Several years ago my attention and interest were caught by a newspaper story that detailed the campaign of Antonio Calipjo-Go to rid Philippine textbooks of the multitude of errors that they had apparently been carrying for a long time. As the publisher and CEO of Mind, the only Philippine magazine devoted exclusively to education, I felt that I had no choice but to meet and evaluate Go, who was, and remains, the academic director of Novaliches-based Marian College. Accordingly, I drove one afternoon to Novaliches with Mind’s editor-in-chief to speak to the man whose family name sounded very much like Calypso Joe. We found Go in his office, surrounded by the dozens of books that he had discovered to be replete with errors. The place seemed more like the editorial room of a publishing house than the office of the academic director of a medium-sized suburban college.
Considering the vehemence with which he had been expressing his views to the media, my colleague and I expected Antonio Calipjo-Go to be a very forceful and highly voluble leader of a campaign to remove the errors that were all over the textbooks used by this country’s students. To our great surprise, we found an individual who was calm, deliberate and soft spoken. ‘Calypso Joe’ lost no time trying to impress upon my colleague and me the gravity of the textbook errors problem. “Our country is facing a very serious problem here,” I recall him saying. “It is more than just some errors in some textbooks; this is about our children’s education.”
Distributed around his ample-sized office, predictably, were dozens of books, all neatly arranged presumably according to whether they were for high school or for the lower grades. To which books did he give priority, I remember asking him. “No particular priority,” Go replied. “Errors are errors wherever they occur.”
Next I posed the quintessential question. Why was he doing what he was doing? Go’s answer: “Because this work has got to be done. I wish that other people were doing it, but they are not.”
Did he realize that in doing what he was doing he had stirred a hornet’s nest and had created many enemies, some of them powerful? Antonio Calipjo-Go said that, at the start he knew that he would be stepping on many powerful toes, but the job just had to be done and he felt that he had to do it.
How did he go about his correction work, my colleague and I asked. Because he was alone, he said, he had to be as methodical as possible, thereby getting the greatest mileage out of his time and resources.
The one quality that the Marian School official exuded throughout our discussion was a sense of dedication to the work upon which he had embarked. He had to press on with the correction work, he said, because he could not countenance the idea of Filipino students’ imbibing information that was erroneous.
I suggested to Go that the best place for him, considering the work that he was doing would be the government, where he would have abundant personnel and other resources at his disposal. Would he consider an appointment to a high position in the Department of Education? His reply was a resounding and firm No. He would be co-opted if he joined the government. He wanted to remain free to say and do whatever needed to be said and done.
I don’t think I would be going overboard if I suggested that Antonio Calipjo-Go deserves a high public award–why not a Magsaysay Award?–for his enormous contribution to the cause of providing students anywhere in Asia, not just the Philippines, with textbook information that is reliable and error-free.
As we left the Marian School compound, my colleague and I felt that we had spent a truly rewarding afternoon in Novaliches.
May the Lady after whom your school is named always be at your side as you go about your difficult but noble work, Antonio Calipjo-Go.
E-mail: rudyromero777@yahoo.com