Can we deny these facts? We have lots of government hospitals but the poorest form of treatment facility is available there. We have government primary and secondary schools but guardians hardly send their children there.
They rather send them to higher fee paying schools. We have government post offices but people don't go there. They use bkash, courier and other means to get their work done smartly and quickly.
We have government banks where you need to spend one hour even if you want to withdraw one hundred taka but private banks take just two to three minutes to do the same job. People had to wait ten to twelve years even after submitting the hush money to get a telephone connection when it was under government control.
As soon as it was released from that control, now eighty percent people use phone facing the least amount of trouble. It gives us clear message that when something is fully controlled by government, problem and sluggishness must be there. Government wants to control education, necessarily it must see doldrums. Government's duty is to make ways wider for the people and private sector which can run faster and freely.
Only then the country will go forward. Government wants to distribute all the books for all kinds of children though we don't have that capacity to deal with the whole affair smartly and ensuring quality.
So, mistakes must happen. Mistakes happen every year. We identify those mistakes and put our comments but who bothers about them? Teachers and guardians don't bother about those mistakes as students hardly use government textbooks. Even teachers don't use them.
Textbooks of neither in Bengali or English version are found on the NCTB website. Not only that, other materials like teachers' guide are also not found there.
There are many learning materials developed by TQI-II, SEQAEP, SESIP and other government projects but are not on the website as eBooks yet. How the people will read the NCTB textbooks who are not students? No answer we have got yet.
It means only students will read books. I wrote the matter many a time focusing the point 'where shall we, the people working for education, get the textbook? Who listens, who bothers?
I also wrote that it's really a gigantic task to prepare free textbooks for all kinds of students of primary and secondary levels and we cannot give concentration at all on quality. Now quality textbook is a matter of faraway thing. The books are full of various kinds of mistakes.
The textbooks are edited by a panel of editors but preparing the curricula and checking and correcting errors are a job done by several other education ministry officials.
This time it was no different but the panel of editors says they were not aware of the corrections made in the books - which even wronged the right words apparently to add communal flavor to them. How that was possible is a big question.
The bigger question is whether the 'corrections' were made as a deliberate move to arouse communal anger by hurting religious sentiments in this overwhelmingly Muslim -- but constitutionally secular -- country. Published by the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB), the books mention that the contents were fine-tuned and modified by five persons who were not on the editors 'panel.
NCTB Member (primary curriculum) Dr Mohammad Abdul Mannan said the textbook editors and writers are not usually informed when small corrections are made in those. "But whenever we make major changes, we inform them. "The NCTB seeks opinion from teachers and students through a try-out at the school level and then holds workshops with the experts on this.
The final decision is made at the meeting of the National Curriculum Co-ordination Committee. Now question is, despite so many checks and balances put in place, how the ridiculous and dangerous mistakes could happen in the name of correcting or upgrading the primary text books.
In view of streams of criticism on the social media and other forums over some embarrassing blunders in school textbooks the Education Ministry has already made NCTB Chief Editor Pritish Kumar Sarkar and its Senior Expert Lana Humayra Khan officers on special duty (OSD).
Two committees have also been formed to find out the mistakes in the books and also those responsible behind those. We don't know whether these steps will ensure that our students will get error free textbooks in future.
The education minister told the media briefing that it would not be wise to mar the joy of the child learners by harping on the errors in their new textbooks. No sensible quarters will dispute this view. But the children in their budding phase of learning careers ought to have been kept free of the ethical rot of the elders.
No matter how severe the actions against the perpetrators and seemingly effective the remedies are, the damages done to the students are eventually set to emerge as serious. For how many schools will bother to comply with the government-directed manual corrections in the books is anybody's guess.
Once again, I request the government to think of producing quality books, not to give us how many millions of books have been distributed free of cost.
We are heading towards achieving the middle income country status but cheap and full of error education materials are being distributed to all kinds of students irrespective of their financial abilities. These actually don't go together. To receive quality education most of our parents are ready to pay more. They don't send their children to government primary schools, rather to higher fee paying schools.
We should try to bring about changes here, not to employ all the manpower of NCTB to publish and distribute books. Despite all the efforts of the government, children of the remotest parts of the country don't get the textbooks on time. Books reach them much late every year.
It is not a story of far off days when a student scored first division in the SSC examination, nobody raised any question about his/her quality. But now we see millions of students obtain GPA-5 but people don't have that level of confidence in them and so, the sound is being raised from all the corners to develop the quality.
To ensure quality, the teaching-learning situation calls for a greater change through observation, feedback and research. The system of assessment must be made above the question of anything.
How we can make our assessment system reasonable in the face of all obstacles and present realities, must be given topmost priority without giving free textbook to all. Free textbooks can be given only to the disabled people to encourage them to come to education and the vulnerable section of population.
The rest of the money of free textbook distribution project can be spent on developing quality teaching and reasonable assessment system.
The writer works in BRAC Education Program and taught in cadet colleges and Rajuk College
Latest News