‘Culturally-insensitive’ textbook to be withdrawn, reviewed & reprinted – MoE

Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain has announced that the Grade Three textbook titled “Guyanese in the World” will be immediately withdrawn, reviewed and reprinted.

The senior education official made the announcement via a social media post after citizens took to the online platform to express concerns about the ‘culturally-insensitive’ contents in the book, which is used by primary school learners for Social Studies.

The book contains a fictional story which depicts the Toshao of Chinese Landing in a negative light.

The current village Toshao Nikita Miller took to Facebook to express her concern with the book, stating “to see this negative information printed in a text book to be taught in schools about Toshao and village of CL [Chinese Landing] is quite disturbing, leaving us to wonder what is the motive of such inaccurate and defamatory information about our village.”

Hussain has since apologised for the oversight. “I want to say that the Ministry of Education deeply regrets the offence or the distress that has been caused to parents, to students, to the wider community and especially to the residents of Chinese Landing,” he noted.

He admitted that a better quality assurance mechanism is needed.

“The Ministry of Education has always prided itself in ensuring that we provide high-quality, inclusive, culturally-sensitive educational material. This is clearly a failure on our quality assurance mechanism. I want to assure members of the public that this error will be fixed, our quality assurance mechanism will be looked at in an effort to ensure this does not happen again,” the CEO said.

In this regard, he announced that the book will be immediately withdrawn, reviewed and then reprinted for distribution.