Three months on, no action on textbook error

It has been three months since the academic year began and since it was discovered that there was a gaffe in the textbooks for class 5 and class 8, of the State syllabus.

While elucidating on the rights of the children, a line inadvertently mentioned one of the rights of children as the ‘right against morality.’ An embarrassed Textbook Society, which is responsible for the content and printing said that it would rectify the mistake during the next academic year.

The Department of Primary and Secondary Education also issued a circular to the block education officers to address the problem immediately by
instructing the schools to change the erroneous line to ‘right to morality’ and submit a report within a week.

Three months later, a survey conducted by Child Rights Trust organisation in more than 50 schools in Bangalore Urban and Rural, Chikkaballapur and Doddaballapur has revealed that none of the schools has taken any action.

According to the survey, a majority of the teachers showed little concern about teaching children anything about the rights. In some case, they were completely unaware about any rights of children and the portion of the textbooks dealing with the rights of children had not been looked at.

A member of the Child Rights Trust said that their attempts to contact the officials about implementing these rules did not yield much result. “In only one school, they said that something was mentioned in a meeting with the block education officer, but nothing was done about it.

Many teachers in schools told us that they knew about child rights, but that they would be unable to find out if there are any errors in the list of child rights given,” the member said.

Ironically, the Textbook Society had claimed that the list of rights had come from the Karnataka State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, a claim the Commission fully denied, stating they were never asked to furnish
a list.