Not getting it

After six years at the helm of the Department of Education, outgoing education secretary Armin Luistro still doesn't get it. He remains hopelessly out of touch with the problems that have plagued his department for so long. Listening to him talk, one wonders how on earth he was ever considered for a position that entailed a willingness to see a problem for what it really is.

Consider his answer to a very simple question posed by Karen Davila when she interviewed him in her morning program on ANC. Davila asked Luistro about what appears to be a continuing problem with errors in school textbooks. You know how Luistro answered Davila? Luistro said the DepEd has a system for correcting errors in textbooks immediately.

Wow. Luistro really doesn't get it. That is not the point of the question. Nobody cares about correcting errors in textbooks or how quickly such errors can be corrected. The whole point is about why there are any errors at all. Textbooks are resource materials that are precisely meant to teach and educate our children. How can our children be properly taught and educated if the materials used to teach and educate them are full of errors.

The most damning thing about this whole flap about errors in textbooks is that it is never the Department of Education, the main government agency tasked to teach and educate our children, that makes the shameful discovery of errors. In virtually all cases, in all the years that errors in textbooks have been discovered, it is always the alert citizens in the private sector who make the discovery and cry foul.

What this tells us is that without the vigilance of our concerned citizens, all of these textbooks will be sent merrily on their way to public schools all over the country to be taught, errors and all, by unsuspecting teachers to young children who do not know any better. And to think that Luistro, against the wishes of many, insisted on foisting his K to 12 program on a gravely unprepared country just so he can brag about bringing our children to be at par with the rest of the world.

But how can our children be at par with the rest of the world when the textbooks they use are filled with factual errors the Department of Education itself failed to detect until alert citizens pointed them out. How can our children measure up to global standards of education when their very own chief educator completely misses the point that errors are the problem and not whether we have a system to make corrections and how swiftly such corrections are made.

When you are in the business of teaching and educating, you are not supposed to have any errors at all in your teaching materials. To have teaching materials riddled with errors defeats the purpose of teaching and educating. It is even worse when the errors pertain to facts that are supposed to be so commonplace. To have a book that says Aetas live in Mountain Province when everybody knows it is the Igorots that do is a big slap in the face of the DepEd.

And yet, confronted with such a silly and ridiculous error, the secretary of education still had the gall to refuse to man up, saying instead that the DepEd has a system for correcting errors immediately. I have never seen a ranking government official trifle with a problem so cavalierly than Luistro, which bring to mind how he similarly answered a question about the problem of classroom shortages.

In another television interview sometime ago, Luistro was asked about the shortage of classrooms. And you know how he answered that one, too? Luistro said there was really no classroom shortage in the country because, as far as he knows, there are actually many classrooms in the rural areas that do not have any students at all. The guy is really some character.

To recap, the problem of textbooks that are filled with errors is no problem at all to Luistro because the education department has a system to correct those errors immediately. And the problem of classroom shortages is similarly no problem at all because there are actually classrooms in the provinces that do not even have schoolchildren in them.

And this brings us to the final point - the perceived educational disparity between Filipino students and those with the rest of the world. And still Luistro doesn't get it. If the global curriculum consists of 12 years, to Luistro it's a simple matter of making ours 12 as well. Never mind if books have errors and taught by unqualified teachers, in classrooms filled to the rafters, or classes held under mango trees. When you don't get it, what problem are we talking about?