Bengaluru: School textbooks would be revised completely for the academic year of 2024-25 and the process of constituting a committee to spearhead the exercise is ongoing, said Madhu Bangarappa, Minister for the Department of School Education and Literacy (DSEL), on Tuesday.

Referring to changes made in the textbooks this year, the Minister said that they had not revised the textbooks but had only “thrown out certain lessons that were toxic to students”. Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, he said to avoid confusion this year, the government only made a few changes to the textbooks and reinstated certain lessons prescribed by the previous Baraguru Ramachandrappa committee.

“The BJP government has tried to saffronise our education system and impose their ideology on schoolchildren, through textbooks. In the name of revision, a lot of objectionable content was included in the school textbooks. But, we neither want to impose any ideology nor want to politicise the issue,” he said.

SEP next year
“As per our poll promise, the Chief Minister has already announced a separate Karnataka State Education Policy (SEP) in his Budget. The Department of Higher Education and the Department of School Education and Literacy will work together for this policy. This policy will come into force from the next academic year,” he said.

No teachers
“The process of teacher transfer is going on in the State. However, most of the schools are facing shortage of teachers. In my constituency, there are no teachers in 52 schools. Therefore, we took the excess teachers transfer on priority and transferred those teachers to the zero teacher schools. The teacher transfer process will be completed by the end of July,” Mr. Bangarappa said.

Mr. Bangarappa said there was a huge demand for Karnataka Public Schools (KPS) across the State and said the government plans to open more such schools soon. “There are 276 KPS schools running efficiently across the State. These schools have good infrastructure and provide quality education. Both students and parents prefer these schools. So we will soon expand the project and open more of these schools,” he said.