Nairobi — Do you ever sit down to go through your child's pre-school textbook? If not, you had better start now. For your child could be reading textbooks laced with violent and antisocial language.

Such books are being used by unwary teachers for learners, some as young as four years, thanks to poor monitoring of class textbooks by the Ministry of Education.

It is barely two months since a war of words erupted between publishers and the Kenya Institute of Education (KIE) over the quality of instructional material used in schools.

In mid-May, KIE released a report accusing publishers of producing school textbooks with factual and editorial errors.

The Kenya Publishers Association responded by accusing KIE, the organisation mandated to vet school textbooks, of sleeping on the job by letting through substandard instructional material.

Before textbooks are allowed into the classroom, they are vetted by KIE. The ministry's quality assurance directorate also keeps an eye on the quality of learning in schools.

As the blame-game goes on, a number of textbooks with obscene, violent and antisocial language are already on the reading lists of many public and private schools.

In one textbook -- Sound and Read Book 1 -- already in use in many pre-school language classes, learners are made to loudly repeat the sentence "I want to chop off his neck."

In another section of the book, the young learners are made to repeatedly read the following sentence: "I want to drink a little whisky."

KIE managing director Lydia Nzomo admits that such language is not appropriate for four-year-olds, and promises to investigate how the books slipped through what she describes as "very thorough" vetting process.

"We would not want materials that do not protect the innocence of the children," Mrs Nzomo says.

But the institute disowns some of the offensive books mentioned, such as Sound and Read Book 1, currently in use at many pre-school centres across the country. According to Mrs Nzomo, the book is not on the official list of approved school texts.

But even inside textbooks vetted by the ministry, more examples of anti-social language abound. In The Champion, a Standard Six text published by Oxford University Press, one character tells his father: "I only said gidown on it you, old mother..."

And although the book purports to teach the influence of mass media on young ones, questions abound if such lines do not end up inflicting more damage on the tender minds.

In The Madhouse, a textbook recommended by KIE for Standard Six and published by Oxford University press, a father says: "The girl is so stupid she cannot even kill herself properly."

Early childhood education teachers, who are still using the book to teach four-year-olds blame KIE for ignoring the needs of pre-school language pupils when they release the official list of approved textbooks.

Although the ministry has prescribed texts for mathematics, religion, music as well as social and life-skills activities for pre-school learners, no textbooks are recommended for language skills.

"The ministry has been operating as if early childhood development education does not exist," says Ms Mumbi Muchiri, the head of one of the numerous early childhood development centres across the country.

Ms Sarah Ruto of Uwezo Trust, the organisation that recently released a damning report on the state of primary school education in Kenya, describes the contents as unacceptable.

More effort should go into analysing book content to weed out violent language, she says. "Someone is failing on their job."

But parents do not have to wait for long before coming face-to-face with the consequences of exposing their children to uncensured material.

One had a rather embarrassing encounter with her son the other day, who is barely out of the pre-unit level. Asked what he had learned in school, the boy confidently replied: "I learnt dad is fat."

The embarrassed parents did not realise that their son had spent part of the day in school reciting this one sentence from his reading skills textbook.

If they had, they would have noticed another sentence after "Dad is fat", one that reads: "A fat man has an ass."