Toxic Textbooks

Remember this post, "English Textbooks In The Philippines"? Here's a follow-up editorial from The Inquirer: Toxic Textbooks. It's a frustrating bit of news. An excerpt:

For three straight days this week, the Philippine Daily Inquirer put out a help wanted ad right on one of the three pages where it does not accept paid advertisements: the front page. (The other ad-less pages are in this section.) The unusual ad called for a new crusader to come forward and wage war against “sick books” that contaminate the Philippine educational system, from grade school to high school. The call was made after Antonio Calipjo-Go, former academic supervisor of Marian School in Quezon City, announced that he had given up the fight for better textbooks in Philippine schools. But after what Go has gone through, there will be few, if any, who will be willing to take up the challenge.

After spending so much time, effort and money, what exactly did Go accomplish? While education officials, like the authors and publishers of the textbooks, were at first in a state of denial and appeared more interested in impugning his motives, in the end they had to acknowledge that Go was right about the errors. In the case of “Asya,” for example, the Department of Education was forced to issue “teaching guides” to correct the mistakes and then hired 22 historians and evaluators to rewrite entire chapters of the textbook. Last year, the department also issued a 21-page guide to correct, factual, grammatical and typographical errors in 11 new Social Studies textbooks. The National Book Development Board has also recommended the pullout of at least one textbook from private schools.

However, aside from creating some awareness of the problem, Go’s lonely crusade seems to have made little headway in improving the quality of the textbooks used by schoolchildren. “Nothing has changed,” Go himself said in frustration. “I am fighting an uphill battle that leads to nowhere."