SHOCKING: This is what students are being taught in Gujarat schools!

New Delhi/Ahmedabad: If bad English was not enough, the textbooks in some schools in Gujarat are teaching students that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30th October, 1948. Additionally, during the Second World War, Japan dropped nuclear bombs on the United States of America and also that after the partition, a new state was formed by the name of Islamic Islamabad. Oh, and all South Indians are ‘madrasis’! The only reprieve is that these textbooks are the same ones which were dashed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after a chapter on his life was proposed. We wonder what all it could have incorporated! The text books were put together by a panel of experts from the Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training (GCERT) and Gujarat State Board for School Textbooks (GSBST). The latter decide the curriculum to be taught at schools. The textbooks, which are mounted with errors, have been taught to the students since long. It is only now that the state government and authorities have finally looked into it. It is not just factual mistakes and language errors that have been noticed. The book cuts the image of a text out to stereotype certain sections of the Indian society. “Idli and dosa are famous in South India. Madrasi food is very famous.” It also says the majority of people in eastern India reside in houses made of wood and bamboo. Many eminent personalities, whilst speaking to the media have said that the Gujarat textbooks do not follow certain standard rules of curriculum. As reported in Mail Today, Social scientist Achyut Yagnik said that the National Curriculum Framework 2005 was never implemented in Gujarat textbooks. The media report also carried out a statement by former director of Indian Institute Of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, Samir Barua wherein he said that the authors of Gujarat school books are not competent. He also questioned the competency of the translators, since most of the text in the textbooks is translated from Guajarati. Yagnik also pointed out the lopsidedness of the textbooks. According to media reports, he said, “The first semester textbook of Class 7 that contains a chapter on medieval age but has just a paragraph on Mughal rule. The chapter largely devotes itself largely to how Mahmud Ghazni looted “India and Saurashtra (in Gujarat).” We wonder what the new HRD minister Smriti Irani has to say about this, considering the state is where the State’s head is from!