I always thought I was a smart kid. At least, based on my own understanding as a kid. Until I started going to school.

Then I started to believe that I was the slow kid who could never keep up with everyone else. My exam papers through grade school would convince anyone to buy stock in red pens and markers. You could even consider trademarking the frowny face and make bank because all my teachers would have to pay licensing fees. In fact, I almost didn’t graduate high school. Through standardized testing, my school had determined that I was at the bottom 10% of the entire graduating class. I even flunked every college entrance exam I took in the Philippines. I was on my way to a successful career as a 3rd world hobo.

Students do not fail. They are in school to learn. In order to learn, you will make mistakes. If students fail to learn something, however, it is the adults that have to take a good look at what – and HOW – they are trying to teach their kids.

I’ve decided to write this extended manifesto on education after spending a week at TED. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while, but this past week really fueled questions – even answers – on why I had such a hard time in school. I never hated learning, but I always hated going to school. And this is something I think a lot of kids can relate to. In parallels, a lot of people hate going to work. They don’t hate the idea of working, they just don’t like or understand the value of what they’re doing half the time. So essentially, we’re all back in the 5th grade, except older, fatter, balding, and sustaining failing organs.

So I have to get this rant out of my system before ADD strikes and I forget all about it. It’s stemmed from a private rant on my Facebook wall, but I’m starting to realize that some folks I went to school with share my sentiments. I spent most of my time as a student at the Immaculate Conception Academy (ICA) in Manila before I moved on to various parts of North America and Europe for higher learning. I received scholarship grants that sent me to college, on top of my parents’ support and a million internships. I graduated with a BFA from CalArts, arguably one of the best creative institutions in the world. Since then, I’ve been fairly successful in my field as a designer, and as a filmmaker. Once in a while, I’ve managed to walk away with an award or two. For a dumb kid, I think I’ve done alright. So what exactly happened in between?

Sir Ken Robinson discusses the concept of lateral thinking. Our current educational system is a vertical where we’re passed on level to level based on age, force fed information from one class to the next, whether or not we understand them, whether or not we know how we can apply this information practically. Salman Khan (The Khan Academy) brought up a great point at his TED talk: some kids will score 100% at an exam, some will score 80%, some 50%, and so on. Do the kids who get less than 100% get a chance of actually learning what they’ve missed? No. They move on to the next exam with gaps in their education that will never be addressed. Do the kids who get 100% retain and value what they’ve learned, or do they forget about it as soon as the exam is over? Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, as the initial argument poses. Some kids learn better in the system that we have in place. Fine. But what about everyone else?

We all have different learning styles. And my learning style can’t keep up with the assembly line, because I like to understand all the small pieces that make up an idea. I was once sitting in Grade 9 Math and asked why a quadratic equation was structured this way. Why should I care if this number multiplies with another number, and why the hell does it matter? Can someone explain to me why the formula became this way? Does this formula have a wife and kids? Where am I going to use this once I graduate? The response was often “just memorize it so you can pass the exam” or “you’ll find out later,” and it just doesn’t seem fair. When we are out in the real world, no one gives us a formula for reducing the cost of war, or even war itself. No one gives us formulas to raise a happy home with all our unique circumstances. We have to have an ability to really understand these formulas from its inception and why it was necessary. We have to have an ability to create competing formulas, or we will ultimately destroy everything in our path without being aware of it. Education is not religion. I don’t believe that we should simply trust it and have faith that our so-called education will be our ultimate salvation. Sometimes it even works against you. Heck, my education told me I was going straight to hell with my grades.

John Hunter, who was also at TED this week, addressed some of my problems with the system. He created “The World Peace Game” for his 4th graders to do just that – find out, for themselves, exactly how the world works. They play a board game as world leaders with specific problems they needed to fix, from the environment, to war, to basic human needs. And these are issues even adults don’t have answers to, like global debt. I think this is ultimately what we need to be able to pass on to kids, because they need to start thinking about what they will be up against as early in life as possible. Giving kids the power of solving problems is no small feat. Making them understand the humanity, causes, and effects behind problems is no small feat. Kids aren’t stupid, but we treat them like, well, powerless children. We are all like Tempurpedic foam beds. As adults, we’ve gone through our own routines, we’ve established deep-seated ways of how we handle things, and this impedes our abilities to look at certain things outside our comfort zone. Kids, they don’t have the baggage of being imprinted with stupid ideas like whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. They are simply people trying to make sense of the world they live in, without any pretense that they understand it any better than you do. As Khaled Hosseini once wrote, “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

Salman Khan also brought up an interesting point: some kids are too embarrassed to ask questions that will make them look stupid. And with our particular culture at ICA, this was definitely a path I followed. We’re not Americans. We highly value how people perceive us, and no matter how ridiculous this really is, it is embedded in our genetic makeup. Needless to say, I always flunked Math because I ended up drawing all over the numbers during exams. I also figured I’d make my own formulas since I didn’t understand the ones that were being taught, so I basically solved problems my way with utter disregard for formulas in question. I usually got a +1 point bonus for creativity. What I find interesting now is my +1 bonus for creativity. Is this really all creativity is worth? Weren’t the original mathematical equations formulated by a creative thinker? Even the concept of a number in the first place is an arbitrary distinction for a specific value – someone had to make it up. Our entire civilization is a result of creative, abstract thinkers challenging the formula. Imagine if we still all thought the world was flat. Imagine if nobody thought, hey, maybe humans could fly. Things will always sound ridiculous and wrong on the first try. That’s what learning is.

As I examine the differences of my Philippine versus my American education, sometimes I wonder if these patterns have anything to do with why society and our standards of living have come this way. In the US, I’ve always been taught to challenge the status quo, if I believed that the status quo was stupid and irrelevant. I was taught to ask the basic question: WHY? with the follow up question, HOW? Something I found sorely lacking in my Philippine education. I’m back in Manila these days, and as much as I hate to say it, it almost seems like we keep progressing backwards rather than forwards. And I’m not just talking about the economy, or politics. I’m just talking about the basic methods of how we think about our place in the world, and how we react to what surrounds us. I complain a lot about things that I don’t like, or things I don’t believe in. One thing someone who never left the Philippines told me, was that I needed to learn how to stop complaining, slow down, and adapt. But there is one thing with adapting to ideas that are quite good (or at least interesting), on any scale. And there is quite another thing with asking me to revert backwards and say, “well, that’s just the way it is, isn’t it?” Forget it. I dream of a Philippines that will surpass any developed nation, perhaps not in economy or scale, but how we create and redefine our own world, without looking outwards and copying the formula of “the American Way” but rather looking inwards, asking, “what is the Filipino Way?” or even, “what is MY way?” In my lifetime, I want to see a culture that doesn’t look like something trying hard to fit into the formula that it can never get. Because quite frankly, I’m sick and tired of the Starbucks revolution in Manila. We need to reassess what the next revolution needs to look like. God knows we haven’t had a real one since 1987, and we haven’t really done much since then, either. Who the fuck cares that People Power happened, if the people are still powerless? Because no matter how frustrated everyone is, at the end of the day, everyone just agrees, “that’s just the way it is.”

It’s taken me over a decade out of ICA to be able to believe, once again, that it’s ok to be dumb and different. As long as I can understand my own capabilities and be able to justify what I believe to be true, I think I’ll be ok. And if the kids in Manila can even get a semblance of the education I wish I had with the Khan Academy or The World Peace Game, I’m hoping they can get a head start now, where they can teach themselves by collaborating with each other and not rely on a broken system. These methods are not inaccessible, and could be totally customized for Filipino kids. We should, as adults, at least give them a fighting chance for the future and not surrender to saying: “that’s just the way it is.” This is my formula.

Mentioned in this post:
John Hunter – The World Peace Game (http://www.worldpeacegame.org)
Salman Khan – The Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/)