Shame
Has anyone heard of cows being “inseminated by seamen” or plants that are “sewn together”? Bernard Lamb, lecturer at Imperial College, London, has found such errors in papers submitted by his students, and he doesn’t think they are funny. He plans to publish these and similar egregious spelling mistakes in Quest, the journal of the Queen’s English Society, as part of a shame campaign that he hopes will not only make students strive to improve their spelling but also force education officials to improve the quality of English education.Lamb studied 17 British universities in 1992 and found that teachers were “despairing” of their students’ poor grasp of the English language. “Ministers say things are getting better, but they are not,” said Lamb, 15 years later.
In the English professor, Antonio Calipjo Go has found a soul mate, whose crusade and experience parallel his own. Since 2001, the academic supervisor of Marian School of Quezon City has been waging a lonely crusade to correct errors in the textbooks being used by pupils in elementary schools. He has written letters to newspapers, sought media interviews and put out newspaper advertisements in a shame campaign aimed not so much at schoolchildren as at education officials and book publishers.
All to no avail. Six years later, Filipino schoolchildren still read such enlightening stuff as: “Many Filipino men and women have brains” or “Galileo invented a magnifying telescope to study the moon.” And their vocabulary is enriched by learning that the male organ is called “titi” while a pimp is known as “titatita.”
And what did Go get for all his pains? At first, the Department of Education, or DepEd, went through the motion of having his complaints investigated by a panel of experts, who agreed that there were errors in the textbooks he had mentioned but who maintained that these were not as many or as serious as he made them out to be. (In one book, according to Go, the reviewers hired by the DepEd found 9 conceptual errors, 20 factual errors and 47 language errors, but they still gave it a 90-percent rating for “correctness.”) Then some book publishers sued him for libel. Later, DepEd officials and the authors of some textbooks sought to discredit his efforts by saying he had either exaggerated the mistakes or made them up altogether.
More recently, after Go took out full-page ads to expose more errors in more textbooks, some DepEd officials cooked up a conspiracy theory. Go, they intimated, is serving as the point man for somebody who is seeking the education portfolio, and that is why he can afford to throw away hundreds of thousands of pesos to put out those ads.
What his detractors seem to have forgotten is that Go launched his crusade for better textbooks long before Jesli Lapus became secretary of education. And he has yet to be heard blaming Lapus directly for the existence of those error-filled textbooks, since he obviously knows the incumbent secretary had nothing to do with their publication.
Given the suspicion, if not outright hostility, with which DepEd officials regard his efforts to bring the mistakes to their attention, is it any wonder that Go can’t be dragged into cooperating with them? Can anyone blame him if he wants to meet with them only in the presence of some neutral parties?
It’s a pity and a shame that textbook reform is being sidetracked by these personal issues. Both sides realize the importance and urgency of correcting those textbooks. The sooner they sit down to compare notes, the earlier our young pupils will have books that advance their knowledge instead of books that mislead and miseducate them.
