EDITORIAL - Defending an indefensible position

A certain Clarito Pacheco, said to be the area manager for FNB Publishing Inc. in Cebu, has been quoted in another paper trying to defend one of its books which German national and long-time Cebu resident Helmut Haas recently exposed as having several errors.

Pacheco is expected, of course, to defend the book he is selling — The Wonderful World of Science — because that is part of his job. But the manner in which he is defending it does not sit well with a public that has long agonized under the problem of error-filled books.

Listen to Pacheco: “Minor grammatical errors are not uncommon in books. If there are some errors, you can’t avoid these.” Jesus Christ. How cavalier can one get. What does Pacheco think of school textbooks, a yoyo that one can tolerate despite having an elliptical spin?

For the information of Pacheco, who should know better since he is in the business of selling books, a textbook is not a toy. It is a tool for teaching. If what you teach is wrong, what a child learns is wrong. And that is intolerable. It is in fact unforgivable.

Pacheco said if Haas has indeed found some errors, he should have gone to them so they can check them out if they are indeed errors. Obviously, Pacheco is not familiar with Cebu, the very market he is dealing with.

Haas is a very respected person in Cebu. He is a very civic-minded man who even directs traffic when the need arises. But he does not blow the whistle needlessly. When he complained of the same problem about error-filled books 12 years ago, even Congress sat up and listened.

Indeed a congressional inquiry was conducted at the time, which should be enough proof to Pacheco that Haas is not just seeing ghosts. If he wonders now why Haas went directly to media, it is because, as usual, nothing happened out of that congressional inquiry.

But that does not alter the fact that many textbooks are filled with errors. In fact, in the words of Pacheco himself, “you cannot avoid these.” Now, we are not trying to accuse Pacheco of anything because we know he has nothing to do with the errors and their printing.

But he should be careful with his words because on the matter of educating children, people can be very sensitive. They spend good money to buy very expensive books and expect these books to serve their purpose, which is to teach their children the right knowledge.