Books for Public School Should Be Monitored by DepEd

Way back in the 80's and 90's, when Google, Yahoo, or other search engines are not that popular yet, books are everyone's best source of material for any research. 

I studied in a private school during elementary and half of my high school days where we need to buy text books as our reference for every subject, books can be bought at the school or outside with local book stores as long as you know the title of the book, the author, grade level and what it looks like. And we used to buy it with one of the popular book stores in the area, since it is cheaper than buying it directly from the school. Unless the book store ran out of stock and we have no choice but to purchase it directly at the school.

After spending 7 years in a private school, I need to transfer to a public school near by. And I don't even need to buy books. Yes, for public schools they will lend you the book for the whole school year.

I love books, I can spend reading the whole day depending on what type of book that got my interest (aside from the household chores that I need to of course). I even teach my children on how to take care of their books and remind them to put it back from where they got it.

A week before the class started we got the books that Bunso will be using for the school year, and yes, I was not surprised to see that some of the books are not looking good in some condition. 

So what's in public school books that I am concern about? A lot! Based on the pictures below, who's not going to get bothered?

See the edges of the two books on top? Need to put adhesive tapes to cover it up and protect it from tearing apart.

Some of the pages already looks like this. Either at the first few pages or those at the back. For the other books, well, both.

This is the cover of the book. And the edges are staring to peel off. 

This is one of the books that my Bunso got, the cover got teared up by the previous borrower, or the borrower before us. Need to cover it up with board paper to hide it.

If you would notice the edge of this page, I covered it up with adhesive. Hoping it would protect the cover and would last long enough for like, how many borrowers in the future.

And I have not included the books that Kuya got, It breaks my heart seeing that the cover was already peeled off from the book itself. And I need to repair it too before putting a new plastic cover.

Public school books had an issue before with having wrong grammars in English text books, and this book lending thing is running for years. And every year, every parent and every student needs to check if the book that they receive is in good condition.

I know that it is the borrower's responsibility to take care of the books, but isn't it also the responsibility of DepEd to monitor if the books are still conducive to learning? Can you just imagine a book with some missing pages when it was given to you and you can not even had a swap for a better book because that's the only one left. 

What also happens is that some books were returned damaged, slight or not, the parent or student will be shouldering the payment for the damages. I would understand if they lost the book, and the said payment will be like a penalty, but for damaged books? Where does these payment goes when it was given? Is it used to produce new books? Does the damaged or lost books been audited and reported to DepEd?

How would a child be interested in reading a book if the book looks like, sorry for the word "trash"? Instead of having the children be more interested in reading books, they prefer to search information right now via the web.

Hoping that this book lending thing improves and public school students will have more better if not a good reading material in the future.