NCTB fixes six errors in primary textbooks

Five months after some school textbooks were found to be riddled with errors, the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) has sent a correction note to upazila level education offices after fixing six errors in five primary textbooks.

"A Shudhdhipatra (correction note) has been sent to all upazila primary education offices recently. The officers will hand over the note to each school," Ratan Siddique, member of NCTB, told The Daily Star yesterday.

The move came more than five months after a widespread criticism from various quarters over the blunders in textbooks and dropping of some contents.

However, the NCTB official said they did not find any mistake in the secondary level textbooks.

The corrections include fixing up the blunders in the famous rhyme “Adarsha Chhele” written by Kusumkumari Das in the “Bangla” textbook of class-III and name of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's mother in the "Introduction to Bangladesh and World" textbook of the same class.

In the textbook, the rhyme has lost its original order and thereby began inaccurately while there was a mistake in the name of Bangabandhu's mother.

Another goof-up that took place on the back cover of "Hindu Shikkha" for class-III students of the English version would also be corrected. The back cover reads, "Do not 'heart' anybody".

The remaining three corrections deal with spelling mistakes, said an NCTB official. He also said the pictures of a goat climbing a tree to eat mango and a girl wearing a scarf will be modified in the next editions.

The government has been facing widespread criticism from various quarters over a sizeable number of errors and anomalies, including spelling mistakes, wrong arrangement of paragraphs and omission of articles since it distributed some 36.21 crore copies of textbooks to 4.26 crore students from primary to secondary levels on January 1.

The issue also triggered a firestorm of protests on social media. Eminent citizens and different organisations too strongly condemned the anomalies.

Many alleged that the government brought the changes following the demand of Islamist group Hefajat-e-Islam to exclude some novels and poems written by “Hindus and atheists”.

Following the criticism, both NCTB and the education ministry formed committees to identify those responsible for the errors.

So far, the ministry took measures against nine NCTB officials by either suspending or transferring them.

However, it did not take any steps regarding the changes made to the contents of the textbook.