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.

Go began his crusade after he found 950 factual errors and 550 typographical errors in one history book being used by high school seniors in 1999. The book was pulled out, but Go went on to look closely at other textbooks being used in schools. In 2000, he found a number of mistakes in a preschool workbook, one grade school textbook and two high school textbooks. But it was not until 2004 that he went public with his dismaying discoveries by putting out a paid ad in the Inquirer, citing the most glaring among 431 errors in the book, ?Asya: Noon, Ngayon at sa Hinaharap.?

In the following months and years, Go would expose numerous errors in other textbooks, including 24 books being used in private schools in 2005, and appear in congressional hearings. For his pains, Go was either ignored or dismissed as some kind of crackpot by education officials and charged with libel by some book authors, and extortion by one publishing house. But what seems to have finally broken his will to fight was a series of attacks mounted by some newspaper columnists questioning his motives and his integrity. With his name and reputation ?irremediably tarnished,? as he put it, Go felt he had to leave the field and just pray that somebody else would pick up ?the good fight.?

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.?

Again, he is correct. One concerned educator has listed 330 errors in the Reading textbook for Grade 3; 80 in the Language textbook for Grade 3; 200 in the Reading textbook for Grade 4 and 120 in Language. These English textbooks, which cost P900 million, are the latest to be procured under a World Bank-funded, five-year program to replace textbooks in all levels of public elementary and secondary schools.

And what do the officials in charge have to say about this? ?Well, you know, I have yet to see a perfect book,? said Socorro Pilor, executive director of the Department of Education?s Instructional Materials Council Secretariat, which reviews books used in public schools. If there are errors in the textbooks, ?they were unintentional,? Pilor added, because after all their authors are ?just human.?

That sounds like a perfect excuse, but it is not. Writers do make mistakes, but the question is, how often will they be allowed to make them? And what kind of mistakes can they be allowed to get away with? The problem is that the people in charge of educating Filipino children have set quality standards so low that almost anything passes their review, including toxic books that kill learning. They must be glad to see Go gone.