Learning from the university of real life

Dear Nanay,

I read your piece on “Nanay’s Christmas Wish” and I wanted to write a quick response to you, but Christmas on a Sunday meant so many things to do, and I forgot all about my intention to write you.

What I have to tell you and your readers is so important that I believe Heaven — God or Jesus — awakened me. It is now 2:56 a.m., Monday morning, and I am excitedly writing you on my yellow pad.

You wrote: “As a mother, my only wish was to give my children what I was not fortunate enough to receive — an education.”

And later: “My biggest frustration in life was that I never went to college.”

Now, this is a truly ironic situation: you’re saying, Nanay, that you envy us (with a holy envy, of course) who have a college education. And here I am, Rolando Quintos, AB, MA, PhD candidate, with 19 years of academic schooling — now telling you that it is I who envy your so-called “uneducated life.”

You see, Nanay Coring, your so-called “non-education” is the only real education, the best education — what I call “Real Self-Education to Achieve Real-Life Success.”

You may not yet know the truly great company to which you belong — the community of the truly great leaders in the world. Some of these names are truly famous because they were and are truly great in every way.

Benjamin Franklin, great world leader of the American Revolution, was “out of school” after second grade.

Abraham Lincoln, probably the greatest American president who preserved the American Union, had only six months of academic schooling.

And Thomas Alva Edison, the greatest inventor of modern times who gave us the electrical industry, had only three months of formal schooling.

Wow!

Compare those achievements with my poor record: I had 19 years of academic schooling and that long academic training almost ruined my great potential to become a great person like you. Yes, too much “academic training” can ruin a person’s great potential.

There are those who never went to or finished academic schooling and never learned to educate themselves outside school. This is unfortunate.

There are many who graduated from college with a college degree and who became unemployed because no employer like you was available to employ them. This is doubly unfortunate. 

It is not academic schooling that’s really important. And I believe I have the right to say this because I excelled in my 19 years of academic schooling. I was always number one, academically speaking, in my class and graduated valedictorian from grade school, high school and college — magna cum laude. And I was awarded a post-graduate scholarship in an American Ivy League school — for four more years!

But I’m telling you now, Nanay Coring, that I envy your kind of education – it’s far more important and valuable than my 19 years of academic schooling.

I am still learning today, at age 72, trying to catch up with your level of super-accomplishment in real life.

Let me say this with all due respect to my academic teachers and to all my academic institutions. I do not blame them or condemn them in any way. They tried to do their best for me, according to do their own best intentions and their own best lights.

But all that I learned from them cannot come close to what I learned and what I taught myself (of course, with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of Jesus), after I left the world of the academe.

I now say, the greatest education in the world is real self-education in accordance with the Infinite Creator’s plan and in accordance with the Holy Spirit’s daily and hourly inspiration to live the best life we can live in accordance with the inspired use of our God-given talents.

Two of my children do not even have a high school diploma, and yet they will be great entrepreneurs in time, earning more than people who have college diplomas. Right now, they are already successful CEOs of their own businesses.

With or without formal schooling, what’s truly important is what we teach ourselves in the only real school there is – the school or university of real life.

I no longer carry my academic credentials after my name — no AB, no MA, no PhD candidate. My name now stands as Rolando N. Quintos, AnD — which means Anak ng Diyos (child of God). I carry that title with real pride and joy, because it is a title that any one of my brothers and sisters, schooled or unschooled, can use after their name.

I hope and pray that this letter, written in the spirit of total humility, has not offended you or any one of your readers who adore you. I am one of them.

The institution that has helped me and my children the most in our quest for Real Self–Education for Real-Life Success is National Book Store.

NBS is our self-education campus as your National employees who know me know that in NBS I feel I am in the paradise of real-life success education.

Thank you for your precious time and attention in reading this letter, but I am speaking to you out of the fullness of my heart. If I am a graduate of many institutions, I am most of all a National Book Store graduate whose many wonderful books fill my home library and my workplace library — which does not contain a single academic textbook that I used in my formal schooling

Thank you, Nanay Coring, for your great life achievement in the Real Self-Education World of Real-Life and Business Success.

Gratefully and in awe of your great life accomplishment.

Rolando N. Quintos, and, NBS graduate

Dear Rolando,

Thank you very much for your kind letter.

I agree that the privilege of having an “academic education” is never a guarantee of success. It never was and never will be. Likewise, the lack of an “academic education” should never be a hindrance to someone who is determined to succeed… regardless of how you define “success.”

However, I also believe that the world today is very different from how it was when I was growing up. Competition has become truly global. Ang daming magaling (there are so many good people). And if we expect our children, grandchildren and especially great-grandchildren to compete, we must give them every tool we can to give them the best chance to do so.

Having said that, all else equal, I think we, as parents and grandparents, owe our children the best education we can give them — both academic and real life. 

Sincerely,

Nanay

Dear Nanay,

I just want to congratulate you for running a column such as you had on Page G-1, Dec. 25, Christmas day. It was a breath of fresh air in the midst of so much hard reading in our daily newspapers nowadays.

My only wish today and every day as we enter another year is that more people will get to read the things that your column provides. 

Indeed, “reading makes a full mind.” In the same issue of Philippine STAR, I read about Manny Pacquiao saying, “The words of the Bible can change a man.” Also, in the same issue, Venus Raj, a runner-up in a major international beauty contest, observed that the reason the world seems more beautiful during this season “is because we celebrate Jesus Christ who came to the world to save us.”

Such words, and your column, help to fulfill our minds.

Dr. Nene Ramientos

Chaplain, The Master’s

Prayer Breakfast Fellowship

Cosmopolitan Church, Manila

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If you have a question, e-mail us at asknanay@nationalbookstore.com.phor just drop your letter at drop boxes in all National Book Store branches nationwide.