The Ministry of Education plans to change the system of examination of school textbooks, improve the procedure for organizing the training of experts who select them and increase the level of responsibility of publishers.
This is stated in the message of the Ministry of Education and Science, which is related to cases of errors in textbooks that have been published in Ukraine in recent years.
“The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine fully shares the public’s concern about the presence of errors, inaccuracies and inappropriate content in school textbooks that have been published over the past few years,” the Ministry of Education said.
In addition, the department notes that the main factors that led to the critical situation are that the authors and publishers do not have time to physically prepare and edit their textbooks.
Textbooks are also introduced into school practice without proper testing, which has been used for some time to study the quality of textbooks.
“According to the current Procedure of the competition, the authors submit part of the textbook materials in the publishing layout, and part – in the manuscript, which does not allow to fully evaluate the future edition, so at the stage of evaluation of textbooks by experts of the Competition selection – reported in the Ministry of Education and Science.
In view of this, the agency has begun to review the current system of examination of school textbooks, which provides for the improvement of the regulatory framework for the competition of textbooks among authors.
“The Ministry’s efforts will also be aimed at improving the organization of training of experts who select textbooks. They should be properly paid for their work and be responsible for the content, “the agency said.
At the same time, the Ministry of Education notes that there are facts of unscrupulous fulfillment of obligations by some publishers, who save on professional editors and, taking advantage of the situation of urgency, admit to the publication of poorly read textbooks. Although under the agreement concluded with the publishers, they and the authors are responsible for the quality of textbooks.
“Therefore, the Ministry of Education and Science will propose to increase the level of responsibility of publishers for the quality preparation of textbooks at the expense of the state budget,” the education department stressed.
The Ministry of Education and Science has already instructed the relevant scientific institutions to work out changes in the procedure and content of expert evaluation of textbooks during their competitive selection.
