EDITORIAL - Still error-filled

The controversy over error-filled textbooks distributed by the government has raged for many years. Yet here we are, at the start of another school year, with the Department of Education admitting that English textbooks intended for use in public schools from Grades 1 to 6 are again riddled with errors.

The DepEd used a $200-million loan from the World Bank for the purchase of the “English for You and Me” series. The books, authored by Elodie Cada and printed by Bookwise Publishing, contained more than 500 errors that were pointed out by Antonio Calipjo-Go, who has waged a personal crusade against the use of textbooks that are replete with grammatical and factual errors. Earlier this year an evaluation of the contents of the textbooks confirmed Calipjo-Go’s critique.

A teachers’ guide, correcting the errors in the textbook series, is now being rushed, with the printing cost reportedly to be shouldered by Bookwise. Apart from making the publisher foot the bill, the government should also determine if the errors were made by the author, which were not spotted in a so-called four-level textbook content evaluation process, or if those were mostly printing mistakes.

Pinpointing the source of the errors should help the DepEd confront this problem, which has persisted despite Calipjo-Go’s crusade. The public education system has enough problems dealing with an acute lack of textbooks on various subjects. The few that public school students have should at least contain reliable information.

The problem is aggravated when teachers themselves cannot spot the errors. In 2004, Calipjo-Go first called the attention of education authorities to factual and grammatical errors in the social studies textbook “Asya Noon, Ngayon at sa Hinaharap.” Calipjo-Go’s points were initially disputed by certain quarters, but the DepEd later released a 21-page error guide for the textbook. Calipjo-Go also pointed out mistakes in some textbooks used in private schools. The books were pulled out.

This campaign to improve the quality of textbooks cannot be waged by one man alone. The DepEd must organize a pool of experts and seek the necessary funding to put in place an effective system of checking the accuracy of textbooks, particularly those distributed to public schools. This problem contributes to the deterioration in the quality of Philippine education and must not be allowed to fester for long.