By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
In recent weeks, the Department of Education (DepEd) has been all over the news for all the wrong reasons as the Commission of Audit (COA) released its audit findings on the department. Among the shameful revelations is the expense of P254.2M on error-riddled textbooks. Instead of humbly admitting fault, DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones laughably questioned the authority of the COA to check textbook errors although she admitted some of the errors and promised they “ will revisit the textbook review system to identify areas for enhancement.” It is highly doubtful though if this latest publicized intention of the DepEd will come to fruition because it has made similar pronouncement in the past and the problem only got worst.
To give you an idea of how long the DepEd has failed to come up with a solution, Antonio Go informed that he has been hounding the agency over its execrable textbooks in the past 24 years.
To my mind, the reason the quality of DepEd textbooks and learning materials instead of improving only keeps getting worse is the absence of any form of sanction or personal inconvenience and loss for the officials and employees involved. Because they have no personal stakes in the quality of the procured or published textbooks, they are confident they can get away with anything leading them to abandon any intent much less attempt to come up with error-free textbooks. Their utter recklessness and lack of concern that children be fed with correct information knows no bounds. Not even small town weeklies or elementary school organs print an error as horrible as the viral “Banana Rice Tereces” for “Banaue Rice Terraces” in the Grade 7 MAPEH textbook, one of the best proofs of DepEd’s incompetence exposed by Go. who has been hounding the agency over its execrable textbooks and other sins for more than two decades now.
That being the case, it is the height of naivete to believe that after the agency has been brazening it out for so long, the DepEd will on its own suddenly fix its messed up textbook publication and procurement system.
And since other concerned government agencies evidently don’t have the sincere intentions and the will to effectively intervene to end this long-standing problem and embarrassment, why don’t we try something out of the box? Go should punctuate his heroic efforts by compiling all his findings over the years into a volume. If this was cinema, his explosive exposes of the idiocy, ineptness and irresponsibility of DepEd in its textbook function were the teasers and this volume the full-length movie. Anyone interested could find in the pages of the book the detailed and lurid proofs of how the education arm of the government thinks nothing about producing books which mislead the children it is supposed to educate.
The book will immortalize all the shameless and incompetent individuals involved in the production and procurement of DepEd textbooks starting from the cheap authors and those who foisted them to the agency as legitimate book writers all the way up to the Education Secretaries who helplessly watched as the botching went on. Because they practically do not lift a finger on the endless idiocy, the names of presidents and all the members of Congress since the problem started be given space in the book. Congress has passed the Anti-Fake News Act of 2017 but could not think of a similar measure to deal with feeding erroneous information to impressionable minds.
The current DepEd officials and personnel involved in the despicable activity have no use for dignity and professional reputation but for sure they have families who care about their name who may prevail upon them to do their jobs better in the future to avoid being mentioned in the sequel of the book. The book will also be a warning to future DepEd officials and employees and their respective families that they could only take part in the production of defective books at the risk of planting their names in the muck for all time.
The book will also give readers a chance to compare the quality of the review outputs of Go and the DepEd in the cases of books reviewed by both parties. The DepEd is currently conducting a review of all the textbooks and learning materials it issued starting in 2012 thanks to the recent public and media outcry against its continued bungling of the critical function of producing learning materials for our children. **
