Missing Conrad, frustrating Go
IMISS the trenchant writing of my friend Conrad de Quiros. Most of all, I rue the absence from the scene of a hardhitting pundit.
De Quiros is on leave from his newspaper. He hasn’t written for a while now. He’s a polemicist who crossed swords with the powerful. A challenger to conventional wisdom in a country where power is often abused and privilege flaunted.
Filipinos treat the powerful with the sort of perverse reverence reserved for autocrats. We look with envy when the rich and powerful display their wealth and flex their muscle. No matter that they’re gangsters, smugglers, crooks, hoodlums, exploiters, and opportunists.
The true pundits in our midst regularly excoriated the powerful and privileged who abused their power and who threw their weight around, basking in their riches of doubtful origin and swaggering as if their privileged days will never end.
Punditry is serous business. It has to be responsible, it has to be fair. It’s not enough that someone could string together sentences and pass it off as opinion. It’s not enough that someone has a point of view and pass it off as responsible and fair criticism. Fairness is the key to credible criticism.
Criticism or column-writing is not flattering or brown-nosing the powerful. That would be public relations or pandering. Rich individuals and corporations have squads of PR people to do that for them. Government has propaganda people to do that for it.
The true purpose of columnwriting or criticism is to contribute a point of view that debunks the zeitgeist or challenges the status quo. Column-writing or criticism is to offer an alternative to mythology that is peddled by those in power, in government or out.
Today there is very little credible commentary that challenges what passes for wisdom because it emanates from the loudspeakers of the ones in charge. What is out there is generally conformity, or worse, irrelevant writing that has nothing to do at all with why prices or taxes are high or why too many people are poor, or why we allow abuse by government and the powerful.
True punditry is taking on what’s being peddled as truth when it’s fake news or propaganda. True punditry is taking a stand on what’s ailing the country and challenging the panacea being offered by the government. True punditry is being relevant, fair, credible and, if it can be helped, elegantly written.
Actually there are still a few excellent pundits out there. But I’m not going to risk listing some and missing others. Let’s just say this is a tribute to them, as personified by De Quiros.
*** My good friend Antonio Calipjo Go is frustrated. He’s the academic supervisor of the Marian College in Quezon City. People also know him for being a crusader against bad public school textbooks.
Go has come across a maddeningly high number of textbooks that contain numerous errors. Practically every book approved by the Department of Education (DepEd) has inexcusable errors of fact, grammar, and construction.
Go’s latest source of frustration is “Let’s get better in English,” a 363-page textbook for Grade Three that contains 430 errors. Is that the best we can do? Is it the best we can offer our schoolchildren?
What’s more frustrating about this is that DepEd allows the errors to go uncorrected. With the department’s huge budget, one would think that they should have enough staff and specialists to go over proposed textbooks and get rid of the errors.
What a crying irony it is that instead of educating our children, we’re actually miseducating them. Instead of immersing our children in knowledge, we’re actually turning them into undereducated adults. No wonder that even though the Philippines has a high rate of graduates, our professionals have a hard time finding suitable and desirable jobs, here and abroad.
Meanwhile, Go’s Sisyphean task of rolling back the heavy rock of ignorance due to erroneous textbooks continues.
*** Tantum Ergo. The PR guru, my multi-awarded friend Charlie Agatep, has a handsome new book, “Winning the Anvils/A Guide for Professionals in the Trade and Students Entering it.” Grab it while you can!