KKEX Enumivo Interview

For those who have been following my past articles about Enumivo, I am reproducing here the full transcript of the live interview by the hinese cryptocurrency exchange KKEX with the Enumivo developer, who goes by the pseudonym, Aiden Pearce (slightly edited for brevity and correctness):

KKEX: Hello everyone, we are so excited to tell you that we have invited the founder of Enumivo, Aiden Pearce. He will share his history and future development of ENU.

AP: I am Aiden Pearce. I’m the founder of Enumivo. I have been a software developer for more than 20 years. And the first time I read Satoshi’s bitcoin whitepaper, I fell in love with the idea. I kept on studying blockchain technology and consensus algorithms and distributed computing. And now, here we are, trying to make a difference in the world using these technologies.

KKEX: Thank you so much, Aiden, since we knew that you will come to make an interview,  many ENU holders and fans sent me their questions, but due to the limited time, I have chosen some, so I am going to ask one by one. Would you like to tell us your nationality? And why don’t you want us to know who you are?

AP: I am an Enumivian. And I invite everyone to become Enumivians. I have no concept of nationality as I have no concept of nations. We are the human race. Enumivans don’t divide themselves according to nations, races, creeds, even species. We are one. We don’t discriminate. We respect all forms of life. Because we are Enumivians!

KKEX: You are one of the earliest bitcoin holders, will you use your bitcoin to control the ENU price?

AP: I will not artificially interfere with the market price of ENU. I will only interfere to give it more value by giving my time and effort to it. I started Enumivo with no hype. I want its growth organic and natural. I want everyone to see the value because of the effort and love everyone gives it. When I started it last February, I was only expecting a slow growth but with people who believe what I believe. I was surprised that the growth became so fast, even I have a hard time catching up. So I also have to step up and keep up.

KKEX: How did you come up with the name “Enumivo”?

AP: The Enumivo name is from my imagination and dream to have a place in the universe where people don’t kill other people because of greed. And we don’t have to take away other people’s dignity and their chance to live a decent life for us to have a better life of our own. Only when we look out after one another can we be truly happy. It gives our lives purpose and meaning.

KKEX:  Is Watchdogs one of your favorite video games? (assuming from your username)

AP: I’m a gamer so I got myself a pseudonym, Aiden Pearce.

KKEX: How many people do you have on your team now and who are they? What background do they have?

AP: When I started it, I was alone. Then slowly people from the community came together. All were volunteers at the beginning. So I invited some of them to be part of the interim core group. The core group now has 12 people. They come from many countries and have different skill sets. We have writers, IT managers, customer service representatives, developers, etc. We are a diverse group of individuals. We don’t know each other personally but we communicate everyday.

However, being an interim group to get Enumivo started from nothing, I am now starting to consult with experts from different fields to formalize the organization. I will be restructuring the core team and make it more streamlined. The biggest challenge for me is to get a CTO and assemble a team of developers while managing the development funds well.

Remember, the greatest honor to give all ENU holders is to make sure we build a good system. I don’t want to hype. I don’t want to just tell the people what we built. I want the people to feel that we built something of value.

KKEX: We learned that ENU has block producers too, but how many ENU block producers will be chosen and when will you start? Could you explain more details?

AP: First let’s talk about inflation since it will pay for the block producers. The community will decide how much inflation there will be but it can’t be more than 5% per year. 4% will go to savings and later the community can use it to hire people to work for Enumivo (like in Bitshares). 1% will go to the block producers. The 1% will be shared by active block producers (0.25%) and standby producers (0.75%). All the producers (active and standby) are voted by the community.

Those having the top 21 votes will be the active producers. They will equally share the 0.25% inflation. The rest of the 0.75% allocated for standby producers and will be distributed proportionally to those who got votes in such a way that the lowest will get at least 100 ENU per day. When mainnet goes live, everyone with ENU can vote. They will all take part in the governance process. So they will vote for block producers. And later, they will vote to hire and where to spend the 4% inflation that is saved.

KKEX: We heard that you are working on three projects at the same time, ENU, LTS, and UBI, do you have enough energy to complete these works?

AP: LiteShares is running already and stable so i’m not giving it much time anymore unless there are problems. The UBI development has not yet started. So the main focus now is to have the Enumivo blockchain running. So most of the time I have is building it and studying all the details inside it. I will also be building the development team and will get a CTO to head the development. This is also part of the restructuring of the core team. I have the energy to make it all happen.

KKEX: If you have to choose, which project is more important for you? Why?

AP: For me the most important project is UBI since this is what I always wanted to have in the beginning. This is unique to Enumivo. The Enumivo platform is needed to make UBI run. And the LTS was created just to be ready to have an exchange for ENU and UBI and not be too dependent on which exchange will support us when we go live. So although all are important, the end goal is to have UBI running. And we will need Enumivo platform and we will keep building on it to support the UBI and other applications that will give UBI more value and utility.

KKEX: What’s the next move to expand the ENU Community?

AP: I will be writing a paper about “Enumivo Ranking Algorithm”. This will be used to fairly rank people by voting. This algorithm will be used to select the 1,000 initial settlers of UBI. And also it will be used to rank members of the Enumivo Community and they will get weekly bounties based on the ranking. This will invite everyone to be more active in the community site. I will post this article in the community and create a software to implement the ranking algorithm.

KKEX: How could you guarantee that the UBI token will have true value?

AP: The UBI tokens are market driven so the only guarantee I can make is to build applications around it that will make it useful. These applications will be built on Enumivo. So I think there will be a correlation in the value of ENU and UBI. Our focus will be to build products that will be useful to the community. If we can give UBI to 2 billion people, that will create a healthy economy. And if we keep on building to make those UBI tokens useful, we can become the biggest unified economy in the world. The promise of Enumivo’s blockchain scalability will make that happen.

KKEX: Could you explain more about UBI? How will you realize the value of UBI? In my eyes, I think the key point of this project is UBI.  Till up now, no UBI succeeded in human history, all the communist experiments have failed. Finland is regarded as the developed country in the UBI world, but it is very limited, only a small area. And the UBI experiment in Finland has still declared a failure, indicating that it will not continue this year.

AP: I agree that the whole project is centered around the UBI. The UBI will give everyone weekly tokens for free and it will be fair and community driven. All the UBI experiments until now are small scale and centralized. Enumivo will be on a wider scale and it’s decentralized so no one can manipulate it and no one can stop it. That’s the difference with Enumivo UBI since it is running on a blockchain. That is our advantage. And those governments and maybe other corporations and philanthropists that will realize what Enumivo UBI is, and when they learn that we are doing it fairly in a provable way, they can also help by making donations to the UBI DAO that will even add more value to UBI tokens. So they don’t have to do UBI on their own. They can help us for the same goal and it will in fact become cheaper for them to do on a wider scale.

KKEX: But if you want to reach a consensus of the blockchain, it has to be widely or globally. So how will you do it?

AP: The blockchain consensus will be achieved by the 21 active block producers that are elected by all ENU holders. Bitshares has been doing that. And Lisk also.

But if you are asking about going global with the Enumivo UBI, well, we are putting up 10M ENU to make sure UBI tokens have value. And it is given for free. So that will help attract many people. Also the community will be helping also spread Enumivo. And as more and more people will join in the UBI program, it will become more popular. And many will be accepting UBI tokens for goods and services. Imagine if bitcoin was distributed to 2 billion or more people. That would increase its utility and popularity even more. Think of UBI as the widest and longest airdrop of the cryptocurrency space, that’s how I envision it. Enumivo was airdropped to about 100,000 people. The average is about 4,000 ENU each. So I think UBI can beat that also in terms of scope.

KKEX: You have expressed your expectations in the whitepaper that you want to achieve UBI by ENU, then if you price UBI by ENU, how will the price be reasonable and how will you ensure fairness?

AP: The value of UBI is purely market driven. So the value of it will really depend on how we develop it. And as more and more people will join, people can have more use of UBI tokens. So UBI price does not depend on ENU price. There may be a correlation but the value of UBI will depend more on how useful it becomes as a currency. Regarding fairness, only unique individuals can get UBI tokens so no single person can have much unless he buys from those people with UBI. So it will actually be very fair.

KKEX: In the near future, will ENU the community give incentives to DAPP developers in order to encourage them?

AP: Yes, if you are a dapp developer and you have a project that will help Enumivo or UBI or something that promotes social justice, we will fund you. We only ask in return is that you give your tokens to all ENU holders for free. However, this does not stop anyone from holding an ICO for their projects if they choose to do so

KKEX: ENU has cloned the original code from EOS, does EOS team provide any help? Can ENU surpass EOS? What if EOS fails to achieve their goal as they promised when the main net goes online, what will you do?

AP: Okay I will answer one by one…The EOS team does not provide direct help to Enumivo but by merely letting their code be published an open, that is already a big help. And I’m grateful to the EOS team for letting us use their work.

Now, can ENU surpass EOS? Anything is possible. It is up to us to chart our own destiny.

What if EOS fails to achieve their goal when the main net goes online? That is very unlikely. But in the very rare event that it will happen, I’ll gladly move Enumivo to a NEO clone.

KKEX: How can people claim UBI when it goes running? With passport or national ID card? If not, how could you guarantee that a unique individual only claims once?

AP: The UBI Application and Approval System will be designed in such a way that it is game theory optimal. Just like in bitcoin mining, honesty is paid and cheating is punished. In UBI, every member already in the system will become a singular oracle by answering the question “Is this applicant a real person and not yet in the system?”, The oracle will answer the truth and it will determine if the applicant is approved or not. Behind the scene, the oracle is the group of people voting and risking their UBI and they will earn if they tell the truth and they will lose if they lie.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What if they make a mistake, but without bad intentions?

AP: If they are not sure to answer a particular application, they should not participate in the voting of that application. For every vote, they will put up some UBI at risk. It will earn if they answer the truth, they will lose if they lie and try to manipulate. It is expected the the truth will likely come out.

KKEX: Does ENU have a strict hardware requirements [to be a block producer]? Is it very expensive?

AP: To be a block producer in Enumivo, you will need cheaper hardware than in EOS. Also, if you become a standby block producer, you will have enough rewards to pay for your hardware monthly.

KKEX: Will there be KYC [know-your-customer] process to claim UBI tokens when it goes live to prevent abuse?

AP: The UBI application process is some sort of “decentralized KYC”. Unlike typical KYC where a single central authority decides if you are a real person or not, the UBI KYC is powered by a smart contract and will act as an oracle. It will answer the question if you are a real person or not.

KKEX: Do you have a special team for the Community operation? Are there institutional investments behind you?

AP: For now we have community moderators. However in the next few weeks, I want to make the community website truly community driven. I will be rewarding LTS and ENU to top community participants based on the “Enumivo Ranking Algorithm” that I will create soon.

There are no institutional investments behind Enumivo.

KKEX: Thank you so much for your participation and cooperation, I am so proud of you. And thank you Aiden, thanks for your time. You have our support.

AP: You are welcome 🙂 Thanks a lot 🙂

 

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

Enumivo FAQ

Since I first wrote about Enumivo last February, its price has picked up significantly from around half a cent to around 13 cents USD (as of this writing). This 2600% increase in value has generated some interest from people who were only lukewarm to the idea before and I find myself having to answer the same questions over and over. So to save a little time, I decided to put together this Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list. So here we go:

 

  • What is Enumivo?

Enumivo (ENU) is a blockchain project that promises to deliver “social justice for all” in the form of providing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) decentralized application (dApp).

ENU is set to be a clone of the EOS blockchain. According to its whitepaper, ENU is officially set to release on August 2018, 2 months after EOS.

Just to be clear, ENU is a separate blockchain. It is not officially affiliated with EOS, has no organizational ties with EOS developer, Block.One, and will not run on top of EOS.

 

  • Why are you cloning EOS?

This is discussed in detail in the whitepaper. The short answer is that EOS solves many problems of speed and scalability that current blockchains have. It is also a clone and not built on EOS because we want to have control of the direction of our development.

 

  • When did it start?

The earliest mention of ENU can be traced to a post on the bitcointalk forum on February 8, 2018, announcing a free distribution of ENU tokens. One could claim the free ENU by sending 0 ethers (ETH) to a certain address, so all one really needed to pay for was a minimum amount of gas. The amount received was calculated based on a formula that gave more tokens to those who joined earlier and less to those who joined later. In a matter of days, a total of 400M tokens were distributed out of a total supply of 500M. The remaining 100M is left for further development of the project.

 

  • If the ENU blockchain has not yet been released, why is there ENU being owned or traded now?

The current ENU tokens are ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. This is only a temporary situation until the ENU blockchain is released. Then the ERC20 tokens will be swapped for the actual ENU tokens and after that will be rendered useless.

 

  • How can I get ENU tokens?

There are 3 different ways to acquire ENU tokens. But before that, while ENU is still an ERC20 token, you would need to set up an Ethereum wallet first to hold your tokens. Then you can try any of the following:

    1. If you personally know anyone with ENU, you may offer to buy from them, beg from them, threaten them, or steal their ENU (if you can). Of course, I do not recommend the last two methods.
    2. Buy/trade ENU at an exchange.  ENU is currently available via:
      1. EtherDelta/ForkDelta
      2. Bixin App
      3. KKEX exchange – you need a Bixin account to login
      4. DDEX exchange
    3. Join different bounty programs where you can do certain tasks to earn Enumivo. Visit the Enumivo forum at enumivo.com to look for current bounties or offers.

We are currently working to get ENU into as many exchanges as we can so this list will definitely keep growing.

 

  • Who are the people behind Enumivo?

Enumivo started as a vision of the lead developer, who wishes to remain anonymous, and uses the pseudonym, Aiden Pearce. Then several volunteers of different nationalities came together online and formed the Core Team.

At present, we are restructuring in order to professionalize the team and have clearly defined roles and responsibilities for each position.

 

  • What is Universal Basic Income?

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an income that is given to a person for simply being human. There are no other qualifications. You don’t have to do anything to receive it. We at Enumivo believe that UBI represents a person’s fair share of the earth’s resources.

Enumivo plans to build an UBI application running on its blockchain which will be issuing a fixed weekly amount of UBI tokens over a person’s lifetime. Anyone can apply to receive this UBI and once the application has been approved and verified (to check if the applicant is really human and unique — no duplicate accounts), the person will start to receive the UBI tokens.

The value of the UBI tokens will be market-driven. As more and more people receive these tokens, we see their value increasing as people will find it easy and useful to trade and exchange for goods and services anywhere in the world.

 

  • Why isn’t ENU listed on CoinMarketCap?

We are working on getting listed in CMC. When we approached them before, they were asking for a huge listing fee. Since ENU was freely given from the start and not funded by an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), we did not have a large fund to begin with.

 

  • When moon?

While we are undeniably happy that price of ENU has been rising the past few days, we would like to remain anchored to the philosophy that price will eventually match value. We are committed to bringing value to Enumivo by delivering a solid, working product that people can really use and benefit from.

As the ENU lead developer and founder has expressed in a past interview, we seek to build value by making this project work. We did not create a lot of hype, then conduct an ICO, then get a mountain of cash up front. We started small. We received payment and bonuses in ENU, which were worth little then, and that motivates us to work harder in order to see our value grow more.

The question for us is not really when the price will reach the moon, but what can we do to bring more value into the ENU blockchain? What can we do in order to make more people use and benefit from our project?

That’s the real goal.

 

For the latest updates, news and tutorials about Enumivo, join our community forum on enumivo.com.

 

Sudbury Valley School

This article was supposed to be “Summerhill Four” but I decided to also acknowledge another source material I draw from when researching democratic schools. The Sudbury Valley School was founded by Daniel Greenberg, Hanna Greenberg and Mimsy Sadofsky and it operates in more or less the same way that I’ve described Summerhill these past three weeks.

But while Summerhill operates in the UK and was founded in the 1920’s, Sudbury Valley School operates out of Massachusetts, USA. One of its founders, Daniel Greenberg, has written several books and numerous articles on how and why they do what they do.

I just read a thought-provoking chapter from The Sudbury Valley Experience and I’d like to share some excerpts here:

“Schools today are institutions in which learning is taken to mean being taught. You want people to learn? Teach them! You want them to learn more? Teach them more! And more! Work them harder. Drill them longer…But learning is a process you do, not a process that is done to you!”

For those who have some trouble distinguishing between learning and being taught, here’s the difference: The first is active participation, usually with interest, and the other is being force-fed material that is usually of little or no interest to the student. Understanding the difference between those two is what separates good teachers from the bad. Sadly, and frankly, we have more of the latter kind of teachers in our school systems today — but not entirely their fault as they were brought up in that kind of educational system as well.

As I said before, it is extremely difficult for those who have been exposed to years and years of  in-the-box education to start thinking out-of-the-box. I, for one, am very grateful to a handful of outstanding teachers I’ve had who understood there was much more to life than getting high grades and memorizing their lessons.

But back now to Greenberg. I love the following paragraphs:

“People go to school to learn. To learn, they must be left alone and given time. When they need help, it should be given, if we want the learning to proceed at its own natural pace. But make no mistake: if a person is determined to learn, they will overcome every obstacle and learn in spite of everything. So you don’t have to help; help just makes the process a little quicker. Overcoming obstacles is one of the main activities of learning. It does no harm to leave a few.

But if you bother the person, if you insist the person stop his or her own natural learning and do instead what you want, between 9:00 AM and 9:50, and between 10:00 AM and 10:50 and so forth, not only won’t the person learn what s/he has a passion to learn, but s/he will also hate you, hate what you are forcing upon them, and lose all taste for learning, at least temporarily.

Every time you think of a class in one of those schools out there, just imagine the teacher was forcing spinach and milk and carrots and sprouts (all those good things) down each student’s throat with a giant ramrod.

Sudbury Valley leaves its students be. Period. No maybes. No exceptions. We help if we can when we are asked. We never get in the way. People come here primarily to learn. And that’s what they all do, every day, all day.”

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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

Summerhill Three

Photo Credit: Paul-W Flickr via Compfight cc

For the past two weeks I have been writing about Summerhill School, the Free School/Democratic School movement, and I still find there is more to write and think about.

The schools systems of today focus too much on skills and knowledge. Yes, there is the customary, perfunctory mention of emphasizing values and attitudes, but let’s face it, it’s really just all about grades — even if the teachers, the principal or the school owner says otherwise, the system itself speaks louder than all of them. Get good grades and you’re ok. Get bad grades and you’re out. Get very high grades and you’re a superstar.

I also do not understand this idea of teaching values as a subject and giving grades based on it. For example, a school might have an item on the report card that says “Honesty.” How in the world can a teacher grade that unless they follow each child every minute of their lives?

Children easily see through falseness and hypocrisy. One day, my elementary kid came to me and asked, “Why is it that during school accreditation, the restrooms are extra clean and suddenly have soap and toilet paper? And why is  everyone cautioned to not be loud and boisterous, and to smile and greet the visitors?”

And it doesn’t only happen in my child’s school but in a lot of major private and public schools. In fact, fictionist Gilda Cordero-Fernando wrote a short story about this phenomenon decades ago entitled “Visitation of the Gods” and captures to perfection the tragically comic way school personnel and officials pander to the “gods” of accreditation.

How can a school talk about honesty when it does things like this? Children get the message loud and clear and it doesn’t matter how many lectures the teachers give on honesty.

Or how about “reverence to God?” How do you measure that? How do you know if that merits an A or a B or a C or even a D? And what if the child believes in another god, or a goddess, or gods, or doesn’t believe in any god at all?

Words are cheap, and words in a lecture are even cheaper. The best way to teach is by example and experience.

This is why the self-government structure of Summerhill intrigues me. Everyone, even 5-year olds, get a vote — and teachers don’t get more votes than students. At a very young age, children learn that their voice matters. They learn to express their thoughts and ideas. They learn the value of cooperation, agreement, and keeping their word. They design their own laws, their own system of rewards and punishment, and even their own system of enforcement. By experience, not just by textbook, they learn how democracy works.

That is the central system and structure of  a free school — not the subjects — those are left for the students to explore by themselves according to their interest. I think it is a far better teaching method than any bunch of lectures can provide.

I read about a teacher’s account of a student who came from a traditional school (I’m not sure whether this was Summerhill or some other democratic school — I cannot find the source anymore). When that boy found out that he could do anything he wanted in this school, he promptly went to the couch and slept.

That’s all that he did for the entire year. Every day, he would come to school, go to the couch, and sleep — and no one bothered him about it, not the teachers or other students. He was exercising his freedom to do it, and he wasn’t bothering anyone or impinging on someone else’s freedom. So he was left alone.

The following year, he proceeded to do that again. Until at around the middle of the year, he approached a teacher and asked how one becomes president of the self-government system. The teacher tells him that he has to get others to vote for him.

“Well, I want to be president,” this boy says.

“And how do you expect people to vote for you if all you do is sleep all day? People have to hear you. They have to know what you can do for them. They have to see that voting for you will be in their best interests,” replied the teacher.

So from that day forward, the boy stopped sleeping on the couch and began doing other things and interacting with the other student. He became active and popular and yes, he indeed became president shortly after.

Sometimes, like plants, all children need is space and time to grow and mature. All the nudging and shaping that we do often doesn’t really help and might even cause resentment and fixation on that which was denied them.

Let me leave you with this little food for though from A.S. Neill himself, “There is no case whatever for the moral instruction of children. It is psychologically wrong. To ask a little child to be unselfish is wrong. Every child is an egoist. The world belongs to him. His power of wishing is strong; he has only to wish and he is king of the earth. When he is given an apple his one wish is to eat that apple. And the chief result of mother’s encouraging him to share his very own apple with his little brother is to make him hate the little brother.

Altruism comes later, comes naturally if the child is not taught to be unselfish; probably never comes at all when the child is taught to be unselfish. The young altruist is merely the child who likes to please others while he is satisfying his own selfishness.”

 

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

Summerhill

header image of the Summerhill School website

I first heard about Summerhill school around a decade ago. The school was founded by Alexander Sutherland Neill in England in 1921. Its distinct feature is that students go there and can do anything they want, as long as they do not impinge on other people’s freedom — the maxim for this being “freedom, not license.”

There is no required curriculum, no exams, no grade levels and no grades (unless so desired by the student perhaps as a means of feedback).

Their website proudly declares: “Summerhill is a school of personal choice, where students must decide each day how they will use their time… they can play, they can involve themselves in a variety of constructive social situations, they can be by themselves to read or daydream, they can engage in self directed group projects and activities, and they can choose to attend formal lessons… each day the children define themselves by choice and action… this is a profound experience that leads to a strong sense of personal and responsibility and self knowledge.”

Summerhill is the first of the free school movement, which has spread to many parts of the world. It is a “free” school not in the sense of being free of tuition or fees, but in the sense of being democratic.

The school practices self-governance in which everyone has one vote, whether student, teacher, staff or administrator. Everyone participates in a weekly meeting to discuss and vote on any current issues. The community itself creates their own rules and they can also vote to remove the same rules, if later found to have unwanted consequences.

For example, students voted on a rule to remove bedtime (Summerhill is a boarding school where students and teachers live on-campus), but they later voted to reinstate it when someone complained that he kept waking up due to the noise that other kids made.

The beauty of this system is that children are taught at a very young age to direct their own lives and to be responsible. Contrast this to the standard educational system where adults make most of the decisions and all kids do is to follow and conform to what the “older” people want — for example, decisions as to what to study and what to learn, how fast they should be able to learn, for example, one year for algebra and another year for geometry and then another for trigonometry — which may be too long for some and too short for others.

How about kids who want to learn how to draw or animate? How about those who want to learn about raising farm animals? How about those who want to learn how to print shirts, or how to grow a garden, or how to fix broken plumbing, or build a treehouse, or be a world-class poker player?

Who decided that children HAVE to learn Math, English, Science, Filipino, History, and so on, and to what degree? I remember when I was teaching before at this school in Manila, I saw some of my students studying their chemistry notes. I looked over their notes and was surprised because the difficulty level was as if they were chemistry majors and not high-schoolers — and most of these kids would not even take chemistry-related majors or careers. What’s the point?

Children, when properly motivated to learn, can pick things up very quickly. Some kids approached a teacher and said they were interested in learning math. So the teacher said okay and set some conditions (like attendance in classes, and so on) and everyone agreed. In a few months, they were able to finish several topics. When this teacher met with a friend who taught in a regular public school, he shared the experience. The public school teacher was surprised. He said, “How did you finish in a few months? Those topics that you mentioned comprise our entire 6-year curriculum!”

Neill himself wrote, “You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.“

A school must facilitate the child’s natural inclination to learn what he wants, and not force the child into dreary conformity on what the school thinks the child ought to want.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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