There’s this story in one of the broadsheets today that Education Secretary Armin Luistro visited “sick books” crusader Antonio Capijo Go last November 5 and encouraged him to resume his doomed crusade. This was after Mr. Go announced a few days back that he was shelving up his one-man advocacy for good after he was intensely pilloried instead of being thanked for it by the publishers, authors, and editors of the targeted books.
Well, what a coincidence! Just the other day, a new Forum member—his username is pedestrian—made a posting in the Forum asking me to explain what those textbook errors were all about in the first place. Pedestrian was belatedly responding to a June 6, 2009 editorial of
The Manila Times that commented on the questionable English passages that Mr. Go had found way back then in six locally produced English-language textbooks. I posted that
Times editorial in the Forum that same day, and now pedestrian is saying that since there was no explanation for those errors, it’s difficult for him to learn from them.
I told pedestrian that it was unfortunate that I didn’t have the time to make detailed critiques of those ill-advised textbook passages the first time around, but I consented to doing sample critiques of four of them just to give him some idea of what the problem is all about. I then expressed the hope—and I’m reiterating it now—that someone would pick up after me and find time to dissect the remaining problematic textbook passages.
Read Forum member pedestrian’s posting in the Forum and my response now! Read “Luistro backs Go crusade” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer now!Read the Forum’s entire discussion thread on the Philippine textbook errors issue now!Read the overview to My Media English Watch now!
