Glaring errors in Punjab textbooks highlighted

Amir Riaz, journalist and educational policy analyst, gave his presentation today on ‘What We Are Teaching Our Children’, his detailed work on the flaws in textbooks of various subjects, including English, Urdu, Islamiyat, Ethics and Pakistan Studies.
Riaz focused on the education policies of Pakistan in 2007 and his report was a study based on the content analysis of 34 textbooks published by the Punjab Text Book Board, from classes one to 10. Riaz said the textbooks often contained errors in dictation, history, were rife with misquotations, cultural bias, and hatred against minorities and communities. Criticising successive regimes of power, Riaz said it was astonishing that the rulers of Punjab had not bothered reading the curriculum considering it contained material against their own political parties. He said textbooks praising military dictators were still being published in an era of democracy. He went on to present a slideshow of the errors in textbooks. The text of the Lahore Resolution, Allama Iqbal’s famous 1930 Allahbad address and Jinnah’s speeches were either misquoted or twisted in books published during Pervaiz Elahi’s regime and republished during Shahbaz Sharif’s rule.
Meanwhile, Riaz said the 2006 Text Book Policy allowed private publishers to enter in the game of text book preparation, yet the policy did not fix any responsibilities upon the private sector at all. There were biased lessons, even against PML-Nawaz in the text books being published by PTBB, under the PML-N government. Though the Punjab CM established a Task Force to review curricula under the chairmanship of Babar Ali, an industrialist, the task force is yet to be launched.
Meanwhile, senior journalist Shafqat Tanveer Mirza said primary education should be in the regional language, as it would assist students to learn easily and also preserve the Punjabi culture. He said more than 0.1 million students annually selected Punjabi as a subject in their Lahore Board Matriculation examinations, but there was not a single teacher available in the schools of Lahore district. PTB Humanities Director Shahida Javaid said if this analysis had been presented a few months earlier, the errors pointed out could have been removed for the textbooks of 2012. She said she would try to republish all books which contained material against minorities and had misquotations.