I dug up this post from my old college blog. College Uneducation, I believe, was an essay made and delivered by Jorge Bocobo, in the University of the Philippines back in the 1900s. Jorge Bocobo was also a former UP Chancellor and was a member of Pres. Manuel L. Quezon’s cabinet. I somewhat toned down some words for better reader experience. I hate to say this, but my posts were annoyingly highfalutin back then, which explain why my blog is hidden today.

 

On devouring the printed page plus the love of pedantry

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed whenever a profound yet intelligible piece of literature or technical-written material strikes you from within? Within–as in within your consciousness, within your capacities of intellectual thinking? You were always inspired with these subtle specks of salient literary works that it sometimes affects your way of thinking. Piles of book-bound pages surround you, tempting you to grab a literature or two to pleasure yourself and your noggin. Without further ado, you almost dig not less than a few pages of these, unknowingly accumulating raw facts of undigested data. You may somewhat disagree, specifically should you consider yourself “highly intellectual”. Yet, you’re just mainly dubbed as “profound” only because of the memorized lines you perfectly utter before your crowd, or your keen sense of clinging to some kind of knowledge you’ve gotten from the New York’s Best Seller or the Nobel Prize Award Winner for Literature in which most so-called scholars worship like pagans to a golden lamb. The thing is: your usual guileless and untainted philosophies are somehow corrupted by hushed yet atrocious pieces of printed matter.

I was never a bookworm during my elementary and high school years, but I wouldn’t deny the fact that I utilized my elem or HS technical books (only when there’s an upcoming exam ).

What’s my point of view here?

I cannot say that I’m a noble, Aristotle-an or Plato-lean, whatever you may call it, trying to discuss this in a sound way, yet it seems esoteric to the other.

My point here is that we sometimes misconstrue ways of philosophical thinking. I even had a grudge on gradually getting famous, eloquent people’s points of view.

Another is, we are clinging too much on books–too bookworm I may say. We sometimes cannot express a single detail made by our own thoughts or convictions; instead, we speak majorly of the author’s perception. We stick too much to their details, to their voice, sans recognizing ours first in the process.

I’m not telling you to stop READING or totally ditch your books. It’s more of having our “own” way/s of thinking. We must not be too dependent on books or other reading paraphernalia, as they (sometimes admittedly or inadvertently) commit factual errors. Of course, it’s also ideal to get ideas or facts from whatever sources we utilize, simply because we also need to be open-minded or to welcome some knowledge which will be helpful in our studies — as students. Sometimes, this helps us prove these ideas, or challenge them. We must embrace them if necessary, for these pieces of knowledge cultivate our ways of thinking. But there’s a great disparity between open-mindedness from dependency, ideology from subversion, and originality from plagiarism. Books should not corrupt us or put us into a massive disillusionment; they should serve as a catalyst for the fulfillment or enhancement of our greater way of thinking (i.e. logical, rational, intellectual).

Above all academic learning, we must not forget to preserve our natural means of thinking, just like during our childhood when we can purely understand the wonders of our playful childhood thinking that we got from the fairytale storybooks and the like as we use our whimsical imagination to make it realistic. We didn’t memorize line-by-line how Pinocchio retorted back to Geppeto, disrespecting his foster father. Instead, we just related ourselves into the situation; we put ourselves in the shoes of the scenario, and exemplify that we, as children, must have utmost respect to our elders. It’s that easy.

(Based on Jorge Bocobo’s College Uneducation – the feverish accumulation of undigested data; the worship of the printed page and the love of pedantry)