Mistakes in textbooks: Education minister to brief media Tuesday

Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid will brief the media on Tuesday about the mistakes in the newly-published textbooks. The briefing will be held in the ministry's conference room at 11am, according to a press release of the ministry. After the textbook festival day, repeated 'evidence' of NCTB's intentional changes to original texts, coupled with numerous spelling and printing mistakes, started surfacing on social media. In the grade 1 textbook, a minor girl is seen saying, "O tey Orna Chai", meaning "I want a chest scarf". The tendency to choose the word 'Orna' for 'O' has been termed gender discriminatory on social media. In the Bangla textbook for grade 3, a very popular poem of 12 lines by Kusumkumari Das – Adarsha Chele, or the Exemplary Boy – appears in the textbook full of changed words and spelling mistakes. In a line, NCTB has supplanted half of the sentence with imaginary words. In the Hindu Religion and Moral Education textbook printed for the third grade, NCTB printed "Do not heart anybody", instead of "Do not hurt anybody".