Flores fluorescent lamp and

(our lack of) critical thinking

Gideon Lasco
Published 3:01 PM, March 15, 2017
Updated 3:01 PM, March 15, 2017

Like many of our kababayan, I grew up believing that

Filipinos invented the fluorescent lamp and the moon
buggy, among other notable marvels of the modern
age.

As our elementary and high school textbooks proudly

recounted, an Agapito Flores, born in Bulacan,
invented the fluorescent lamp and its very name is
indelible proof of its inventor. The same textbooks
claimed that a Filipino engineer, Eduardo San Juan,
invented the historic vehicle that the Apollo
astronauts used when they explored the moon.

Years later, I would be disappointed to find out the

Agapito Flores story is actually a myth. In a
2001 Inquirer piece, science writer Queena Lee-Chua
wrote: No scientific report, no valid statement, no
rigorous documents can be used to credit Flores for
the discovery of the fluorescent lamp. We have tried
to correct this misconception, but the media (for
one) and our textbooks (for another) keep using the
Flores example. The word fluorescent, of course,
comes from the Latin fluorspar (a mineral) and
opalescence not from Flores. A prototype for the
fluorescent lamp was already patented by Peter
Cooper in 1901 - when Agapito Flores was just four
years old.

The Eduardo San Juan story is a bit complicated.

Lee-Chua also wrote of correspondences with NASA
that yielded no mention of any Filipinos among the
Boeing engineers who designed the lunar rover.
Paulo Ordoveza, the longtime internet fact-checker,
however, found that Eduardo San Juan was a
aerospace engineer who did contribute in the design
of a lunar rover - just not the one NASA used. Thus
while he can be credited for being part of the
pioneering age of space engineering, he cannot be
called the inventor of the lunar rover.

These factual errors notwithstanding, these

inventions continue to circulate, in textbooks, the
internet, and even in newspaper columns. What
lessons can we learn from these tales?
At the superficial level, they speak of the poor quality of our textbooks something
that crusader Antonio Go had tirelessly sought to make known to the public. As Niels
Mulder wrote: For a long period of time, and with considerable publicity, Go exposed
the nonsensical material and factual inaccuracies that are densely woven into current
Philippine schoolbooksHowever, after fourteen years of campaigning he finally
decided to throw in the towel in 2010. The quality of public education provided is
apparently a trivial issue to the citizenry at large, while those who reviled him are still
after his skin. Mulder argues that these factual errors are both a cause and effect of
the lack of critical thinking we need in our civic society.
And this brings us to a bigger point - one that has
taken on a renewed relevance in our time. Indeed,
what is at stake in these inaccuracies is not just the
trivial knowledge that a Filipino invented a lamp, but
our capacity to collectively and individually evaluate
what is factual and what is fictitious. How could it be
that no one bothered to interrogate those tales that
fly in the face of logic tales that could have easily
been verified?

This dearth of critical thinking continues today: In

the 2000s, someone concocted an etymology of the
term "churva", claiming that it came from the Greek
cheorvamus, defined as the lack of the right word to
say or in place of something you want to express but
cannot verbalize.

But heres the rub: there is no such term in Greek -

not even a V letter or sound in the language! The
earliest references for the word comes from Filipino
e-groups, and a crowd sourced Urban Dictionary
entry that also came from our kabayans.
Surprisingly, however, even some newspaper writers
accepted the definition as true, echoing it without
questioning its factualness!

Is it a surprise, then, that fake news circulates today,

and that misleading advertisements and false
therapeutic claims do not get called out? Instead of
looking at Mocha Uson as a problem in and of
herself, perhaps we can (also) view her as a
symptom of a deeper malady: our lack of critical
thinking. Rappler.com

Gideon Lasco is a physician, medical anthropologist,

and commentator on culture and current events.