The pleasure of finding things out in Venezuela I

Here you will find one of the guys I admire the most. His name was Richard Feynman. He was one of the greatest physicists of the XX Century. He was a theoretical physicist and a practical inventor as well, apart from a not so bad hobby bongo drummer. He was one of those guys who transform the world for good. He gave us new ideas, new insights on many things. He also contributed to making his country more prosperous by the thinking he generated and the people he inspired. He was infinitely curious, and very disrespectful. Here is one of his quotations:

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

Not that the guy hated learning languages. He spoke Portuguese and tried a bit Japanese. Definitely: knowing names is one thing and knowing something is another matter. We need in Venezuela people who want to know how things work out and then make them do so. That is much more important than titles or honours. We need doers. We need people who transform the country by being inventive. What conditions do we have for that?

Feynman told about how he started to learn calculus as a young boy. He had heard calculus was a big thing and he decided to go to the public library and borrow a book on that subject. He decided to borrow a book called Calculus for the Practical Man. When the librarian, puzzled, asked him what he was going to do with that book, Feynman replied: "It is for my dad". It was a lie. He just did not bother to explain why he, a young boy, would or could learn calculus.

When I read about that in Feynman's book Sure you must be Joking, Mr Feynman, and later saw this video, I thought immediately: and what would have happened in Venezuela?

The answer most likely would have been: such a boy would have had a much bigger difficulty because he would not have been able to borrow a book in the first place.

Do you know how many real public libraries my city, with over 1000000 people, has? It has one "big" library and a handful of very small ones. You can't hardly borrow books even from the big one and forget about getting books on mathematics or on business making.

Miguel Pena, the poorest area of my city and the one with half of its population has only one of the small "public libraries" from which you cannot expect to get many books and much less books of this kind.

Venezuelans read very little. The huge majority, more than in other places, prefer self-help books and cheap novels only. Sure, there should be place for that as well, but: can we offer a better environment to Venezuelan children so that we get sometime our Edisons and Jeffersons and Feynmans?

Public libraries are just a tiny detail, but it is something where the government could make big contributions. Do you know how many public libraries with lots of interesting books for children could be bought for the same amount of money Chávez is using to buy more Russian submarines? How many could be bought by part of the salary of some of the best paid deputies in the world, the venezuelan deputies?

There are a lot of other missing things needed to produce children like this. Do you know how many science prizes could we offer to curious pupils in poor schools if we were taxing a little bit more the huge amounts of Scottish whiskey Venezuela is importing? And all the other luxuries Venezuelans are so fond of? Do you know how much we could improve Venezuelan schools if people who were able to study and prosper would contribute more to them? Do you know what could happen if the Venezuelan government decided to put in practice a real education programme? Do you know how much we could profit if we all started to discuss about how to awaken the desire of Venezuelans to find things out, get to know how everything works, how we can make one or the other thing ourselves and not just expect to get some petrodollars to buy it from abroad?

I know, I have written here about many issues. Too many, perhaps. Still, I hope you get the idea: we need to ask ourselves what can we do to make Venezuela less mediocre and more competitive? Complaining about our history is not going to take us further. We need to find things out.