Mozambique: Government resorts to old 6th grade textbook

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Mozambique: Government resorts to old 6th grade textbook

4:12 CAT | 08 Jun 2022

Photo: O País

The Mozambican government has decided to resort to an old 6th grade Social Science textbook to be used by students in the National Education System (SNE), following the scandal of “unacceptable mistakes” detected in the new textbook published by the Portuguese company Porto Editora.

The decision was announced on Tuesday after the weekly meeting in Maputo of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet).

“We are going to use the student activity booklet of this year”, said the government spokesperson, Deputy Justice Minister Filimão Suaze. “We are also going to use the discontinued 6th grade textbook as reference material because it contains a good percentage of the content from the book that was rejected, due to unacceptable mistakes”.

“These instruments will ensure the smooth continuation of the process. We can’t delay or paralyze the teaching process”, he stressed.

It is far from clear how this ad-hoc solution will work. There will certainly not be enough copies of the discontinued textbook available to provide one for each of the hundreds of thousands of sixth grade pupils in the country.

According to Suaze, working groups to correct the mistakes discovered in the primary school textbooks have been created for each subject, including specialists from the Eduardo Mondlane University and the Pedagogical University, the two largest higher education institutions in Mozambique.

“The groups are already evaluating all 6th grade textbooks, making comparison of the contents of the discontinued and current Social Science student textbooks. The groups are checking the alignment of all teaching materials, namely curricular and teaching programs, including student textbooks, and teacher’s manuals”, he stated.

Recently a Commission of Inquiry was created to investigate how the textbooks came to be written so badly. They contain errors in basic maths, howling mistakes in geography, and ungrammatical Portuguese. Perhaps most serious of all, one of the books praises colonialism for supposedly ending ethnic wars in Africa.

The author of the 6th grade Social Science book, Firoza Bica, has said nothing about the scandal. The General Director of the National Institute for the Development of Education (INDE), Ismael Nheze, was suspended a week ago, and the National Commission to Assess School Textbooks has been dissolved.

Source: AIM