THATTA: The new primary textbooks introduced by the Sindh Textbook Board, Jamshoro, for the academic year 2015 are full of typographical errors, have many blank pages and are bound poorly, causing students great difficulty in learning their lessons.

Students and their parents complained to Dawn on Thursday that the textbooks for class three to five including Islamiyat, Sindhi, English and Social Studies (Samaji Ibhyas) were previously provided in separate bindings while the syllabus of 2015 had been bound in one book form, which was full of typo errors and blank pages.

The book was very poorly bound with misleading page numbers and many lessons missing, which caused great agony and mental stress to children, they said.

Hazoor Bux Khaskheli, former district officer of the Secondary Education Management Information System and Noor Mohammad Serai, taluka education officer of Thatta, agreed the textbooks should be in separate bindings so that small children could carry them conveniently and not get exhausted while trying to access the chapters under study.

Students’ parents Farooq Jan Khaskheli, Shabir Ahmed Khushik, Ashgar Ali, Sattar Behrani, Mehboob Ali, Irfan Ali Samoo and an activist of Environment Livelihood Integrated Development Organisation, Rehmatullah Chutto, said the budding students were feeling unnecessary stress in their routine schooling because of the errors in textbooks and because it had been rendered highly cumbersome for them to access different books in one heavy and unwieldy book.

They demanded the department immediately remove errors and provide separate books of syllabus to help students learn without stress.

As per annual school census 2013-14, a total of 152,000 boys and girls study in 4,232 primary schools in the coastal districts Sujawal and Thatta.

Published in Dawn May 2nd, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play