The Ministry of Education recently admitted to 15 errors in textbooks, which were discovered thanks to activists on social networking sites.

In a press statement on Sunday, the ministry said the General Directorate of Curricula reviews errors and proposals regarding the annual academic curricula and publish them through social networking sites.

Although the ministry admitted to the errors, officials said that these blunders are relatively low, compared to the globally accepted standard of 10 errors per 100 pages. The ministry said it produces and prints 1,339 books with a total of 116,691 pages for students and teachers, and only 15 errors were identified overall, a majority of which were typos.

Committees are carrying on with their review, both from inside and outside the ministry, and anyone with comments about the educational curriculum can visit the ministry’s website to post their feedback, said the ministry.

Sixty-three days into the academic year, students have come across other errors in textbooks, but the main problem for the ministry now is the fact that an unspecified number of students in schools across the Kingdom have yet to receive their books.

While the ministry acknowledged its inability to provide enough material this academic year, the undersecretary of planning and development at the ministry, Rashid Al-Ghayad, attributed the delay to the unexpected increase in the number of non-Saudi students accepted by schools this year. He said the ministry is printing 10 percent more books to meet the need as early as possible.

Ali Al-Ghamdi, official spokesman of the ministry, said the ministry has begun to “distribute (the educational material) to schools with a shortage of books.”