MANILA, Philippines?Antonio Calipjo Go is back with a vengeance.

A sample critique is published on this page under his byline.

Last year, the self-styled ?sick books? crusader had thrown in the towel.

A cabal of columnists had come after him hammer and tongs after his media campaign against error-filled textbooks used in private elementary schools had finally resulted in the Department of Education (DepEd) banning the materials this school year.

The torrent of invectives in op-ed pages in newspapers?not in the Philippine Daily Inquirer?came in the midst of the refiling by a publisher of alleged extortion charges that a court had earlier dismissed.

Go, 57, academic supervisor at Marian School of Quezon City, has denied the charges. He had faced similar accusations, along with libel, through the dozen or so years of his lonely advocacy from authors and publishers he had stepped on.

But the ton of bricks hit at a particularly bad time. Go, who has been taking care of an ailing mother, had fallen ill. He told the Inquirer then that he could not deal with the columnists, his court antagonists and his own health problems all at the same time. On top of this, he rued that the campaign had elicited little public support.

?The decision to ?come back? was a specially painful one for me, made as it was during the Christmas vacation when a member of my family had specifically requested me to abandon my advocacy altogether,? Go says in a letter to the Inquirer on Jan. 9.

?In the end, I had to make a judgment call favoring the interest of the many over that of my own,? he says.

?The new batch of public school textbooks in English Reading and Language shows that the situation had, in fact, deteriorated to a point where a textbook, like the 208-page ?English for You and Me Grade 6,? contains more than 500 errors!

?Isn?t that excessive? Are we still teaching? What will the poor students learn? The bad books keep growing in numbers. I hope it is not yet too late to correct the material before the Grade 6 students graduate in March,? he says.

12-year crusade

Go?s personal crusade began 12 years ago when a book agent came to Marian School in the working-class neighborhood of Novaliches, offering him an L-300 van if he agreed to use the textbooks.

He was infuriated that learning materials were being peddled like merchandise bundled with special offers. He was doubly incensed when he found out that they were shot through with errors.

There had been parents who had angrily gone public on discovering the trash that their students were being force-fed in public schools. But after a fleeting hue and cry, the outbursts went down the drain.

Not with Go. He pursued his campaign in media, talking to reporters and pulling out newspaper ads that had cost him a million pesos.

Lost in translation

Foreign correspondents took notice, writing in their newspapers in the United States, Europe and Asia about published textbooks here that got ?lost in translation? and exposing to ridicule the Philippine education system.

That the quality of the country?s education has deteriorated?a result of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship?s emphasis on his personal security and that of his family?has been widely acknowledged, even by the Arroyo administration.

This had been evident in the underwhelming results in recent proficiency examinations in Science, Math and English for Filipino students.

A number of reasons underlying the rot have been debated, including the quality of textbooks and learning materials, the paltry government spending on education compared to Singapore?s and Japan?s, for example, and the inability to cope with a burgeoning, and generally impoverished, population.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?along with concerned sectors, business and civil society?has attempted to address the mind-boggling problems that have deprived the masses of the only vehicle for social mobility under a regime of lack of access to wealth and the failure of agrarian reform.

Multistage evaluation

The DepEd has purportedly put in place a multistage evaluation process to review textbooks currently being updated with millions of pesos worth of loans from the World Bank.

Final vetting is done by such elite schools as Ateneo de Manila University and University of the Philippines, according to the DepEd.

Nothing has happened?at least according to Go?s evaluation of four textbooks in English used in public schools distributed this year that he said are filled with errors.

One of the authors he has crossed, Expectacion Gonzales, in a letter to the Inquirer, questions the credentials of what she describes as a ?supervisor of an inconspicuous school ? who has not even made a name for himself in the book writing industry.?

What?s good writing?

Says Go: ?I?m merely showing what these most-revered and highly respected writers really are. The first requisite of a good writer is that he must know how to write. And what is considered good writing? It is one that promotes knowledge, skills and values by means of instructions and teachings which are true, good and correct. If a writer does not have proficiency in English, he shouldn?t be writing textbooks in English. It is simplicity itself.

?While it is fair to say that anonymous DepEd evaluators should also be blamed, it cannot be denied that the original sin had been committed by the writers themselves. Editors and reviewers are expected to edit only minor errors, and not to correct and rewrite an entirely trashy book. The author who doesn?t know how to write, the reviewer who doesn?t know how to correct and the DepEd?these three share the guilt in equal measure.?

Go had planned to live quietly and go into farming after the columnists? campaign last year to shoot the messenger, thereby killing his message that defective textbooks are one of the root causes of the decline in Philippine education.

He could not rest easy with his bedtime readings.