Power of experience
The students were completely mesmerized by their acquired experiential wisdom and learned extensively from each other’s reports.
(This article is an update of a two-part series published years ago, a refined and evolved version.)
A boy was told by his mother not to put his finger on a candle flame. The boy obeyed in utter fear. But one day, out of curiosity, he asked himself – what would it feel like? He shelved obedience and gave in to curiosity and adventure. When his finger was burnt, he replaced theoretical wisdom, the mother's warning, with experiential wisdom, getting his finger burnt. It was a deep spiritual experience never to be forgotten. He will never put his finger on a candle flame again.
A boy on a Swiss farm was about to pee on the barbed wire of a fence. He ignored the warning of a farmer saying the fence was electrified. He did it anyway. He went into a convulsion and fell. Never again, he said. Experiential wisdom is based on reality and sticks permanently even in the subconscious, especially if traumatic.
When a bunch of college students heard that I was teaching Journalism, they interviewed me on camera as an assignment for a course. They complained that their journalism professor was teaching them nonsense. I told them to choose a 'practitioner' professor fraught with experiential wisdom and avoid 'arm-chair' professors who never practice journalism and relied on American textbooks. The textbook did not contextualize journalism in Filipino culture. Its theoretical wisdom was irrelevant.
I told them this was how I conducted my Journalism class. I had no textbook and no syllabus. I broke down the class into teams of 4 to 5 and assigned them to interview editors and journalists from tri-media, from the real world — print, broadcast, and radio, such as ABS-CBN, GMA7, Inquirer, Manila Times, DZRH.
Their field reports presented orally became the 'textbook' of the course. They ended up teaching me, as my experience was outdated, and tri-media had changed a lot. The course was 20 percent my lectures, inferring from their field reports, and 80 percent their field reports.
Here are some of their findings that put me in awe. TV stations were a snake pit of journalists and reporters trying to get ahead of each other, so a lot of backstabbing. Salaries were about 5 times lower than those in Japan. New graduates as trainees, willing to do anything just to get in, are not paid salaries, only allowances.
One team reported that, at one time, Liwayway, the popular vernacular comics-type magazine, had not shifted yet to computers. Stories were typed in ancient Underwood typewriters. All artworks were manually done. The staff was mainly senior citizens. Yet, the magazine thrived in its non-digital creativity.
One team reported about the Kapihan breakfast press forum at Manila Hotel. The pretty students wore their uniforms, so they stood out. Some congressmen started asking to be text-mates. They politely refused. My mistake. From then on, no uniforms. An American student who grew up here and spoke Pilipino very well reported how some journalists gave sexual comments in Pilipino. As soon as she cursed all of them in Pilipino, they backed away.
One team discovered how foreign correspondents shared information, while local journalists kept information secret to get exclusive 'scoops'.
The students were completely mesmerized by their acquired experiential wisdom and learned extensively from each other's reports. Some said it was the best college experience of their lives, the immersion in the 'wild' media world.
I remember my days of adventure in Europe, drifting for three years as far south as Morocco and as far north as Oslo. In Morocco, I met a Canadian girl who ran away from home because her dad would beat her up regularly when he came home drunk. She lived with the Bedouins, ancient nomads of the vast Sahara, who treated her like their own daughter. She said she learned more about life in two months in the desert (experiential wisdom) than four years of college life (theoretical wisdom). Her parents were amazed at how she changed profoundly, perhaps because she experienced being loved.
Back home, she convinced her dad to abandon alcohol, using gentle persuasion.
Such is the power of experiential wisdom, drawing spiritual renewal, and changing people for the better.
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