The Poverty of Learning
I deplore the fact that among an unwieldy stream of textbooks coming out of the publishing houses every year, many escape critical peer reviews that should be the requirement of every manuscript prior to its entrance to the press. If ever they all did then I am very bewildered at the quality of the reviewers as a large number of Filipino-authored textbooks reaching public and private libraries and bookstores variably contain errors in some or in many parts. In institutions where professors and other members of the faculty are not critical to details (owing to their bookishness) these errors persist and create a well of misinformation for the students and the public, who are ought to carry the erroneous brand of knowledge to their children or their students and their graves.
I remember that years ago this problem has caught to the attention of the Department of Education, and since then I grew critical of the typical textbooks we were using at school. This is the reason why since my student days up to my teaching stint I never settled on a single reference. I always gathered a number of titles from local and foreign authors for content comparison, even using reliable sources in the World Wide Web (only that I discouraged my students from using Wikipedia content, I referred instead to the links embedded in the reference section of the open-source encyclopedia) in order to check the facts in each chapter. For instance in Philosophy class I used the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a very useful source, and prefer the established authorities, historians and researchers whose first hand works in the field provide more accurate and more authentic information than do those who, though adorned with their Master’s and their Ph. D.’s, are expertised only in the copy-scrambling of data, with paragraph reconstructions blurring out the original discussion of first-hand authors. These are the uninterested and lazy dudes who listed a bunch of references in the bibliography section of the book but in reality worked only in just a few of them… [continue reading]
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