India is cutting periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

What have we learnt about India from the centuries before and how to teach about it? A case study of India’s post-colonial history of science

These words were crafted in 1976 in an amendment to India’s constitution. The constitution’s writers rightly saw the pursuit of evidence, reasoning and humanity as the responsibility of every citizen as India emerged from arguably the most tumultuous period in its history since gaining independence from Britain nearly three decades earlier.

A chapter in the periodic table of elements has been removed from the syllabus for class 10 students who are typically 15 years old. There are chapters on sustainable management of natural resources that have been removed.

When it considers the content to be irrelevant or when it overlaps with others in the curriculum, rationalization is needed. The 2020 National Education Policy of India says students need to become problemsolvers and critical thinker, and it therefore advocates less memorization and more active learning.

NCERT wants a rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems in India. Some people think that this is a reason to remove Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday from science, and instead learn about India’s pre-colonial history of science.

India is not the only post-colonial country that is wrestling with how to honor and recognize Indigenous forms of knowledge. New Zealand is trialling the teaching of Māori ‘ways of knowing’ — mātauranga Māori — in a selection of schools across the country. But it is not removing important scientific content to accommodate the new material, and for good reason.

Science and History: Where science meets culture, where we come from and how we can explore the world – an example from which we can share our experiences and what we have learned from each other

The process of evolution by natural selection and the principles underlying the periodic table are both fundamental concepts that explain — and encourage students to wonder about — the world at large. Life is the product of evolutionary processes. The building blocks of the physical world are composed of a small set of chemical elements. NCERT axed lessons set out in conceptual frameworks that helped explain the way these two realms are.

Moreover, there’s a great deal of literature and teaching practice that outlines how scientific concepts can be taught using visual methods, such as videos and animation, instead of by rote learning. An alternative is to embed concepts using non-fiction narrative storytelling. In the case of the periodic table, this would involve detailing how individual elements found their places in the table; the highs and lows, dramas and inflection points as researchers sought to get to the truth and be recognized for their achievements.

Learning core scientific concepts, engaging in problem-solving and digging into the history of science are all part of the science curriculum. There is a link between scientific temperament and pride in heritage. As we have written in these columns before, research does not advance without a firm grasp of what came before. In short, science and history complement each other.

A historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli says that a mass-membership volunteer organization has a close relationship with the governing Bharatia Janata Party and is making changes to the curriculum. The RSS feels that Hinduism is under threat from India’s other religions and cultures.

What NCERT has to offer in the Indian curriculum and its textbooks? An analysis by D.R. Joshi of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)

NCERT needs to listen to opinions of everyone in the community. But, as an autonomous body, it must be free to make its own decisions, and should always do so on the basis of the best available evidence. Public confidence in its decisions will be helped if it interacts with all users. Some of the speculation might not be accurate due to the fact that not doing so fuels it.

Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some people in the public think evolution doesn’t fit in with academic institutions.

In India, class 10 is the last year in which science is taught to every student. Only students who elect to study biology in the final two years of education (before university) will learn about the topic.

There are 134 million 11-18-year-olds in India who are affected by the changes. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year starting in May.

NCERT said on its website that it considered a number of things, such as whether the content was important, the difficulty of the content, and whether it was related to other content. It aims to provide students with opportunities for participation in learning and creativity.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01770-y

Axed Evolution – What the Future has to Tell Us About Science – A Professor’s Comment on Michael Faraday’s contributions to science in the nineteenth century

A small section on Michael Faraday’s contributions to the understanding of electricity and magnetism in the nineteenth century has also been stripped from the class-10 syllabus. Chapters on democracy and diversity, political parties, and challenges to democracy have been removed from non science content. Older students have a chapter on the industrial revolution removed.

More than 4,500 scientists, teachers and scientists working in the field of science have signed an appeal to restore the axed evolution content.

Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Mumbai Institute of Social Sciences in India, said that all water, air pollution and resource management have been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air Pollution isn’t relevant to us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy has been removed. That is a bit strange given the relevance in today’s world.