For both students and teachers, textbooks are core part of the school learning process and serve as curriculum guide. Throughout our whole lives as students, we rely on textbooks back when all the information we need isn’t just one click away online. Instructional materials like textbooks not only provide information that students need to learn to pass a certain subject but can also mold children’s beliefs and knowledge that they would probably carry for the rest of their lives.
This is why accuracy is important in every printed word in these textbooks. One typographical error or misrepresentation could affect not just the student’s learning process but also the teacher’s way of teaching.
In a now viral Facebook post, several books for the K to 12 curriculum are criticized for bearing wrong and misleading information for readers. Anthony Comedia shared several photos of books ranging from the 1st to 7th grade of different subjects.
One of the photos showed how a textbook misspelled terraces and even turned Banaue into Banana. When did we ever have a “Banana Rice Tereces”?
If this isn’t making you shake your head enough, another photo shows an excerpt of a textbook where Hagdan-Hagdang Palayan (Banaue Rice Terraces) is said to be located at “Ilocos Region”. The rice terraces, commonly referred to as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” is actually located at Ifugao and is part of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR).
Other photo shows a discriminative illustration and description of our ethnic groups where fellow Filipinos from Cordillera are depicted as “maliit at maiitim” (short and dark-skinned).
In the comments, Comedia shared that the author of book, Alma Dayag, reached out to him after his post went viral online. According to Dayag, the illustration was from an earlier edition and the book was already revised a year ago and was republished with appropriate changes. She apologized for the previous illustration in the book and clarified that the goal was only to help Grade 1 students to describe the physical traits of a person.
The said books may have been revised already, but what’s worrying is how these books seem to have skipped the proofreading process. Comedia says that he hopes that this would get to the Department of Education and would do immediate action to help correct and facilitate these instructional materials.
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