Cordillera council wants power to go after publishers of erroneous textbooks

BAGUIO, Philippines – Erroneous depictions, factual errors, and misspellings in student textbooks about the land and people of the Cordillera Administrative Region reached the attention of the Regional Development Council here.

As a result, the Committee on Indigenous People’s Concerns moved during a recent meeting to not only condemn such mistakes and misrepresentations, but also asked Congress to rectify them.

In one instance, a textbook has a multiple choice question, tasking students with describing Cordilleran parents as either one of the three answers:

• short and dark
• fair and tall
• tall and yellow

One entry mislabeled the Banaue Rice Terraces as the “Banana Rice Tereces” while yet another mistake placed the location of these Ifugao Rice Terraces in the Ilocos Region.

In another case, an illustration of a boy in G-strings and Ifugao vest said that he was from Zambales. Igorots, in one other tidbit of misrepresentation, came from Italia.

Ethielyn Taqued, Department of Education – Cordillera education program supervisor, who was invited to a meeting on the matter, said these errors did not go through their department’s prescribed evaluation process. She said the textbooks in their K to 12 deparment were coordinated by private publishing companies.

According to Taqued, the books which passed their evaluation process would have visible DepEd marks on the front, back, and spine of the book.

The books containing the various errors did not have the requisite marks.

“More than just condemnation, we will also ask Congress through our resolution for them to possibly legislate pertinent laws giving powers to our institution to go after such perpetrators,” said CIPC Chair Roland Calde, who is also regional director of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples – Cordillera.

“If only these textbooks were validated by the community, erroneous information against the IPs of the Cordillera would have been corrected,” said Calde. – Rappler.com