Petya Panayotova, Vanya Tsvetkova and Mila Bogdanova from Bulgaria worked on this contribution. They didn’t find any textbooks, where the Chernobyl issue is treated. Vanya presents a Physics and Astronomy school book for 7th grade, a Chemistry and Environment Protection book for 9th grade and a Physics and Astronomy book for 10th grade. Mila also worked on this last book and contributed some additional pictures
Petya Panayotova
The topic isn’t covered in the Bulgarian textbooks at all. There aren’t any descriptions of the accidents, the consequences or something else in connection with Chernobyl. The accident is mentioned in some Physics or Chemistry textbooks in the lessons about ionization and radiation but there are two – three words indeed and it’s written like the students already know what the case is. In fact, I don’t think there are many people who don’t know the main point of what’s happened although there is no information in the textbooks. The probable reason is that as Bulgaria is operating with nuclear power plant, the topic is often mentioned in the media. That doesn’t mean there is no need of studying about the accident because many of the important points and the details aren’t well – known.
In my opinion the probable reason for the absence of the topic in the textbooks is the fact that they were written before 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bulgaria was depending on the Soviet Union and we’ve already seen what a misinformation was about the topic of Chernobyl. So the censorship was really strong at that time. Although the textbooks are republished sooner, they aren’t “rewritten” and the content is the same.
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