On September 20, a Facebook page ჯაბა მუსელიანის ბლოგი (Jaba Museliani’s Blog) published a photo of a book page titled “What does Love Caress Mean?” According to the Facebook page, this book is a textbook for first graders. The post had 244 likes and 50 shares, however, the author later deleted the post from Facebook.
Myth Detector contacted the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sport to verify the information. The Ministry said that the given textbook is not included in the curriculum.
“Such a text could not be found in the textbooks printed in the framework of the ‘Program for the Provision of Pupils with Textbooks’” – mentions the written response from the Press Service of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sport.
- The text is from a book called the ABC of Love.
The book called Questions d’amour was published in 1999 and was written by Virginie Dumont. The book contains sexual education topics for children aged 5-8. In 2006-2007, a Georgian translation of the book – called the ABC of Love – was sent out to libraries of up to 1,200 schools, however, it was never included in a curriculum and some schools even removed it from extracurricular literature.
The stir around the book began several years ago – initially on Georgian forums and later on social media, blogs, and online portals. In 2014, a photo of the book was published by a webpage ambebi.ge and Robert Kavtiashvili’s Blog. The latter was also claiming that in 2014-2015, schools were introducing a new subject – the ABC of Love – and the book was printed exactly for that purpose.
Jaba Museliani Blog was created on March 17, 2019 and is administered from Georgia. Apart from entertaining posts, Jaba Museliani Blog often shares posts that aim to discredit the protest manifestations on Rustaveli Avenue, as well as homophobic, xenophobic, and anti-Western content.
