The history textbooks for ethnic minority grammar schools do not fulfil the recent requirements of education reform and therefore a tender for developing new ones will be held, Education Minister Ján Mikolaj from the Slovak National Party said after a Government session on February 25.
The association of ethnic-Hungarian history teachers has submitted a petition to the Education Ministry in which they described the textbooks from 2006-2007 as satisfactory and said there is no reason to change them, the TASR newswire wrote.
Mikolaj said that the history textbooks, the new editions of which will be available as of September 2009, should be unified for the whole Slovakia – while for ethnic minority schools, they will be translated into their language.
“Our education system is unified. Can you imagine that in every school something different would be taught?” he remarked.
The history textbooks for ethic minority schools have, to date, always been slightly different from the Slovak ones. The events that are important for the Hungarian nationality were explained in more detail, for instance. The Hungarian authors are therefore worried that they will be discriminated against in the tender.
“There is an expert committee that will assess the concepts and choose the best one,” said Mikolaj. TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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