The Publishers Association and Distributors of Textbooks of the Dominican Republic (ASEDILIRD) positively valued this Wednesday that the students of the primary and secondary levels will have updated textbooks, after eight years of waiting since the new Dominican curriculum was restructured, which will contribute to raise the quality of education “because books are essential sources of learning.”
“In ASEDILIRD we salute the work that the present authorities have done around books, since since 2013, the Dominican Educational System when the new curricular proposal was approved, and despite having 4%, the Dominican classrooms lacked books”, said Juan Colón, president of ASEDILIRD.
In a press release, he explained that books are a basic and fundamental input for the teaching-learning process and as of this year, secondary school students will be able to benefit from them, so they hope that they will have a positive impact on the quality of education “and when we are evaluated again in the PISA tests, well, we have taken a leap because we understand that the absence of the book has been very damaging to Dominican students. So we are very happy, very happy with this advent of textbooks in the classrooms of the Dominican Republic”.
The president of ASEDILIRD also highlighted that for the first time the Dominican publishing houses are taken into account, in such a way that of the 10 companies that participated in the bidding process carried out by the Ministry of Education for the allocation of textbooks, five of them are Dominican, which represents progress. He highlighted the opening of this process because the 10 participating companies received at least one lot, “in such a way that we are very happy with this opening with this space that has also been given to Dominican publishers.”
He explained that these new textbooks will benefit almost 3,000,000 students at the initial and basic level, while about 900,000 students will benefit from Secondary.
Colón recalled that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) recently presented a report with very negative results for Latin America, indicating that in the two years of the pandemic, the region was 10 years behind in terms of education, that is to say that a decade was lost “and although Latin America was spoken of in general terms, we have to understand the part that corresponds to us, especially because during those two years of the pandemic, textbooks were also absent.”
He explained that from 2013 to 2018 totally outdated books were being used, and just last year, the initial and basic levels started with their new books, about 10 million in total. And from now on, in the 2022-2023 school year, Dominican classrooms at the middle level will already have 5 million books.
