Editorial
Ban on guidebooks flouted
Schoolchildren at the mercy of mercenaries
Officials of National Curriculum and Textbook Board, NCTB, and CID police in a joint drive at some printing presses in old Dhaka on Monday have seized some 1.5 lakh banned guide and notebooks for primary and secondary students.
The detective branch and NCTB officials have no doubt done a commendable job. At the same time, the very size of the haul in a single drive also demonstrates that the underground network to print and market these illegal notebooks is very strong and widespread.
The seizure shows lack of monitoring by the education department over illegal printing and marketing of such banned books. Therefore, the Notebook Prohibition Act of 1980 remains only on paper.
Taking advantage of the government's delay in supplying supplementary English and Bangla grammar books for classes VI to IX introduced from this year, this unscrupulous network of printers and their accomplices have also flooded the market with unapproved supplementary textbooks.
Needless to say, these notebooks encourage students to set aside textbooks and resort to learning by rote. In this manner the process of their learning and acquiring knowledge is stunted. This denies the students the opportunity to apply their minds to their studies. Thus their creative and analytical faculties are not nurtured. But the very objective of banning notebooks through the said Act was to stop this self-destructive practice among schoolchildren.
Without any nexus with some corrupt elements in the education department and the teaching community, the underground network could not have operated with such freedom for so long and attain such a huge scale of operation.
The harmful nexus must be destroyed to protect our children from the devastating impact of these notes and guidebooks.
We hope the government will take the incident of unearthing the secret printing presses for printing textbooks for primary and secondary students with due seriousness and make every effort necessary to bust this illicit network.
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