Printer’s Devil in school textbooks

Now, free textbooks do not automatically translate into quality education. Giving children an opportunity to learn is one thing, but feeding them wrong information is quite another. Recently, there has been a spate of newspaper reports about textbooks issued by various state boards that are filled with, not only erroneous, but also outrageously absurd information.

For example, according to textbooks of Class VII and VIII in Gujarat, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 October 1948, Japan nuked the United States in 1948 and a new country ‘Islamic Islamabad’ was formed after Partition with its capital at ‘Khyber Ghat’ in the Hindu Kush. This information were put together by a panel of experts of the Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training and the Gujarat State Board for School Textbooks. Thankfully, the state has now appointed another set of experts to review and revise these textbooks.

Likewise, in 2012, a Punjab School Education Board textbook defined heavy industries as: “Industries in which very heavy type of raw materials are used”.

Now, the SSC history textbook for Class X, issued by the Maharashtra State Board, has come under scanner. According to a history teacher in Vashi, while major spelling errors from the last year’s edition has been corrected, there are still many grammatical and factual errors. Last year, teachers had pointed out glaring errors, where Suez Canal was referred to as the ‘Sewage Canal’. While some errors have been corrected, history teachers maintain that many still remain.

Meanwhile, Balbharati, the Maharashtra Bureau of Textbook Production, has received flak from geography teachers for errors in the environmental studies textbook for class III students of the Marathi medium. The Mumbai Geography Teachers Association (MGTA) has pointed out mistakes on maps published in the book. They said in one map, a water body is marked as land.

Experts and the teaching community is now questioning whether these errors are just lapse in judgment or its shows a general disregard for quality education material produced under government initiative.