Students, teachers pay the price as textbook row rages

Shyam Sundar Vattam | NT
Bengaluru

With the controversy over the glitches in textbooks from first to 10th standards still raging, students are facing problems of learning due to delay in receipt of the new textbooks.

Though six weeks have passed after the reopening of schools, the teachers are confused about what to teach and what not to. The state government has been mum on this issue, after disbanding the Textbooks Revision Committee headed by Rohith Chakravathy.

Every day one or the other individuals or organisations come out with various factual errors in textbooks and there are repeated calls to withdraw the text books. But the government seems to have completed the printing of textbooks for all the classes and kept them ready for distribution.

Had the opposition Congress Party, Janata Dal (Secular), seers of various mutts not raised objection, all government, aided and unaided schools would have been supplied with the textbooks. This morning, a fresh factual error was found in a textbook, much to the dismay of the government about the works of the whole committee which was supposed to remove all the glitches by reading and correcting them thoroughly.

Instead of accepting the mistakes gracefully, the incumbent government had gone back to pinpoint the errors committed by the previous textbooks revision committees. The department was entrusted with the task of finding out all the blunders done by the previous committees, and it was put out on social media.
In the fight between the ruling and the opposition parties, the worst sufferers are teachers and students. While the students have not laid their hands on the new textbooks, the teachers are not sure what to teach.

The schools had begun offline classes after a gap of almost two years due to Covid. But the teachers don’t have easy answers to parents’ queries regarding the new textbooks.

Recently, the students of a government school confronted Chikmagalur MLA C.T. Ravi about when they would get the new textbooks, to which the MLA replied ‘shortly’. Hardly three days are left for the July month and still there was no sign of the distribution of textbooks to the kids. Usually, by this time teachers complete 20-25 per cent of the syllabus and even hold a monthly test.

A teacher of a government school told News Trail that the government should have distributed the draft copies of textbooks to a group of expert teachers to pick up the mistakes and make it error-free before the printing. Now the printing of books is over and the whole lot cannot be discarded because of errors. By not doing so, the department was putting pressure on teachers to teach lessons but must be ready to make changes after the government finalises it.

The students in some schools were made only to listen due to the non-supply of textbooks. “We don’t know when the government will clear the air,” the teacher said.