We all know very well how with every change of every regime the textbooks also go through changes; in most of the cases such changes are made very hastily, without giving much thought. In our country the government has exclusive control over the preparation and publication of all the textbooks at primary level and most of the books at secondary level. At the higher secondary level it is gradually assuming the supervisory role and the task of writing and publishing books has been rendered to the private sector. The same is true for madrassah level textbooks also. National Curriculum and Textbook Board and Madrassah Education Board enjoys the authority over textbook publishing. By the sheer number of copies they print annually and the number of students they reach they can easily be termed as the largest publishing house in South Asia, if not in the world.

One should also admit that lot of planning and brain-storming goes into the preparation of textbooks and this has been reflected in the improvement that has been made in English, Bengali and Science books. In case of English textbooks the shift has been made over the years in the method of learning and instead of teaching language and literature the emphasis now is more on communicative and functional English. The process of preparing a textbook can be understood following its trial which took about five years of continuous work. Following the recommendations of NCTB the draft textbooks were prepared and evaluated by a team of national and expatriate experts. Each part of the book was tried in schools, both urban and rural, government and private. Then revision was made with participation of teachers and specialists. The revised and modified textbooks were finally introduced nationally alongwith a teacher's guide and detail lesson plan. As development of curriculum and textbook is a continuous process periodic evaluation and revision remains very much integrated with textbook publication.

Even the textbooks produced following such arduous methodology cannot be completely free of mistakes, omissions, bias and prejudice. If one looks at the books from a gender perspective, lot of distortion and bias will prop up. There are other kinds of bias also. In the English books so many names have been used to depict different characters in their communication with each other. Sabina, Salam, Belal, Hasan, Arif and many more people of the community has been named, but among all these Bangladeshi names not one Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or for that matter any tribal name is to be found. Interestingly, in English for To-day for Class VI, 'other people' have been introduced from Nepal, USA, UK, Malaysia, India and Germany. Can one guess the name of two persons from India? They are Anwarul Haque (sic), who is a writer and Runa Haque (no relation), who is a journalist. Among the eight of such 'other people' besides Runa there are two women, one is Janet Jones from UK with a very predictable profession of nursing and the other lady Susan from US strangely is a housewife.

In the lessons for communicative English there is a passage titled "Our Country". Previously it depicted only the land and people, without mentioning anything about its emergence and liberation struggle. The committee formed during Awami League's tenure, headed by historian Prof. Salahuddin Ahmed has added the following lines at the beginning : "Bangladesh declared independence on 26 March 1971. It became free from Pakistan on 16 December 1971, after a great liberation war. It is a democratic country with many kinds of people. They follow different religions and customs. All these people are free and enjoy equal rights."

Although the subsequent BNP government changed almost all the revisions made by previous regime it kept this passage intact, one of the rare statement with bonafide claim of national consensus. But the other changes made hastily showed that tinkering with the textbook is the game politicians love to play and they play it very badly. This can give them a sense of political correctness but end up with messing the whole concept of designing and writing textbooks. A glaring example is the effort made to politically correct the Bengali textbook of class VII, Shahitya Kanika which has 16 prose pieces on different subjects following the criterion set in the curriculum. With the regime change one biographical piece was replaced with brief biographies of four national leaders, AK Fazlul Huq, Maulana Bhasani, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman. Whereas each prose piece is of 5 to 6 pages long this newly inserted one altogether has 21 pages to its credit. Such intrusion upsets the balance of the textbook and does not serve any useful purpose. If one looks at the text critically even the article on Ziaur Rahman is full of spelling mistakes and wrongly constructed sentences. Such tinkering shows party in power could not careless about the quality of textbooks and is more happy with the 'politically correct' one.

Textbooks need regular evaluation and upgrading. A good textbook is not only a well-written one but also a balanced one which takes into consideration the present reality with aim to project into the future. A textbook has to be properly graded, be effective in both urban and rural areas, in different cultural and social milieu and providing tool to the teacher for the proper upbringing of our future generation. It is imperative that not only textbooks, the curriculum and educational objectives should also be evaluated from time to time.

Here attention can be drawn to one aspect of our declared educational aim. NCTB has formulated 19-point objectives that a student has to acquire at terminal stage of his or her primary education. This is apart from the skills that the student will acquire. It has been stated that the main aim of primary education is to ensure overall development of child's physical, mental, social, spiritual, moral and human aspects. Then the 19 points were laid out as the common aims to be fulfilled. The first two aims are as follows :

1. To imbue in the mind of the student unflinching faith on Almighty Allah so that this can be the source of all his thought and work.
2. To awaken the spiritual, social and moral values in the student on the basis of full faith and belief in Almighty Allah.

These two aims, the way they have been formulated, excludes the followers of other religions completely and do a disservice to the concept of universal primary education irrespective of cast, creed and race. Such formulation can be made for theological education but not in a society aspiring to be liberal and moderate and providing universal education. In this 19-point objectives no mention has been made to teach the child to be tolerant and respectful to other culture, religion or language. Arrogance of the majority not only brings disaster for the minority but also proves harmful for the proper development of the majority and ultimately harms the entire nation. In today's world the concept of tolerance and respect for otherness is of fundamental importance and this has been brutally tampered by our policymakers in education year after year, regime after regime. In this basic document of primary education the importance of internationalism has been emphasised in a wrong way and on point 18 it has been written that, "the concept of universal brotherhood and internationalism should be awakened on the basis of the belief that all humanity is the creation of Almighty Allah."

There are many distortions in the textbooks derived from such brutalisation of majority people's religious belief. A child can be imbued with moral values only when his religious values are set in harmony with human values. Our textbooks are not only on the wrong side of history, they are also on the wrong side of moral education. The issue needs much more attention and care from those concerned with it.

Mofidul Hoque is a publisher