CAGAYAN DE ORO—For over a decade, Antonio Calipjo-Go skewered error-studded textbooks, bought with our taxes and hefty World Bank IOUs. The battered academician, this month, won vindication of sorts. Grudgingly, the Department of Education issued a 28-page booklet to more than half a million public school teachers. “Teaching Notes” correct “more than 450 errors found in 10 English textbooks,” the Inquirer reported.

Grade 1 to Grade 6 students use these books. And Go pinpointed most of those flaws. Use “Notes” for “correcting errors that may be [found],” Education Undersecretary Vilma Labrador gingerly wrote.

“Books are the carriers of civilization,” historian Barbara Tuchman said. “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation silenced,” said the author of “The Guns of August.”

In December 2008, Go tossed in the towel in the battle to prevent our kids from sliding into a nation of dimwits. It led to nowhere, the 57-year-old whistleblower wearily said.

“Go sowed the wind by documenting multiple errors in books, from science, grammar, social studies to history,” Viewpoint noted. “He reaped the whirlwind.”

So did other whistleblowers before him. Ensign Philip Pestaño denounced, in 1997, misuse of Navy boats to haul illegal lumber and drugs. A Senate probe concluded he was murdered. But in the last 22 years, the military ombudsman hasn’t budged beyond securing counter-affidavits.

Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada testified on how a $132-million ZTE broadband contract ballooned to $329 million. Lozada has been fired, sued and harassed.

“If you have money, even the spirits will turn the mills for you,” the Chinese proverb says. And there’s big bucks in textbook publishing. DepEd last year bought 21.2 million English textbooks for grades 1 to 6. The bill: P666.6 million. Just one firm cornered P383 million for six books.

Big publishers and corrupt officials choreographed a smear campaign against Go. Some columnists didn’t take issue with errors he pointed out, like “Paoay is a province.” But they assailed Go’s integrity with charges that proved baseless.

Accord Go the right of reply, the Philippine Press Council asked. Go’s rejoinders have been ignored up to now. This is failure at self-regulation by individual newspapers.

Most papers, in contrast, scrupulously ensure fairness. But this lapse may yet sap media’s defense against the threat of compulsory right-of-reply measures, like HB 3306 and SB 2150.

“You shall know the truth,” Aldous Huxley once joshed. “And the truth will make you mad.”

Flawed textbooks infuriated parents, educators and private citizens. But their protests slammed against shekel power.

Frank Hilario drew up a timeline that depicts resistance to reform in “horror of errors in Philippine textbooks.” Read and weep:

1996. German national Helmut Haas finds 1,341 errors in his daughter’s textbooks: 194 in “Science and Health” and 420 in “Civics and Culture.” Rep. Raul del Mar prods the House to adopt corrective legislation.

1999. Enter Matt Dizon and Go. They pinpoint 950 factual errors and 550 typographical errors in a book sold to Marian School of Quezon City. The publisher incorporates corrections, but he does not acknowledge the work of Dizon and Go.

2000. Go finds flaws in books, from “Effective Language” to Asian history. In 2001, the series “Science and Technology for The Modern World” for high school students is scrubbed because of errors.

2002. In a full-page newspaper ad, Go points to 400 textbook errors and calls for reforms. In an Inquirer ad, in 2004, he fingers 431 factual and grammatical errors in the social studies and history textbooks, approved by DepEd.

2007. Two years after errors in history textbooks were revealed, the Senate discovered the same errors repeated. Another 100-plus “errors of fact” studded a new batch of Grade 3 social studies books.

Gross errors in chemistry in a General Science book is found by Sigrid S. Rodolfo, who holds a doctorate from Purdue University. Sen. Panfilo Lacson introduces Resolution 53 to probe a problem that refused to go away.

2008. Sen. Pia Cayetano follows suit. Nothing happens. Erika Sauler reports in an Inquirer series that despite a DepEd order, private schools use uncorrected texts. Sen. Manuel Villar gets into the act with Senate Resolution 822.

The Inquirer won this year a Citizens Mass Media Award for its textbook series.

Why is the pace of reforms so stretched out? Governments face a choice, Harvard University’s John Kenneth Gailbraith explained. Change one’s mind or prove there is no need to do so. “Almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”

The country is in debt to whistleblowers who, like Go or Lozada, slug away. The unsavory reality is that, like Somali pirates, bandits here often win. The targets vary—from jueteng, as Erap knows, to fertilizers, as Joc-joc Bolante can attest to.

But the bottom line is constant: crime pays handsomely. Thieves are not ostracized. They buy first places at table. Indeed, “the ultimate perversion is to call evil good.”

“Mangled textbooks mangle young minds,” noted Viewpoint on Dec. 3, 2008. “Miseducation sentences kids to life sentences in twilight ignorance. This locks them into poverty and unfulfilled potentials. And as these youngster go, so does the nation.”

(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)