A recent piece circulating in international media portrays Bangladesh’s curriculum reforms as a sudden descent into political manipulation. It opens with Laiba, a high school student who is supposedly being “brainwashed” by new history books that have removed poems, speeches, and images of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Sheikh Hasina.
The implication is clear: Her education is being twisted by a partisan regime that departed from an otherwise neutral past. Reports from February 15 made similar claims. This is the wrong starting point.
Political interference in our textbooks did not begin this year.
It has been a feature of curriculum design for decades, shifting with whoever holds power. The difference now is that the narrative no longer flatters the previous ruling party, which is why some voices that were comfortable before are suddenly alarmed.
For years, students were taught a version of national history centred on one family. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s place in 1971 is undeniable, yet the presentation in schoolbooks turned him into a heroic constant rather than a historical subject.
His speeches appeared in full, his image was everywhere, and his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, was celebrated while still in office.
That is not neutral pedagogy. It is the cultivation of loyalty through the curriculum.
What many international commentaries skip is that this earlier framing often minimized other actors, including General Ziaur Rahman, who announced independence over the radio in March
1971. That omission was not a slip. It reflected a broader design that treats political legitimacy as something to be instructed rather than debated.
The politicization was never confined to history chapters. In 2017, under pressure from religious groups, textbook content on evolution, secularism, and gender was edited or removed, illustrations were altered to fit “religious sensibilities,” and references to gender diversity were reduced.
This was documented at the time by journalists and researchers and should have triggered the same level of concern now being expressed.
Recent changes have simply rearranged the lens. New materials elevate other figures and events, such as the 2024 student-led uprising, while scaling down the Mujib-centred narrative.
Even sympathetic reports acknowledge these shifts. The Daily Star reported that the uprising would enter the 2025 textbooks, and regional outlets note that images and texts linked to Hasina were removed or reduced. These choices are politically meaningful, just as the previous choices were.
What does this do to students’ minds?
The long-standing habit of building curricula around leaders produces predictable cognitive outcomes:
interpretations, students learn to memorize rather than interrogate sources or weigh conflicting accounts.
irredeemable villains. Young people then apply that binary thinking to the present-day politics, where dissent is seen as disloyalty rather than a democratic resource.
The glorification of Mujib
Students who grew up under the Hasina-era curriculum were not only taught facts. They were socialized into a civic ritual that fused patriotism with reverence for a single leader. The Centenary celebrations and symbolic programming in schools entrenched that pattern.
The pendulum has now swung, and the country is arguing over how to treat the same symbols. The interim government’s decisions around national days, including canceling or scaling back observances tied to Mujib, moved the controversy from classrooms to the calendar.
March 17 and August 15 were among the days affected, which inevitably reframed how schools and families marked those anniversaries. The result has been a noisy public struggle over commemoration. On one side are students and
citizens who learned to treat Mujib as an uncontested, almost sacred figure. On the other hand are peers who resent a curriculum they see as partisan and welcome the rollbacks. The dispute has spilled into the streets and timelines, with protests and counter-protests shaping the climate well before and after March 17 and August 15. Seen through an educational lens, none of this is surprising.
If you train one cohort to treat a leader as beyond debate, then abruptly re-script the same history for the next cohort, you are not teaching critical thinking. You are teaching alternating loyalties. Social media then amplifies the clash, because platforms reward certainty and spectacle more than nuance.
What honest criticism should look like
Critics are right to call out omissions in the new textbooks, including the failure to name Jamaat-e-Islami, when discussing the 1971 atrocities. That should be fixed. But it is misleading to imply that prior curricula offered a braver account.
Earlier materials also curated the Liberation War to buttress one party’s moral monopoly and left little room for plural readings or contested roles.
The point is not to excuse present flaws. It is to admit that the pattern is old. Scholars of Bangladesh’s politics have long described how governments imprint their narratives on education.
Ali Riaz’s work on political histories and democratic backsliding shows how institutional frameworks, including curriculum, are repeatedly repurposed to legitimize those in power.
A way forward
If we want students to think critically rather than memorize politics, several steps are overdue:
The standard should be consistent
To international readers and domestic commentators: Worry about politicized education, but apply that worry evenly. Defending the legacy of Sheikh Mujib cannot require the erasure of everyone else. Celebrating pluralism cannot require the erasure of Mujib. If outrage appears only when your preferred version is challenged, that is not a defense of truth.
It is a defense of branding. Our students deserve to learn the full story. That means Mujib and Zia. It means grassroots fighters and controversial alliances. It means the hard parts, named plainly. Above all, it means trusting young people with the tools to judge competing claims for themselves.
Education should not be a loyalty test. It should be a path to liberation. Until we all accept that, Regardless of who governs, our children will keep paying the price.
Umma Salma is a program coordinator -- SIP and Junior instructor of English at Asian University for Women, Chittagong.
