DepEd ignoring textbook errors

Two articles and two letters to the editor published by the Inquirer in June and July of this year, all of them pertaining to my discovery of numerous grave errors in two learning materials used in public secondary schools, were completely ignored by the Department of Education. What is being implied? That I should not be taken seriously because what I’m saying is not true?

“Voyages in Communication” continues to be used in Grade 8 classrooms of public schools all over the country, in place of the textbooks that do not exist because these have not been made ready for the second year of implementation of the K to 12 Education Reform Program of the government. Aside from its 1,836 specific errors, “Voyages in Communication” also contains many serious systemic and conceptual errors.

By disregarding the errors, the DepEd has shown that it is not inclined to correct them.

Error-riddled textbooks miseducate. Public school students forced by fickle fate to use these defective products undergo defective tutelage that is a complete waste of their time, resources and effort. These children of a lesser god suffer and endure a diminution that is planned, intended and designed, by the very people they trust would teach and educate them, really and truly. Thus, they are kept in bondage by a collar no human eye can see, the collar of ignorance, the leash of mediocrity, the tether of stupidity. The uneducated, the miseducated, are easily controlled. Like a glove shaped to accept a hand, the ignorant and the stupid are shaped to accept domination and subjugation as a matter of course. A country such as ours, with more than its share of porridge-minded people, makes possible the proliferation of con artists so bold and brazen in the way they conduct their monkey business, such that even the rip-roaring plunder of P10-billion pork barrel funds could flourish undetected and unchallenged for 10 long years! The combined weight of a lot of stupid people tips the balance of power in favor of unprincipled politicians and avaricious businessmen. Poor quality education condemns the poor to a life of unbroken destitution and impoverishment.

I believe in Education Secretary Armin Luistro’s sincerity and integrity, and it is not his fault that the people he relies on to come up with teaching materials that are sensible, rational, right and correct have failed to deliver. Now that the DepEd has gotten the biggest slice of the budget pie among all government bureaucracies, Secretary Luistro must see to it that a portion of the DepEd’s humongous allocation be used to improve the quality of its “learning” materials, textbooks and e-books, starting, but not ending, with the despicable “Voyages in Communication.” I am submitting this urgent petition to the education secretary in behalf of the millions of public high school students who are using the book, sadly, to their detriment.

—ANTONIO CALIPJO GO, academic supervisor, Marian School of Quezon City, 199 Sauyo Road,  Novaliches, Quezon City, [email protected]