Challenging students

When I am asked to address young students, I always have only one message for them: do not believe the older generation. (That includes me, of course, so you can appreciate the self-contradiction.)

I always say that it is my generation (and, of course, the generation before me) that polluted the earth and created the culture of corruption and impunity in our country. Since they will still be around when all of my contemporaries are dead, students should now prepare for the kind of future that they want for themselves. After all, it is their future, not ours.

Last Saturday, Dec. 13, I was invited to give a talk on “Preparing for ASEAN Integration: Education and Global Competitiveness” to the brightest college students in the country, in the Third Philippine Scholars’ Summit, held at the University of Santo Tomas. (All my lectures, by the way, are uploaded to www.kto12plusphilippines.com.)

I shared with them my view that the Philippines will not get anywhere if we do not innovate in the field of technology. I urged them to start thinking of things they would like to see and to plan how they will themselves make those things happen.

For example, I said, showing them my iPhone 6 Plus (big enough to show to a huge audience).

“Look at this phone,” I said, “Why does it have only one face or display? Why is it not double-sided? My desktop has two screens. Why does this phone have only one screen?”

That got their attention.

“Why is it not foldable? Why doesn’t it have a built-in extension so I don’t need my selfie pole? Why does it need my fingerprint to open it rather than just my eyes? Why does it need a keyboard when I can already give it verbal commands anyway?” I asked a lot of questions like these.

Now, I said, if you think that you can make a phone that is much better than this newest phone from Apple, then you should think of what you need to do to be able to do that. You might need to get a degree in engineering. You might want to study advanced mathematics. You might want to apprentice in a computer research laboratory. You might need to go abroad. I told them to plan their lives according to what they want to achieve.

The example was meant to highlight something I really believe young students should do. They should all look at what we old people are doing and say, why do we have to behave like they do? Why do we have to be as corrupt as them? Why do we have to be as narrow-minded as them? Why do we have to believe that there are limits to what we can do?

Frankly, I think that those of us above the age of 40 have lost the high moral ground. There is no question in my mind that climate change, terrorism, corruption, trafficking, drug abuse, and all the other ills that we ourselves detest are our own doing. No one else has been around except us. We cannot be expected to correct ourselves. We have too much to lose by being moral and upright.

But the youth have nothing to lose, except their dreams. I gave them the example that Ken Robinson uses in one of his TED talks. His now famous question is, “How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?” An equally famous study showed that kindergarten kids (in America) can think of at least 200 ways, while adults who have gone through the whole education cycle can think only of 15 at most. I wanted my audience to realize that their education was making them lose their creativity (or as Robinson calls it, their divergent thinking).

Then I gave my favorite example of how genius is often not recognized by adults. The way I tell the story is this: Albert Einstein’s teacher was saying that parallel lines do not meet. The young Einstein raised his hand and said, no, sir, all parallel lines meet. The teacher flunked him. Many years later, Einstein created the General Theory of Relativity, where parallel lines always meet or intersect (just as parallel lines on the earth’s surface meet at the North and South poles).

(This example, by the way, is an urban legend. Einstein never received a failing grade for mathematics in school. He was notorious, however, for making up his own derivations of equations, like the Pythagorean theorem, when he was only 12 years old. I can imagine how his teachers would have reacted when he would claim that there was another way to derive classic equations.)

In short, I challenged the scholars not to think the way their teachers, parents, or elders think.

The future belongs to the youth. After some years from graduating from college, they will be managers and sooner or later maybe even the CEOs of companies. If at that time, they can no longer think of 200 ways to use a paper clip, then the world will really be in trouble.