“EXPERIENCE is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.”
~ Benjamin Disraeli.
My dad was self-taught but he was the best mining engineer there ever was who worked in the mines hereabouts. He worked in three big mining corporations for more than four decades.
You do not have to agree or argue with me about that but during his time as a mining supervisor in Lepanto Mines, all new mining engineers and geologists (most of them) have undergone training about their actual work with him.
He was always subordinate in rank and salary to the new professionals who must gain knowledge and experience on mining through him. He did not mind his status but he cared about how the mining engineers learn and lead the miners under their care in the future. He was a committed labor unionist even after he joined the ranks of company bottom management.
I understand that some of these professionals, fresh from the universities resented the fact that my self-taught dad was their trainer. The real guys among them accepted him as elder and mentor, not really their equal. Rising through the ranks as a miner, my dad was a multi-awarded employee of the mines.
My dad was not only an expert in his trade. He was the most sought-after member of the barangay “lupon.” A “lupon” hearing would just have to wait for him or demand his presence. During his time, Barangay Paco in Mankayan, Benguet won the nation’s best “lupon” award.
I cite my first-hand knowledge about my dad not so much for any other reason but to dramatize the importance of self-learning and experience in a man or woman’s education. A formal education in college is important and a great privilege to those who have or are blessed with such an opportunity to pursue it. A formal education has a great bearing in life but anybody can also derive genuine fulfillment and take great pride as a self-taught human being, like Abraham Lincoln and the other great men and women in history who were autodidacts.
In the case of my father, who was orphaned at an early age, he had no choice but to engage a world of change. He never talked about it but I suspected that the real reason why he left the confines of his village was that the local culture, great in many ways, was not really kind to orphans in those days. His younger brother and a sister were taken to the orphanage, while he and his older brother went to find their own lives in an expanding universe.
In leaving a great home that is fast fading behind him, he learned to improvise and cope with the ambiguities of his condition, and to engage new and different cultures and traditions that welcomed him. That was his university and he must learn along the way.
Unlike all other autodidacts, my father learned his trade purely on experience, engaged multilingual dialogues in English, Tagalog, Ilocano and the local dialects; and read the King James Bible extensively with a primary education. He completed grade 3 before the Second World War broke out and never went back to school when his parents died one after the other by accident and disease after the war.
This same tragic thread is shared by autodidacts the world over but their triumphs reassure us about the deep and great learning that occurred outside the settings labeled as educational. The great accomplishments in the arts, sciences, even war reveal that living and learning go together and they are founded on a man or woman’s need and ability to improvise.
Ambiguity, indeed, is a war that need not be eliminated but a beckoning field for us to join in the dance, like in the Igorot round dance of drums and gongs, finding coherence in different sounds and complexities of beats and sharing within multiplicity. Here each player is responsible where each misstep and false beating can foul the tune of the musical instruments.
The Igorot round dance is a dance learned by experience, on your actual first try among those who have been playing it for years in their lifetime. The trick lies in following the steps of the man in front and beating your gong as he does. In due time, vary the beating of your gong making sure that the sound produced enhances not disrupts the cadence of the martial tune.
Otherwise, you can always fall back as you were and then try again, and yet again.
Learning by doing is what it means to dance the round dance. You find joy in it when at the same time, your hands and feet join many hands beating gongs and lively stomping feet thudding on the ground, souls suffering for each other and creating that rhythmic musical cadence that make the mountains, men, women and beasts alike sway around the communal fire until all excesses of body fat is expired. The end of the dance would make you leap for the experience of being in a wondrous moment.
Learning is engaging the moment, contributing your mind and energies to an enterprise you are in, not simply a spectator and commentator.
Learning is living, evolving new possibilities and realities of relationships and intimacies.
Learning is not preliminary to anything as many youths define education and performance in life today.
In my experience, and to uphold the honor of my father in teaching us to respect other people’s right to life by upholding it, I say learning is threaded into the experience of what is right, not just a mental formulation or perception of it.
And if anything is right and upheld into one’s conscience, it is not always something you demand for yourself, but that it is something that everybody shares and honors with you. Before demanding it, have you considered how much the other person needed the same right you demand of him or anybody?
In exacting joy, happiness, respect from your elders, authority or anybody, have you considered what makes them happy in the first place, if not, all you wanted is one-sided, for your own benefit alone, negating the rights of others in desiring that you also must be responsible and excel in life, do something, besides being a parasite.
When you ask, give first. Have you done that?