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to help them forge the missing links between science and technology and production and to use their scientific and technical talent more fully and gainfully in the service of production. The first such centre has been established in Latin America and three are now planned in Asia.

Malcolm S. Adiseshiah

Gaza schoolchildren get textbooks after three-year 'famine'

For the first time since the Six-day War in 1967, textbooks printed in the United Arab Republic are now available to Palestinian refugee children in the Israeli-held Gaza Strip. For many of the 58,ooo children in the UNRWA/Unesco schools there, it is the first time they have held a school textbook in their hands.

A first batch of some 214,5oo books, compris- ing thirty-two titles, have arrived for use in p r imary and lower-secondary schools. A fur- ther twenty-eight titles, involving also about 2oo,o00 books, are due to follow.

The granting of an import licence by the Israeli authorities to these textbooks means that only six books are still excluded of the sixty-six approved by Unesco's Director-General, Rend Maheu, on the advice of a three-member inter- national commission of distinguished Arab-lan- guage scholars, selected from outside the Middle East, to examine the books for use in U N R W A / Unesco schools.

This followed a ban on them by Israel who complained that certain passages tended to in- duce hatred of Israel and gave a one-sided ver- sion of local history and geography. The six books still excluded are: two Arabic readers, two Arabic grammars , a book on religion and one on geography. The books now granted free pas- sage include works on geography, history, Arabic language, arithmetic, physics, chemistry, etc.

The Gaza Strip was particularly affected by

the famine of school textbooks in Israeli-held territories that followed the Six-day War. Thanks largely to personal negotiations by Mr. Maheu, who was in constant touch with both the Arab countries and with Israel, the children in the Gaza Strip now can use their textbooks, instead of having to make do with lessons on the black- board, written for them by teachers from their own Teachers' Notes, prepared and printed by the UNRWA/Unesco Institute of Education in Beirut.

In the occupied territory of the West Bank of Jordan, of the seventy-one textbooks approved by the Director-General, sixty-seven have so far been allowed into class-rooms. The four excluded books have to do with Arabic grammar , lan- guage, civics and an atlas.

Although the same situation obviously does not apply to the other areas where U N R W A / Unesco schools are situated, a small number of textbooks are still not being purchased because they do not conform with the criteria laid down by Unesco's Executive Board, which was the yardstick for the three-member international commission named by Mr. Maheu.

Educational aid for the Palestine refugees

For more than twenty years, Unesco and U N R W A (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) have been pro- viding education services for refugee children. Unesco's Director-General, Rend Maheu, stated in his appeal earlier this year, that the 500 schools which U N R W A operates with technical assist- ance from Unesco accommodate i92,ooo pupils at the p r imary level alone, to whom must be added 35,000 pupils attending public and pri- vate schools with grants from UNRWA.

For secondary education the figures are res- pectively 53,000 and 30,o00, with 2,500 in tech- nical education. Over 80o students have been