EDITORIAL - Textbooks for sale

The latest word is that even government property has found its way to C.M. Recto Avenue, that special place in Manila where you can get everything from state-of-the-art cell phones to pornographic magazines dirt-cheap. The latest products, as admitted even by education officials, are textbooks for public schools. Sen. Tessie Aquino-Oreta, who used to chair the chamber’s committee on education, said the sale of the textbooks appeared to be the handiwork of syndicates operating in cahoots with government personnel, presumably those at the Department of Education, Culture and Sports. Education Secretary Raul Roco, on the other hand, said he suspected petty thieves.

It’s understandable for Roco to defend DECS personnel, but Oreta’s suspicion has basis. It won’t be the first time that DECS employees would be implicated in anomalies concerning textbooks. From the bidding for textbook supply contracts to their distribution, there are opportunities for corruption at the education department. The first major scandal to erupt in the Estrada administration involved alleged lobbying by a presidential relative for a textbook supply contract at the DECS. Stiff competition in the manufacture of textbooks, however, has not meant improvements in product quality. In recent years education officials themselves have noted a deterioration in the qua-lity of public school textbooks, a number of which have been found to be replete with not only grammatical mistakes but also errors of fact.

The Philippine education system, once the envy of Asia, has fallen way behind those of the country’s neighbors and the rest of the world. Poor pay has turned away the nation’s best and brightest from the teaching profession. If Filipino students can’t get qualified teachers, they should at least get qua-lity textbooks. Each school opening, however, public schools are faced with an acute shortage of textbooks, while the books that are available often have atrocious grammar and factual errors.

Now there’s a new problem: scarce textbooks being sold in the streets of Manila. If these books are the substandard ones, they’re no big loss to students. Whatever the quality of the books, however, public funds are used to pay for anything marked as government property. And whether the books being sold on C.M. Recto were pilfered or distributed by a syndicate at the DECS, their sale must be stopped and those responsible caught and punished.