India has removed the periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
Class 10 students following the Indian government’s syllabus will no longer learn the periodic table of elements. Environmental sustainability has also been removed from the curriculum.
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which oversees school syllabi for around 134 million students aged 11-18, had earlier even removed evolution from the curriculum, sparking a protest.
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“In non-science content, chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy have been scrapped. And a chapter on the industrial revolution has been removed for older students,” Nature has reported.
Shocked experts have critcized the move, saying the removed topics are more than ever relevant today.
“Everything related to water, air pollution, and resource management has been removed...I don’t see how the conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, told Nature.
NCERT removed the founder of IITs from textbooks
It was reported last month that NCERT had nixed the mention of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who fought for India’s independence from Britain and was India’s first education minister, from the class 11 textbook.
In 1951, Azad inaugurated the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, in West Bengal, spawning a string of similar elite institutions across the country over the next many decades. Today, having laid the foundation of and propelled India’s technological prowess the world over, the 23 IITs are some of the most sought-after tech schools globally.
The NCERT cited “syllabus rationalization” as the reason for removing Azad’s reference from the textbooks.
It also dropped lessons on the 2002 Gujarat riots (prime minister Narendra Modi was the state’s chief minister then), Mughal courts, the Emergency (1975-77), and the Cold War, among other topics.
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