Nuggets of wisdom lost in translation
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:16:00 06/10/2008
MANILA, Philippines—A life-size image of the Virgin Mary stands on the small campus of Marian School of Quezon City run by Antonio Calipjo Go, its academic supervisor.
Inside a combined bookstore and library, where Go holds office, the walls are adorned with framed newspaper articles and full-page advertisements under a sign proclaiming them as specimens of “textbook boo-boos.”
A younger-looking Go smiles on a magazine cover that calls him the “Lone Textbook Ranger.”
Go greets a visitor in his small office, where Brahms wafts soothingly from a CD player.
The 57-year-old Go speaks softly, but as he warms up to his subject he becomes a smoldering volcano about to erupt.
He talks about a meeting the Department of Education called last month to discuss for the first time his 3-year-old complaint about errors in Science and English textbooks published by Phoenix Publishing House Inc. and used in some 200 private schools.
Go thinks the meeting was a setup, that he walked into an “ambush.” Phoenix sent a battery of lawyers who dredged up instead charges of extortion they had leveled against him, which a criminal court had dismissed.
Although the DepEd meeting sustained his findings that the Phoenix books were erroneous, he thought it was an empty victory.
Whitewash
Education Secretary Jesli Lapus produced an order during the meeting pulling out the books from circulation. He was told the directive would be made public the following day. He says he has seen no evidence this has been done and the books remain in circulation, as far as he can tell.
“It seems there was a cover-up or a whitewash,” says Go.
Such setbacks in the midst of apparent triumphs are nothing new to Go, who has relentlessly campaigned against errors in textbooks in both public and private schools over the past years.
The crusade has attracted the attention of newspapers from Singapore to Germany that found it not only hilarious but tragic that in the process of educating Filipino youth, nuggets of wisdom were “lost in translation.”
In 2004, Go managed to get then Education Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad to recall the public school textbook “Asya Noon, Ngayon at sa Hinaharap” (Asia Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) because of the errors he had found there.
It was the first time in the department’s history that such a move had been taken. Go laments, however, that, in fact, the book remains in use to this day.
Last year, Go drew attention to blunders in the first set of updated public school social studies textbooks funded by a $200-million concessional loan from the World Bank that had been released to millions of elementary schoolchildren.
Correction to corrections
The DepEd subsequently issued leaflets correcting the errors. Go reviewed the leaflets and found that they, too, had blunders. He issued a “correction to the corrections.”
The supervisor of Marian School, which is tucked in the working class neighborhood of Novaliches and which has a population of 400 from preschoolers to high school, has not encountered criminal suits from the publishers he had attacked except for the Phoenix cases.
Go has begun reviewing English textbooks released by the DepEd this year, as part of the process of updating books used in public schools. He says he had received copies of the books from people he did not even know, asking him to review them.
Choosing to look first at the material for fourth year public high school, which he thought should be the toughest, Go poured over “English Expressways.”
Go says he has read 311 pages of the 326-page book. So far, the eagle eyes had spotted 575 typos and errors in grammar, usage and logic. He plans to issue his critique one of these days and woe is forthcoming unto its authors from Ateneo de Manila University and University of the Philippines.
Even the title of the textbook sounds weird, says Go. “Why not ‘British highways?’” he says. “Should it not be called instead ‘Ways of expressing English?’”
Defective books mislead
If Go has set a laser-like focus on textbooks errors, it is because he feels that defective textbooks compromise children. He feels that the worst forms of violence inflicted on the young are poverty and ignorance.
“Textbooks that teach errors as lessons mislead and miseducate,” he says.
“This is the driving force behind my decision to take on the ‘windmills of my mind’ against the well-meaning advice of friends, relatives and loved ones, against even my own better judgment,” Go says.
“The crusade against error-riddled textbooks has given focus and direction, purpose and meaning to my life,” he says. “It bleeds me dry, it also makes me want to live.”
Go has published 10 full-page ads in newspapers in pursuit of his cause that had set his pocketbook back by more P1 million.
He says he remains committed to his cause—“as much as Dracula is committed to loving blood.”
“A more level-headed analogy would be the line by Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’: I cannot live without my soul,” he says.
He will need all the help from the Virgin Mary in his crusade. Fernando del Mundo
|
