SRINAGAR: It is a huge dispute right now – whether the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education (JKBOSE) has adopted a Jaspal Bati style or the Santa Banta method. A consensus, however, is emerging that it resounds the 3 Idiots in which Aamir Khan used a single computer command (control R) to change the context in a rote-delivered speech from Chamatkar to Balatkar.
The context will help understand the crisis better.
The JKBOSE published the 2024 edition of the tenth standard book Disaster Management and Road Safety Education has used UT in three places and it has changed the context and the text of the lesson.
This was brought out by a parent whose kids were desperately seeking to understand the passage on pages 29 and 30, under the subheading Fainting and Losing Conscience. The correct heading should have been Fainting and Losing Consciousness. The passage reads:
“Unconsciousness or fainting is a UT of human body as a result of interference with the functioning of brain which could lead to airway obstruction, loss of breathing and malfunctioning of heart. This UT can lead to death of victim if no immediate first aid is provided. There are different causes of unconsciousness and the most common being is sudden shocking news, fall from height, epilepsy, carbon monoxide or drug poisoning and diseases like high blood pressure diabetes, low blood pressure, UT of shock etc.”
As my kid insisted, I went to Google and eventually to chatGPT, the parents said. “I had no answers,” he said. “Finally, I called a relative whose kid had passed the examination two years ago. Somehow, the boy located the book.”
It turned out that the earlier edition of the same book on the same page had the word “state” in it. In the new edition, they gave a computer command and replaced the ‘state’ with ‘UT’ hardly giving any importance to the word’s meaning and the state of its use. The erasure of the state was not territorial but from the dictionary itself.
It changed everything. “Fainting is a state of human body” became “fainting is a UT of human body”, “This state can lead to death of victim” became “This UT can lead to death of victim” and “state of shock” became “UT of shock”. The new word construction might be metaphoric fun of the contemporary facts but the reality is that these are texts based on which a new generation relies upon.
“It is shocking,” the parent said. “How can so-called academics be so crude that they cannot even proofread the text they want our kids to learn.”
This is not the first time that the BOSE books have crippling mistakes in their texts. Presumed to be one of the poorest academic institutions in Kashmir’s history, BOSE is a money-minting monitor that has reduced itself to a gatekeeper’s status.
Is this why BOSE wants all schools including the privately run education sector to use BOSE textbooks?
