[OPINION] I’m 73. And I went back to school.

I enrolled in three certificate courses at the Development Academy of the Philippines. They covered geopolitics, international relations, strategic futures, oceans, the law of the sea, and maritime security.

Attending these courses virtually became one of the most stimulating things I did this year.

I did not go back to school because I needed certificates, missed homework, or had suddenly developed a fondness for deadlines.

I was curious. I wanted to understand what was happening in the world, and why.

But there was a practical reason too. I needed this knowledge for my work. I wanted to ask better questions and give better advice about policies that matter. People at work now come to me with questions about security — not because I am an expert, but because I am studying it.

Curiosity is a wonderful thing. But one has to be useful too.

Abstract until…

In our maritime security course, retired associate justice Antonio Carpio showed us historical maps. They made me appreciate something deceptively simple: geography is neither a blessing nor a curse.

We cannot push China farther north. We cannot move Taiwan farther south. We cannot wish the South China Sea away.

But geography should not determine a nation’s fate.

A short basketball player cannot suddenly become six-foot-eight. But he can learn to run faster, pass better, play stronger defense, see the court differently, and use what he has to his advantage.

Countries have to do the same thing.

Then came the law.

Attorney Fretti Ganchoon, senior state counsel at the Department of Justice, gave us a terrific lecture on the oceans, UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), and international law.

These can sound terribly abstract — until a marine is struck in the head, somebody loses a thumb, or fishermen come home injured and their wives wonder whether, on the next trip, they might become widows.

Attorney Isabel Cañaveral, legal officer of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, took us through the maritime zones, jurisdictions, rights, and obligations created by UNCLOS.

After that, an ocean no longer looked like empty blue space to me. It had boundaries, rights, responsibilities — and consequences.

Simulating a crisis

Then Florence Principe Gamboa, managing editor of FACTS, made us confront what happens when geography, law, and politics collide with an actual emergency.

She put us through a simulation involving the evacuation of Filipinos from Taiwan. Suddenly, geopolitics became very real. Who is in charge? Do we know where our people are? How do we move some 250,000 Filipinos out of Taiwan if commercial flights stop? Which Taiwanese agencies do we coordinate with? How do we communicate with our people and our counterparts on the ground? And perhaps the most important question: has the evacuation plan actually been tested?

These are not minor operational details. In a crisis, they may determine whether a plan works at all.

A plan on paper is not enough. Discovering its weak points after the crisis begins is already too late.

That raised another question: what if we could think about crises before they happened?

That was what the Strategic Futures and National Security course taught by Dr. Oliva Domingo of the UP National College of Public Administration and Governance asked us to do.

Choices that can change a future

Strategic foresight is not fortune-telling. It is a disciplined way of looking at several plausible futures, using what we know today while recognizing what we do not know.C

I chose chronic kidney disease.

Not because I wanted to turn kidneys into a security threat, but because disease on a large enough scale affects a country’s choices. (READ: [OPINION] Philippines’ peculiar health policy: Waiting until kidneys fail)

Young people on dialysis will not be joining the Armed Forces or the Coast Guard. And when government spends billions treating preventable disease, those resources come from the same national budget that must also fund education, infrastructure, social protection, and security.

My paper, therefore, was not really about kidneys. 

It was about choices made early enough to change a future.

I developed several scenarios. In the future I considered most desirable, government acted much earlier: preventing diabetes and hypertension, regulating unhealthy food environments, giving incentives to urban and town planners to create places where people could walk, play, and socialize, and teaching children early about eating well and staying healthy.

By the time a problem becomes a crisis, our choices have already narrowed.

And across all these subjects — maps, oceans, evacuation plans, chronic disease — one issue kept returning: governance.

Security does not exist only at sea, at a border, or inside a military installation. It depends on whether institutions work, agencies speak to one another, responsibilities are clear, and whether somebody has thought about what happens on Monday morning after the crisis erupts on Sunday night.

I came away with a conviction that sounds almost embarrassingly ordinary: grand strategies do not work unless somebody makes sure the operational details work too.

What older people bring to the classroom

Which brings me to the DAP Learning Team, led by Dean Alyn Joy Baltazar. They worked quietly in the background, making sure lecturers and students remained connected despite weak and unreliable internet; schedules ran on time; lectures were recorded, transcribed, and uploaded promptly; submissions met deadlines; and Spotify somehow managed to play the coolest music during our breaks.

In class, we talked about governance, coordination, and institutional capacity. The DAP Learning Team demonstrated all three — without announcing that they were doing so. 

These courses made me question assumptions, test the logic of my own arguments, discard ideas I had become too comfortable with, and look at familiar problems differently.

I brought experience into the classroom. Not necessarily wisdom.

I have worked in policymaking and implementation, nationally and internationally. I have seen policies succeed and fail. I have watched institutions evolve. More importantly, I have known people whose lives were affected by all of them.

Experience changes the questions one asks.

I can still be impressed by an idea. But I am much more interested now in whether it works.

Who will implement it? What happens when it reaches the bureaucracy? What happens when conditions change? And ultimately: how will it make people’s lives better?

That is why I hope more older Filipinos return to classrooms.

We need places where generations can meet — where experience encounters new knowledge, where assumptions can be challenged, and where people can disagree without pretending that anyone already has all the answers.

I went back to school because I was curious. I also wanted to be useful. 

I came away understanding something I had not expected.

Education does not change the map. It changes how we read it. And that can change what we decide to do next. – Rappler.com

Marilen J Danguilan is a medical doctor who studied at the University of the Philippines Diliman, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. She was a Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is external affairs officer of Salubris Medical Center and serves as adviser to the Peacebuilding Department of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.