The Ministry of Education and Culture changes the rules for selecting textbooks due to the incident with the map of Ukraine without Crimea

The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine began to change the procedure for the development and approval of textbooks after the recent scandal related to the discovery of a map of Ukraine without Crimea in a textbook for the 7th grade. MES strives to improve the process of creating textbooks in order to prevent errors and improve the quality of educational materials.

As reported the press service of the Ministry of Education and Culture, the incident with the textbook, which caused outrage in society, revealed serious flaws in the existing system of preparation of educational materials. The ministry explained that the page with the map, where the image of Crimea was missing, did not pass the examination at the approval stage, because during the examination, electronic versions of manuscripts or mock-ups of textbooks are analyzed, which may not include the final design of the pages.

In order to correct this error, the “Litera LTD” publishing house, which was responsible for printing the textbook, took responsibility and undertook to reprint the edition at its own expense. All textbooks found to be in error will be withdrawn from schools.

This incident happened with the Ukrainian language textbook for the 7th grade, which was recommended by the Ministry of Education and Science and published with state funding in 2024. The authors of the textbook are Anastasia Onatiy and Taras Tkachuk. For the first time, the literary critic Tetyana Gonchenko drew attention to the error, who published this information in her Telegram channel “Unbreakable Book Reader”. This caused a significant resonance in society, forcing the Ministry of Education and Culture to respond urgently.