Friday, December 31, 2010

The 3 Rs and beyond . . .

. . . Not a scholar but a practitioner’s take on education: the writer’s worldview is atypical – an indifferent student in his youth; worked and lived at home and abroad doing development work – people, organization, business and economic – mostly in the private sector. He would summarize industry’s perspective of development as: ‘To ensure individuals develop the knowledge, attitude, skills and habit to be productive contributors to an enterprise’. (Man’s superiority is why we’re challenged to teach how not simply give fish?)

In post-career but finds time – his way of ‘giving back to society’ – to do most of the above gratis, including mentoring graduates students and keeping a blog to share his two-cents re the Philippine economy, yet the experience is rewarding. He gains from the giving especially guiding his Eastern European friends navigate their new EU environment. The more he gives and shares the more he gains and learns, coming face-to-face with his own naiveté – e.g., socialism to him was a theory from (browsing) Mao’s Red Book while cutting classes.

He realizes the 3 Rs (with the modern math version given inherent logic) are genuinely fundamental, but the challenges he encounters – in problem-solving and looking into the future, e.g., sustainability and innovation – require a background like liberal education, and collaborative and lateral – starting with the end in view – thinking (introduced by a Filipino educator) while tapping engineers and scientists. The value of education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think’, as Einstein says. The indifference of his youth is rescued by a traveling job – its hurdles, with the bar constantly rising, bring his education to life yet demand greater inquisitiveness (inculcated by a Filipino entrepreneur). Like with most professionals the work educates him while his formal and continuing education (with a dose of executive education behind ivied walls) reinforces his appreciation of the world and the work, while all the more comprehending that knowledge is beyond his countless lifetimes.

He recognizes that it is imperative to live and let live, thus the basics of our faith – the Great Commandments – are our moral compass or the Golden Rule for others. By extension corruption in all its forms is a no-no – it violates instead of respects people and institutions, country and beyond. But man can’t approximate purity ever hence the must to raise transparency and lower hierarchy. A relatively later realization is that the basics of our faith are the supreme examples of ‘separating the wheat from the chaff’ – and employs them to educate ex-socialists in their chase of the free enterprise. And the corollaries, among them, being Pareto’s 80-20 rule, Euclid’s basic axioms and da Vinci on simplicity. They are central in the initiation and creation of ideas as well as their execution, the keys to leadership – in strategic, creative, or pragmatic pursuits. And as importantly, they bestow congruence and clarity and thus the confidence to invest in the 21st century: the age of competitiveness – in investment, technology, talent, innovation, product, and market.

And he sees that people from different cultures respond positively. So . . . are we Filipinos different – and why we lag the rankings in economic and human development? Contemporary thinkers are investigating different factors to figure out why the West, for instance, developed ahead of the East and why certain individuals and nations could be more innovative. They look at dynamics like biology, sociology and geography as well as nature and culture, among others. Closer to the writer’s experience is the vital role of environment – of encouraging openness as opposed to being restrictive. And the best example being the World Wide Web – i.e., it accelerates progress and innovation at warp speed. His sense of the way of the future comes from: (1) witnessing certain countries adapting to the email ahead of others, for instance and (2) a project with a catchy title – ‘Speed’ – he was involved with sponsored by The Conference Board, a US think-tank. Thus in his blog he talks about our culture, e.g., (a) our parochial instinct and hierarchical structure as opposed to openness; (b) lack of urgency as opposed to speed, e.g., power supply, Terminal 3, and (c) the imperative of sustainability, e.g., versus dole outs.

In reforming education the writer believes that there are fundamentals that must be emphasized for us to be relevant in the 21st century. Among them: the basics of our faith, the Great Commandments or the Golden Rule for others, the 3 Rs/modern math, liberal education, collaborative and lateral thinking, leadership, transparency and integrity, and a global worldview. No nation can claim ownership of sageness – and must raise our consciousness and the bar of progress and innovation, with science and technology at the core?

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