‘Sick’ learning modules of DepEd’s Briones and her stooges

If the incompetent bureaucrats heading the Department of Education (DepEd) are not dismissed from the service soon enough, all public school students in the Philippines are better off ignoring their lessons.

To put it bluntly, the DepEd is currently headed by inutile, inefficient and incompetent bureaucrats, beginning with its head, Secretary Leonor Briones.

The latest controversy in the DepEd involves the so-called “self-learning modules” or SLM, which the DepEd distributed to public schools nationwide last October as part of its “distance learning program” for school year 2020-2021.

Those SLM are supposed to complement the online style of education currently implemented in public schools. With the use of SLM, pupils need not be dependent on the Internet in places where cyber connectivity is a recurring problem.

The SLM are produced under the control and supervision of the DepEd and are paid for by public funds. Being a project of the DepEd, Secretary Briones should have seen to it that these SLM do not contain any substantial, grammatical or clerical errors. Anything short of that standard is gross inexcusable negligence.

Unfortunately, Briones and her underlings did not do their job.

The SLM of the DepEd are “sick” materials because they contain endless substantive, grammatical and clerical errors. One SLM said the word “rabbit” begins with the letter “L,” and a drawing of an owl in another SLM was identified as that of an ostrich.

Numerous complaints from parents and netizens attest to this.

In an online press conference, DepEd Undersecretary Diosdado San Antonio admitted that the publication of the “sick” SLM was haphazardly rushed to meet the school opening on 5 October 2020. He also said the DepEd is going to hire external personnel to review the “sick” SLM.

San Antonio attempted to downgrade this anomaly by announcing to the media that the DepEd welcomes the efforts of netizens to call out the errors in the “sick” SLM, and that DepEd Undersecretary Alain Del Pascua is “negotiating with potential partners” to help the DepEd improve the content of those “sick” modules.

The question San Antonio avoided is — Why didn’t the DepEd hire enough reviewers to proofread the “sick” SLM before the said modules were printed and distributed? That’s a basic procedure in any project involving published materials.

Moreover, if the DepEd can hire enough “reviewers” today, then DepEd should have hired those reviewers before the “sick” SLM were published and distributed to their unsuspecting users.

Pupils consider the contents of the SLM almost like gospel truth, not only because their young minds are impressionable, but mainly because the SLM are official publications of the DepEd, which is the government agency in charge of upgrading the standards of education in the country. For the pupils, if a publication comes from the DepEd, it ought to be true and correct.

When the SLM state something false or erroneous, that’s enough for the pupils to believe because they’ve read it in an official publication of the DepEd. Put yourself in the place of a child. Wouldn’t you get the same wrong impression, too?

Even the language employed in the SLM is important. Sentences with grammatical or spelling errors, if left uncorrected, will make pupils believe that such erroneous grammar or spelling is actually correct.

By any standard, the DepEd’s SLM are a collective disservice to the Filipino youth because they feed the wrong information to impressionable, unsuspecting children.

Incidentally, how does the DepEd plan to correct the errors in the SLM which have been distributed already?

Hiring reviewers will not solve the problem, and will only be a further waste of public funds. What will the DepEd do with whatever additional errors those reviewers will find? Putting them on a sheet of paper as a supplement for the “sick” SLM is useless. If that sheet of paper is misplaced, the SLM becomes a misleading publication, one that is detrimental to public interest.

At the end of the day, the “sick” SLM will have to be destroyed. Since that’s a lot of public funds wasted by Briones and her stooges, these bureaucrats should be sued in the Office of the Ombudsman.

Meanwhile, the acronym SLM should hereafter mean “‘sick’ learning module” courtesy of Secretary Briones.

“Since that’s a lot of public funds wasted by Briones and her stooges, these bureaucrats should be sued in the Office of the Ombudsman.

“Why didn’t the DepEd hire enough reviewers to proofread the ‘sick’ SLM before the said modules were printed and distributed?