India And Pakistan To Rewrite Text Books... ************ Pak province rewrites text books to satisfy Islamic conservatives Peshawar, October 30 A Pakistani province is rewriting school books to make them more Islamic, inserting verses on jihad, removing pictures of unveiled women and changing material on recent history, officials said on Thursday. The public tussle over the changes mirrors a struggle for power at the heart of Pakistans young democracy. Secular, liberal parties are vying with conservative, religious parties for influence in the nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people. That struggle often plays out in the classroom. Professors or teachers accused of blasphemy have been attacked, jailed or killed. School books commissioned by provincial governments have been frequently rewritten. The latest changes in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa cover chemistry, physics, English, history and geography text books. Education official Bashir Hussain Shah told Reuters that the changes include reintroducing religious verses on jihad, a word that means holy struggle but is also often used by insurgents. That had been removed from the curriculum for 13 and 14 year olds, he said, but was being restored. Inayatullah Khan, the leader of religious political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, said the verses on jihad were not intended to promote violence but to inform students when jihad was lawful. It doesn’t allow Muslims to fight against those non-Muslims with whom you have diplomatic ties or an agreement, he said. Changes were also made to history books and science books, Khan said. They would reverse changes that had replaced content about Muslims with material about non-Muslims, including American Helen Keller, an author who was deaf and blind, and Hindu ruler Raja Dahir. — Reuters (tribuneindia/2014/20141031/world.htm#3) **** Irani lets Sangh ‘star historians’ do the talk on education rejig Aditi Tandon Tribune News Service New Delhi, October 30 The BJP government today opened its first formal dialogue on education with representatives of RSS organisations working in the field of education. Among invitees to the meeting chaired by HRD Minister Smriti Irani were senior functionaries of the Vidya Bharati, the school education network run by the RSS, and Sanskrit Bharati, another right wing outfit engaged in the promotion of Sanskrit. The most famous among attendees to the meeting held at Madhya Pradesh Bhavan here was Dina Nath Batra, convenor of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti and senior member of the Vidya Bharati who recently shot to fame for getting Penguin to pulp Wendy Donigers book on Hinduism. Batras views on geography and history created a furore, especially since a set of nine books he authored were declared as supplementary literature for government schools in Gujarat. Batra is known for his shocking academic assertions such as the Mahabharata was the first to understand stem cell research; infertility can be cured by caring for cows and Indias map should be redrawn as Akhand Bharat by including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Tibet, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. Batra spoke in the meeting about what he feels should be taught at schools. The RSS functionaries also conveyed to Smriti Irani their take on Indians history and spoke of their concerns and the way forward. A source told The Tribune that one of the concerns among attendees was historical anomalies in textbooks with respect to certain nationalist leaders. A hit here was to the alleged distortions in the projection of Hindutva ideologue Veer Savarkar. Another issue of concern to right wing education activists is the writing of Indian history and its projection in Indian school and college textbooks. ( tribuneindia/2014/20141031/main6.htm)
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:42:59 +0000
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