, especially authority figures, and even at themselves.
4. Wounds of Numbness – the daily, robotic routine of doing tasks that do not interest them makes students to simply stop caring. They become zoned out, uninterested and unenthusiastic about anything.
5. Wounds of Underestimation – no matter how teachers tell you they are objective and non-judgmental, the opposite is always true. You only have to drop by the faculty room and eavesdrop about them talking about their students. This is not because they are evil but because they are human. But these judgments carry a heavy price, and they are often communicated to students subconsciously, unintentionally and non-verbally.
6. Wounds of Perfectionism – Students who are consistently high achievers become too hard on themselves. We laugh at stories of high achievers who are sad when they get a 98 instead of a 99, but these are true stories and they are actually tragic. Students who are like this find it very hard to recover when they encounter failure (of which life has plenty to offer).
7. Wounds of the Average – This is where most students feel they are. They are neither outstanding nor notorious. They do not have interesting stories to tell during reunions. Their teachers, and perhaps some classmates,  don’t even remember them. They feel insignificant, even in life.

Yes, a lot of people recover from these wounds and come out “all right” but wouldn’t it be better if they did not have to be wounded in the first place? Wouldn’t it be better if their own interests and passions were nurtured and they go through life’s trials naturally instead of this artificial, forced curriculum, grading systems and standardized tests?

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.