Burkina Faso Orders Major Curriculum Overhaul

Burkina Faso‘s military government has announced a comprehensive overhaul of its history, geography, and civic education curricula.

The government said the changes are intended to “decolonise” what students are taught as the new school year begins.

Higher Education Minister Moumouni Zoungrana said the reform was carried out at the instruction of the prime minister and aimed to correct content inherited from the colonial period.

Speaking at a government event in Ouagadougou, he said the country needed to stop presenting its own history through a foreign lens.

“We have decided to review these curricula, remove words that treat us like children or animals, and add chapters that promote our values,” Zoungrana wrote.

“When you open our textbooks, we are portrayed as mere objects. Our victories were never highlighted; on the contrary, the focus was on our defeats and our negative traits.”

The country was a French colony until 1960.

School textbooks have not yet been revised, according to a history and geography teacher in the capital, Ouagadougou, but the ministry has distributed a booklet for teachers specifying which expressions to avoid and which chapters to remove or add.

“We will no longer speak of explorers…but of invaders. We will rehabilitate the African resistance fighters who were portrayed as tyrants or barbarians in old textbooks,” the teacher said.