Bangladesh Women's National Football team in NCTB textbook

Bangladesh Women's National Football team beat Nepal 3-1 last night to clinch the 2022 SAFF Women's Champions title. While many of us have only gotten to know them over the last week or so, our younger generation has been getting acquainted with them for a few months now thanks to an NCTB textbook.

The English for Today textbook for class 11 and 12 by NCTB features an entire lesson on our Tigresses with the title, "The Unbeaten Girls" under the unit, "Youthful Achievers". NCTB revised the book earlier in 2022 to include this section along with a few other changes to the book. 

The chapter starts by talking about how our society discriminates between girls and boys when it comes to sports and other gender-defined roles. It then quickly points out how this is unfair and wrong, and how our girls have time and time again proven this assumption to be false.

Later in the lesson, we are introduced to some of our young Tigresses and their football journey so far. We get to take a look at the hardships they have had to face over the course of this journey, and how they were able to overcome it.

The lesson then takes us back a few years into the past telling us about the various victories and honours our undefeated girls have achieved over that duration. It also heavily focuses on the Kalsindur village in Mymensingh, where many of the stars of our national team's current roster come from.

It's refreshing to see the NCTB include such a timely lesson in their syllabus. The idea that girls should not get involved in sports is a wrong one, and this lesson carefully breaks it down helping readers understand why that's the case, and why participation in sports should not be subjected to gender bias. 

One can only hope that the NCTB continues to introduce similar timely lessons in their curriculum, especially for junior classes.