Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Obenieta: What the fact! By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
WHAT a burden our life would be without it even if it’s too light, almost weightless. Though it’s also a prime necessity, toilet paper is not what we’re talking about here. A roll of diploma, that’s what we’ve been taught we need to succeed. Or else we’d be in deep shit without it.
No wonder it was all the Wizard of Oz could offer to assure the Scarecrow: “I can’t give you brains but I can give you a diploma.”
But graduating high school students in Ohio had a lot to crow about after Westlake High School officials misspelled “education” on the diplomas distributed last weekend. Though new diplomas were later reprinted and sent again to the 330 graduates, the damage has been done. “It’s been the subject of mockery on local radio,” says the news after a Cleveland-area principal says he’s embarrassed his students got proof of their “educaiton” on their diplomas. Que horror. Aiee, to err is humor.
That’s surely one for the books. Tell that to school kids in the Philippines plagued with textbooks chock-a-block with errors.
A howler—”what could be a source of a diplomatic irritant”—has been discovered in a new Social Studies textbook for public high school sophomores just released in time for the opening of classes. As reported, “Chinese customs authorities seized one shipment of about 400,000 copies of the textbook, published by Vibal and printed in China. Mentioning Taiwan as a “country” separate from the People’s Republic of China, it tweaks the one-China policy upheld by the Philippine government.
Double whammy, indeed, as the said book is supposed to replace an earlier error-filled edition titled, Asya: Noon, Ngayon at sa Hinaharap. Used in 1997 but pulled out in 2004 after the detection of errors, it had 316 pages pockmarked with “430 factual and grammatical mistakes.”
You’d think its team of authors from the Department of Education (DepEd) and 17 professors from the state university were way above kids playing truant past recess. This is not the first time, after all, that textbooks have been found erroneous. In fact, the DepEd’s Instructional Materials Council Secretariat (IMCS) published last year a booklet of corrections on 150 errors found in seven new titles used in Grades 1 to 5 of Social Studies or HeKaSi (Heograpiya, Kasaysayan at Sibika).
“Too many details, too many facts.” So bewails the IMCS executive director, conceding why Social Studies textbooks are always far from perfect. Can’t blame the American intellectual known for his autobiographical book, The Education of Henry Adams, when he smirked, “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
That’s worth checking out, indeed, for an estimated 1.3 million students expected to attend the first day of classes today in Central Visayas where public schools still face the same old facts: lack of classrooms, teachers, chairs and, yes, textbooks.
Would be a relief, indeed, if the reports could be proven wrong. After all, newspapers are not spared from its own share of horrors, too. “Between 40 and 60 percent of newspaper news stories have some type of error... only 2 percent were corrected,” reveals a website humbly calling itself “Regret the Error.”
Really, academic authorities and journalists—this blunder-prone deadline beater included—might as well ride along this reality check from a bumper sticker I saw recently. Offering information in the face of irony, it reads: “Illiterate? Write For Help.”
