This makes no sense to me. This highly unlikely to be a political move. Science education is not political in India. Evolution, abortion, chemistry are not debated at all.
This is more likely for the reasons to be innocuous.
> In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the content was irrelevant. It also aims to provide opportunities for experiential learning and creativity.
> NCERT announced the cuts last year, saying that they would ease pressures on students studying online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India, says that science teachers and researchers expected that the content would be reinstated once students returned to classrooms. Instead, the NCERT shocked everyone by printing textbooks for the new academic year with a statement that the changes will remain for the next two academic years, in line with India’s revised education policy approved by government in July 2020.
Sounds more like students have continued lagging behind after coming back from Covid, than anything malicious. I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science.
I might be wrong, but I would genuinely like to see 1st source statements from the board indicating that these changes are religiously motivated.
I have no idea exactly how much this particular curriculum change is influenced by religion. But your assertion that science is depoliticized in India is very wrong.
This is just one of many such troubling incidents, including apparent indifference to the murder of pro-rationalism academics.
Anecdotally, if you have people from India in your life, this is inescapable. Constant barrage of forwards on WhatsApp of Hindu supremacy, which necessarily have to flip history upside down. The story goes that Hindus had nuclear energy 10,000 years ago, but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India.
> By the 2021-2022 academic year, Darwin’s theory was quietly removed from the examination syllabus for the students of Class 9 and Class 10. By 2022-2023, the topic of evolution was completely purged from school textbooks, teachers and education experts told Al Jazeera.
> The story goes that Hindus had nuclear energy 10,000 years ago, but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India.
I’ve never understood this kind of messaging. You see it in all sorts of supremacists.
But how is it a credit to you and your ancestors that they had the ability to create nuclear power or fly, etc and then they just lost it!
That’s a sign of deep shame. The particular group of people you’re claiming are superior are so incompetent they weren’t even able to keep knowledge they already had.
Seems like the group of people you think are so superior have been getting dumber with every generation and you therefore are the dumbest of your lineage.
It's also like bragging that you were a highly advanced civilization and got conquered/occupied by a bunch of dumb savages. There's a few more prominent countries that follow similar narratives and I agree with you that it sounds far more embarrassing than boasting. And if you're superior then why haven't you caught up or surpassed the others? I can understand if this is like <100 years but longer than that feels embarrassing and counter to the superiority narrative.
As to why it works, I completely understand. We just want reasons to feel superior. It is why in high school jocks define metrics as strength and why nerds define metrics as intelligence. It's why we have "well I have street smarts" and other things like that.
>>It's also like bragging that you were a highly advanced civilization and got conquered/occupied by a bunch of dumb savages.
They explain that part by using the idea of 'traitors'. They are often the minorities of that land(whom they currently hate, and serve as a nice punching bag in the whole process, and in the overall scheme of hate process).
The 'traitor' part is like a constant theme in these stories. Super advanced ancestors, but also very nice, accommodating to everyone. Some savages from the outside invade, traitors help them from inside. Savages win, they are colonised. Traitors benefit. The monuments, symbols and anything to do with the traitors is now demonised and the 'treason' is used as a casus belli for a genocide/ethnic cleansing.
Quite similar, in that respect, to the Vietnam War. The "We would have won if it weren't for the people back home who stopped us from fighting" stance, for instance.
The corollary story that usually shows up is that Westerners "stole" scientific discoveries from India and suppressed them while the country was under occupation. There's a fairly standard example of this at:
But how is knowledge "stolen"? I understand in the context of piracy, but like piracy you can't really remove it from the originator. Sure, you can take and destroy all books you can find, but it is also pretty easy to make new books (and hide them) or pass knowledge through word of mouth (or hidden in stories). Wouldn't a highly intelligent society be able to accomplish such a simple feat that's been demonstrated by hundreds of civilizations through historY?
I didn't say the narrative made sense! But I think the implication was that there was some sort of systematic campaign to erase Indian records of that knowledge after "stealing" it, i.e. by destroying artifacts and written records, preventing word-of-mouth transmission of history, etc. Of course this is all nonsense, but it's nonsense which plays well to an audience which is open to nationalist, anti-imperialist messages.
I agree that all of the example in the blog post and bbc article are nonsense. However, I think that you're slightly wrong in this statement:
> I think the implication was that there was some sort of systematic campaign to erase Indian records of that knowledge
The blog post is more specific than "Indian records". The blog post is talking about the Vedas in particular. I don't know much about the Vedas, but this looks a lot more like biblical literalism to me. The references to the Raj and to stolen knowledge are used to bolster the Vedas as a primary source of truth.
> Even by today’s standards, if properly applied, these Vedic Sutras can create most advanced technological instruments and mammoth machines ever known to mankind.
> Science expanded its views in the area of observation as well. Thomas Edison developed the light bulb and the motion picture based on Vedic principles. Sun rays emitting illusory rainbows, speed of light and its composition are all explained in Vedas. The idea that light defines or makes our universe visible can be found as explained by Shrila Prabhupada in his purport to SB 2.9.4 “In the darkness one cannot see the sun, nor himself, nor the world. But in the sunlight one can see the sun, himself and the world around him.”
FWIW, I think that it's pretty straightforward to suppress knowledge though. You can record knowledge into books, but it's not really known if no-one is reading the books or using that knowledge. You can suppress metal-working know-how by eliminating metal-working jobs. The Raj had a profound control over India which affected the available areas of work, which would affect what people wanted to learn. You don't have to explicitly ban a topic to make people not want to study that topic.
Humiliation is essential to any fascist project. You can see this in any of the statements from fascist and authoritarian leaders. They’ll emphasize how tricky and duplicitous the enemies are, how the good and honest people were defrauded, but now they’re exacting revenge.
Its crazy man. There is constant barrage of world's best prime minister, best food, best flag, bext xyz declared by NASA/UNO/AMERICA and stuff. Anything tou can think of, its best is in India as per that whatspap forwards & university. If you agree, good. If you object based on facts, you are anti national, anti Hindu. Really crazy.
Haha, it's funny but that's the story they go with. There's also great anger in India for "paid conversions" where Christian missionaries give people money and resources if they'll become Christian. Ultimately, it seems reasonable that you go with the god who serves you best.
Reminds me of the story of Job. I'm not sure how people read it any other way than Satan pulling a fast one over God. How is it not a story where Satan tricked God into torturing Job?
Strange how a former police officer gets a gov job with influence over higher education. He called himself a “man of science” but his entire career was police work with a bit of politics at the tail end.
He was “minister of state” [1] for the Ministry of Human Resource Development which apparently was renamed the Ministry of Education after he left.
[1] Google tells me that’s an assistant/junior role to the actual Minister.
Minister of State is a generic executive position that is created to reward medium level politicians.
Satyapal Singh specifically helped the BJP win over the Jat community in Western Uttar Pradesh which before 2014 voted for the RLD (a Jat primary party in western UP, Rajasthan, and Haryana).
By rewarding him, with a low level backbench minister position, he can provide patronage to the rest of his patronage network.
He also tried to save Amit Shah+Modi's political skin during the Ishrat Jahan encounter killing case while he was part of the IPS.
Indian politics is heavily based on micro-level community based calculations because of how close elections are in India (most elections are decided within 5,000 votes ie. one town). Due to this, caste, family, and regional patronage networks form, and this is common across all parties (INC, BJP, etc).
For example, Modi rose to power in Gujarat by helping organize a Dalits+Tribal+Urban coalition in the 1980s and 90s at the expense of a combined Muslim+Patel voting bloc. This same template Modi used is what the BJP has been using since 2014 (intersectionality of identity based on Hinduism ie. Hinduvta).
And the same thing happened in Satyapal Singh's area during the Muzaffarnagar/Shamli riots when the Dalit Hindu + Dalit Muslim voter bloc split due to communal violence, leading to Hindu Dalits leaving the BSP for the BJP, Hindu Jatts leaving the RLD for BJP, and Dalit Muslims leaving the BSP to support the Samajwadi Party because there was no other viable party left in Western Uttar Pradesh.
I am not a fan of the BJP, but you got to hand it to them - they are probably the only national party in India with a strong understanding of subaltern power struggles and micro-level demographic data. Anyone in the INC who knew this stuff defected to the BJP by 2019 anyhow, but might defect back to the INC assuming the right PM candidate is selected (Gehlot would be a strong competitor against Modi, RG would have a hard time)
India is not alone. We have a well-known rapper in France who recently explained how the Egyptian pyramides were something something electricity generators and that Egyptians had electricity thousand of years ago.
This was relayed on TikTok and other platforms to the point where some gov't official had to say that this is bullshit.
This is complicated. I mean, first you gotta ask what India even is. From a purely border perspective (this is the important context) it is no different than any other country[0] (play videos for other regions). Current borders only exist since 1950. The longest stable period of Indian borders (and largest) were actually under English occupation. Prior to this the largest empire was the Maurya Empire, which covered Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh but did not reach the southern point of modern India. They didn't even hold this for 100 years. Mughal Empire might be the next best example, but was far later and similarly didn't hold for long.
But this is the history of every region/country. There aren't realistically countries that are thousands of years old, only centuries (and not as how we think of them). But this isn't politically popular. Similarly is that a small force can't occupy a region without significant levels of collusion with local players[1]. English occupation influenced Indian unification as it also unified adversaries and caused competing groups to align to a more important goal. We like to paint stories of ancient cultural heritage, but this is all very fuzzy and extremely messy. Many cultures can claim inventions as borders drastically shifted over the centuries. I think a lot of this just has to do with are limited context windows and that it is hard to codify these timeframes and the complexities of establishing borders (obviously along with political narratives and propaganda). But it also should say a lot about the modern world and why Long Peace is such a big thing (very recent thing btw).
[1] I need to be clear that this doesn't justify or excuse in any way occupation. It doesn't dismiss the brutalities and injustices. It is more about how while the dominant blame belongs to the ruling/occupying class, that we must be careful to not let this blame let local players be swept under the rug, as they play a critical role and local populations have more influence on these actors. It is about nuance and a warning, not an excuse.
* the civilization and peoples that made the subcontinent its home
* the borders and the political entity in control of those borders (past, present, future)
The British did not create the civilization or the religions they found when they landed here.
The didn't build the temples, or compose the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Itihasas, the Puranas, or the various dharma shastras.
And Indian people didn't emerge out of British vaginas.
The idea that India didn't exist before the British (a lot of people claim this) is nonsensical. The only claim one can make is that they became, for a time, Chakravartin.[1] They were not the first, and they won't be the last.
> They didn't even hold this for 100 years.
Powers (the State) and areas enclosed by the borders it claims and governs (the political boundaries; the country) are always ephemeral things. Be it 100 years or 1000 years, they will change.
For most people, this has only been relevant in so far as the impact it has on their daily lives. Does the State interfere in their religious, social, personal and economic affairs? To what extent? Does it protect them from insiders and outsiders who attempt to do the same? To what extent? These are the only questions that matter.
Couldn't the same be said for the dominant group before and after? Honestly asking, but looking through the history, that area has been in turmoil a long time, which is true of most places. And also does not excuse imperialism either of course.
Or the British suspiciously inventing nuclear weapons/power relatively quickly after the occupation of India. Or even when they began trading. Nor the Greeks. But maybe the British were just playing the long con. Well played British... well played. Waiting a hundred years, giving the technology to the Americans, and letting Germany bomb your cities and almost occupy your country. Very crafty.
The British had a deliberate policy of extracting raw materials and flooding the market with machine-manufactured goods. The British markets were not open to Indian manufacturers. So not only was India de-industrialized, but many rare skills and techniques were lost during this period. I can’t find a reference, but I remember reading an early British East India Conpany account of encountering silk of such fine quality that yards of it could be folded into a tiny box. Those workers would have been put out of business by the British, and their skills lost for generations. Might be a legend but I’m sure many things like that happened.
It’s just not things like rockets or nuclear weapons.
In the West, any attempt to debate science is declared to be anti-science, which eventually suffocates science. Conformity to the party line is the ticket to funding (from the political establishment) and acclaim. Are there anti-science people? Sure, but far fewer than the knee jerk reactionists say there are. And someone who goes around calling everyone anti-science without logical basis is antithetical to scientific debate and advancement.
Let us remember where a lot of "scientific" funding comes from, the politicians and Uncle Sam; which inherently tends to corrupt the "science" to become political.
There needs to be some added context to this. Many anti-science advocates mask as "just asking questions." This was the whole Koch strategy over climate change (they didn't invent it though) where they exaggerated uncertainties in data/conclusions. These always exist, they are called error bounds, but can be quite nuanced. It is easy to bastardize scientific language, which is different than laymen (and why it is possible, though noisy, to identify scientists on semi-anonymous forums like this one).
> Let us remember where a lot of "scientific" funding comes from, the politicians and Uncle Sam; which inherently tends to corrupt the "science" to become political.
Which this is a flag about your political beliefs and lack of experience. It just doesn't follow the practicality of the situation. Neither democrats nor republicans control government science. If you look at DOE secretaries you'll see their party affiliation matches the sitting president. In the labs, there are a lot of political diversity (including a need to ban news being played in the cafeterias because it led to fighting). It is far from monolithic and it's absurd to paint it with a wide brush. You also need to decouple the science (what's being published) from what becomes political narratives (news/directions from secretaries). Gov scientists frequently publish works contrary to the normal political narratives (even of the agency) and if they are prevented from publishing leaks happen pretty quickly.
Some science itself is innately connected to politics (others "aren't"[0]: e.g. cosmology or particle physics). The question is how science should be participating (leading, participating, or auxiliary). You invent new technologies that affect societies and governments... govern societies. You find information that affect citizens and of course this is going to affect policy (e.g. climate change). Of course there are going to be biases, but there is less than what you'd find in an industry. Government science is different, especially since the focus is far less profit motivated (the scientists also aren't making much and can make far more in industry if they are profit motivated). While not ideal, gov science should be a third party verification of information. As an example, looking at climate again, you look at the results of 3 (not independent) different groups: gov, industry, academia (influenced by both gov and industry). If gov + academia comes to a consensus, industry agrees with data but not conclusions, then there's reason to distrust the industry conclusions as there's profit incentives. Your comment is destructive because it has been the narrative that has led to industry capture and manipulation. We've seen it in leaded gasoline, cigarettes, climate change, and many others. No, gov and academia aren't perfect, but this shouldn't result in defaulting to industry opinion or allowing them to dominate narratives. This has to stop.
[0] quotes because money and funding is political, but this is different than conclusions like climate change. Most gov science is in the low politics camp btw.
> I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science.
Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body[1] and then claiming presence of test tube babies in ancient times[3]
On the other hand, Union Health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan claimed that Vedas had knowledge beyond Theory of Relativity[3]
BJP, the ruling party has tried to indoctrinate a bunch of nonsense like Wright brothers did not invent the airplane, it was infact ancient Indians[4].
India actually has a well-funded ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy) and its influence has massively grown over the past decade. It is as anti-science as you get.
> Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body
There is evidence for plastic surgery being known in Ancient India through works of Sushruta/Charaka. Leaving apart the sewing of an elephant’s head on a human body, which was probably added for religious/mythological effect I don’t quite see what’s nonsensical here?
This is a very strange comment for a Hindu nationalist to make. I thought it was well established that Shiva installed the elephant head on Ganesh's body after he rashly beheaded him before realizing he was his son. It seems very bizarre to imagine a god using a plastic surgeon to sew the head on.
Not how I read it. OP seems to completely dismiss the possibility that some surgical techniques may have been known in Ancient India because of what I’m sure is prejudice against one or more of religion/Hinduism/speaker(Modi in this case). Like I said the story about the elephant’s head is likely mythological/religious but that doesn’t take away from the other basic facts.
OP quotes saying that Indian politicians from the current party are being anti-science, but the first link where modi talks about religious texts is trying to link it to science.
If you read further in the link he talks about Aryabhata and space science and how we need to regain those.
This is anything but anti-science
Seems pretty funny to me, the reference added to say that this Indian politician is anti science is actually trying to encourage ppl to become good at science. May be he using religious based texts, but that speech in the article isn’t really anti science though.
Ah, you are not reading the situation right. The fascist elements have hijacked the term "science". Nowadays, it is science if you say that cowling protects against atomic radiation ([1]) or you say that ancient India had interplanetary travel ([2]) .. note that the latter was at an official track at the Indian Science Congress on science in ancient India. If the vedas said something, that is science. If the white man brought out a periodic table, either ban it, or say 'our ancient texts already knew about it'. That's the state of India right now.
You will never see any statements by the board. They are comprised of people who are either scared shitless of speaking out, or who are really religious fundamentalists at core.
Generally the goal of an authoritarian government is keeping the leader in power long enough to rob the country blind and then die peacefully. Where they have goals outside of that they do not tend to prioritize education — educated people often have more of the resources they need to challenge power.
Power is always in comparison to something. You are powerful compared to somebody. So as long as they have enough to exercise control over minorities of India and feel nice about it they are powerful enough.
The whole idea of western style power over the whole world is not something they imagine as power. Or at least proactively work towards.
Having seen Avenue 5, and also having just performed a four second web search, I feel mildly confident in saying this is interesting, because poo is indeed great radiation shielding.
1 is just a regional judge reaffirming existing cow conservation law with some woo woo in his decision, 2 is a non-scientist giving a lecture at a science institute which caused controversy among the actual scientists.
Neither of them really have anything to do with the science/government control other than India’s long standing obsession with cows.
Ayush is a govt portal for govt funded products based on ancient Indian pharmacology. Here is the 'research' on panchagavya (click to find out what it is, and weep)
https://ayushportal.nic.in/panchagavya.html
This is not an isolated person who's lost his marbles. It is a massive country, where a small but highly vocal and powerful minority has completely lost it, and they are the ones who vote.
--------
As for the second, it was not a lecture at a science institute. It was the 102nd Indian Science Congress, an event that is supposed to be prestigious. Indian Nobel winners, Field medalists, prominent space scientists were there amongst the august crowd. And there was an entire track imposed on that event by the govt.
I am not going to give a link to that paper; you need to do some homework. That is of course, if you care about what is happening. Hope you will not be like the others who say, 'but Modi is building roads and airports, so everything is getting better'. I weep for my country.
The United States routinely has states, especially in the South, trying to get rid of evolution from textbooks, that fault line is usually the battleground between religious zealots that desire to inculcate their biblical worldviews into the formal education system.
Of course there are also contests to control history, sex education, politics, etc, because those are far more political.
The periodic table though, hoo boy, that's a new one.
Yes, there are plenty of people in the US who are proudly and aggressively ignorant for ideological reasons, but what does that have to do with a discussion of what's going on India?
As with a lot of India news appearing here of late, take this with a pound of salt. Like you were saying, this makes no sense as a political move. Hinduism (and by extension Hindutva, the problematic political form) has no bone to pick with Darwin and evolution. Actually the opposite is true - it's likely to be promoted because evolution is a point of contention in Abrahamic religions. The Indian far-right promotes a lot of fabrications; this isn't one of them though.
The two academics quoted in the article come from JNU, which is known for its left/far-left leaning. Looking through their social media, I see retweets of: US stealing Syria's oil, opposition to bombing Syria and aiding Ukraine, etc. What does it say about the author of the story, if she can't see through biases? It's kinda disappointing that balanced opinions are becoming rare in news media.
Fake news.
These topics are covered in the relevant (Science) stream in class 12 now. This is simply rationalization of the subjects to reduce burden on the students.
On a related note, I see quite a bit of fake news posted here...
I agrée, I also did not have that impression from what I could tell. This is really bad.
All talk about demographic dividends and such are moot when such stupidity is ushered in and allowed to prevail. They may be squandering a real opportunity here.
This is the same country that tried to derail the building of a shipping channel because it would have destroyed a bridge built by a monkey army, also known as limestone shoal.
Historically it has never been. Even in day to day life neither science nor evolution or periodic table has been debated. While it could be very innocuous, the new BJP government is also a bit on the "our history, our culture" side.
I am hoping this is just the NCERT just removing modules that students just rote learn.
> like to see 1st source statements from the board indicating that these changes are religiously motivated.
Nobody responsible or involved with this process is gonna give a written statement that they did to please the evergrowing hindutva or modi bhakti or whatsapp university.
You've not seen the back cover of textbooks that says X or Y is only possible because of the generosity of the "Insert current Chief Minister of State?"
India has been getting high on its own supply for a few years now. The narrative is that all knowledge originated in ancient Indian texts and was stolen by the west. Even the ISRO chief made a comment in this vein a few days back.
Cultures that keep looking at imagined past glories, imo, are destined to become static and falter.
>Cultures that keep looking at imagined past glories, imo, are destined to become static and falter.
If education was just chanting this half the day the world would be better off.
I had a Hindu nationalist recently berate me about how the "US had lost the Space Race, ISRO was the clear winner."
I mentioned the US landed on the Moon first, and he said "would rather have not landed on the Moon than live in a country with a large number of Black people" (put less pleasantly).
Indian here. Your exchange doesn't surprise me one bit. The Hindu nationalists are some of the most delusional, ultra-nationalistic, racist morons out there.
Many of them think India is going to be the next superpower and economic miracle out there. There's a large number of them working in big tech, and they'll say how fantastic India is, now that there are very high-paying tech jobs available there (almost all of them in American companies) and this gives them fantastic standards of living because they can easily afford maids and cooks aka cheap labor they can exploit. I scratch my head and wonder, if India is so good WTF are they still doing here, while also working on their Green Card petitions?
I've seen this too. My ex is kind of a Hindu nationalist and her friend group and family are full of them. Her brother even threatened her for dating me saying he would cut off all contact and never let her see his children unless she consented to do an arranged marriage with an Indian (which she secretly came here to escape).
But then the same Hindu nationalists had this weird tendency to think they were entitled to US based tech jobs. They would claim Indians were responsible for all the tech companies in the US being successful and not Americans and that America is this awful, sad, corrupt society that they really wanted to get into despite India being better in every way apparently. It was irritating at times and sad because this isn't uncommon imo.
A lot of the US tech industry was built on the backs of Indians. You'll find that the Indians were the second largest race involved in early computing after the Whites.
The second point is that a lot of the problems in India do stem from colonialism - in Asian culture the vast majority don't usually segregate Europe from the US, and view Americans as being just as responsible for colonialism and the benefits of colonialism as modern-day Europeans.
One important thing to know about people like these is that they don't have a rational argument
They have a Believe and they like to shout it out to the world.
Oh, I'm absolutely aware of that, I was just curious if there was literally anything they could point to that could, if viewed at through significantly rose-colored lenses, be seen as support for their statement. Like maybe (given my previous experience with Hindu nationalists) some passage in the Vedas that was interpreted to mean ancient Hindus were actually a spacefaring race or something.
It's mostly them dancing on "see ISRO launches satellites for so much more less cost!". Like PPP, labor and material costs being much expensive in the US are not factors that exist.
> The narrative is that all knowledge originated in ancient Indian texts and was stolen by the west.
There is plenty of objective material to feed discourses about admirable achievements that Indian people offered to mankind. I mean, think Pāṇini or Ramanujan to cite only two people whose work are well known in HN community. But obviously they are numerous example in many western scholar fields and beyond like yoga or Kamasutra.
It makes all the more ridiculous any attempt to exaggerate about glorious past: those who do prove themselves not living up the depth and fine grained nuances of their actual heritage.
Tamils mostly take pride in the age of their language and its continued use till date. They also make their identity around this. They don't claim that every language originated from theirs or that computers need to be programmed with Tamil.
Also, as a person who has experienced xenophobia in over 50 nations I can tell you that it’s never the best and brightest who stayed in their home town and defend it against outsiders via physical violence and harassment. I have a metal plate and five screws in my leg that tell me your proposals are a no go.
Being from Eastern Europe, I can confidently say that being a defeated empire does not prevent idiots from reimagining the past.
Everyone looks at the glory of yesterday, but some are much more obsessed with it. It becomes issue when it leads to contradicting the facts, using it to harm others, and preventing yourself from building a better future.
These are the cultures that do this most. Pointing to a mythologized and stolen past greatness is a coping mechanism for the insecurities of a flagging present.
Surely, you must be aware that this thing called 'Make America Great Again' is a backwards-looking 'movement' that has half the country (and a third of the lefty towns) in its thrall. (Just don't ask them to say what 'Great' is out loud, you're not going to get an answer appropriate for polite company.)
And even besides it, the US is highly backwards-looking. At its best, it's political culture is ossified and enslaved to the predominant opinions of a small group of people who are two centuries dead. (While being oblivious to the fact that within that group, there was a huge spectrum of disagreement on these fundamental questions!)
Pile on a bunch of American Exceptionalism, and you get a perfect thought-terminating cocktail of 'It is this way because it's always been this way and because we are the greatest country in the world.'
Yeah such a backwards culture. They should have the common sense to be born in my country which invented Freedom and Democracy and is a shining beacon for the entire world!
Reading the source that Nature cites, it seems like the content has been made temporarily unexaminable ‘in light of COVID’, rather than the section actually getting cut from the textbook.
https://ncert.nic.in/rationalised-content.php
Could any Indian with a new physical textbook perhaps confirm? It’s a rather concerning policy.
The headline also seems awfully clickbaity. What the policy seems to have done is shifted basic evolution down to younger grades and moved the more advanced concepts to more senior grades. However, this shifts more advanced concepts up to grades in which science as a subject is not compulsory. Regressive as this is, this isn’t what the headline suggests.
It still teaches Mendelian genetics (chpt 8), but then entire book seems severely dumbed down compared to older NCERT textbooks I've read before when bored on India trips.
It might be because now you can't graduate high school in the 10th grade anymore in India - now you can only graduate at the 12th grade or transfer to a vocational college for 11th and 12th.
It's only affecting 10th grade CBSE (NCERT), not ICSE or state board* exams, let alone competitive board exams like the JEE (Engineering) or NEET (Medicine).
It's still being taught in the NCERT books as well, but now in 12th grade instead of 10th grade.
The scarier thing should be the rewriting of the history section of CBSE.
* board is Indian English for curriculum
Also, on the hierarchy of Indian board exams:
Top - ICSE
Medium - some State Boards
Low - CBSE, some state boards
Board exams are orthogonal to college entrance exams in India.
For example, IIT and Engineering admissions are gated by the JEE, so students oftentimes bunk 10th-12th grade to study the JEE and try to get a D average in the Board exam (because there's only so much you can study).
Board exams do have value though for most average colleges though and some top tier non-Eng ones (eg. If I wanted to study Law at St Stephen's College, University of Delhi or Business at Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi - both programs that feed into the political and business elite of India).
The Indian system is confusing and weird and there is some reform within it to become much more similar to the American system, but that's a work in progress.
> The scarier thing should be the rewriting of the history section of CBSE.
That is the one I am looking forward to. Indian history today is freedom struggle - mughal empire - freedom struggle - mughal empire - gandhi - nehru - akbar. Is all.
Indian history is long overdue for a huge revamp. We need more balanced views of the independence movement. We need greater exposure to non-Delhi kingdoms that shaped the major parts of the country. We need history of the period between 1947 - 2000.
World history needs to be taught from a non-western lens too. India needs to learn about the East & Africa, just as much as the west. This is especially valid because Indians have closer historic ties to South East Asia and diaspora in places like Guyana, the Caribbean and Africa. With the advent of population genomics, we must include findings about Sub-continental pre-history that are more scientific than the idle musings of some 18th century white guy.
PS: good summary of the Indian educational system. As you correctly pointed out, western intuitions about education do not transfer well to the Indian system.
I'm not sure NCERT will ever be able to teach about ethnic diversity within India correctly - it's too politically loaded. For example, I'm Pahari. According to NCERT, we're a Hindi speaking ethnic group, though our Pahari languages are completely indecipherable to Hindi speakers (Eg. Sadh khol lal nukke heghe. Chaiyda tenu?) and we are classified as a different language group from Hindi. Similar reductiveness is applied to the "Hindi Heartland" by removing the ethnolinguistic diversity of Central India (eg. Bihar historically wasn't Hindi speaking until the 1970s because of Hindi oriented literacy programs).
If it's bad enough for highly represented regions of India, imagine less well represented areas like the North East, the Ghats, etc.
The big issue is NCERT and most grade school Indian historical education takes a very "Delhi" centric view of Gupta-Small Kingdoms-Delhi Sultanate-Mughals-British-Independence, but this chronological ordering is true for only a subset of India. South Indian kingdoms (itself a problematic term), Indigenous movements, the entire ethnographic history of the Northeast and the Northwest, etc all get ignored. That said, this is a bipartisan problem - doesn't matter if it's INC, BJP, whatever who's in power.
Also, there is a dearth of qualified teachers for the CBSE curriculum.
When I was in school(2002-2012), the Maharashtra state board history education was Maharashtra centric, not delhi centric. Most of the history lessons revolved around the maratha empire, their enemies. Few years were dedicated to freedom struggle, world wars and ancient history.
Even then though, there was very little about even other kingdoms who ruled present day Maharashtra, so there is clear need of diversity in history education.
This sense of the word 'board' as in 'examination board' also exists in British English. The US also has the 'College Board' which sets some national exams.
I grew up in ~6 different states in 9 schools in the US during the 1990s and 2000s, and we did not have final exams from Kindergarten through 12th grade, other than Advanced Placement (AP) exams.
You typically take tests at various points in time during the school year up to 12th grade, but entire course year tests labeled as "exams" did not happen until university, or AP exams if you took AP courses in high school.
Exam is definitely used in American English, though.
I had final exams in the US, in 2 different states, in both public and private schools. I have 2 kids, and 16-odd neices and nephews in 5 states, from 2nd to 12th grade in both public and private schools. Everyone talked about final exams. I think they get 'officially' called other things; in my state they're called Milestone Assessments, but they sure sound like a final exam to me.
"Georgia Milestones is a single assessment system that consists of end-of-grade measures in English language arts and mathematics in grades 3-8, end-of-grade measures in science in grades 5 and 8, end-of-grade measure in social studies in grade 8, and end-of-course measures for specified high school courses."
Interesting. I did not go to school in Georgia, but various states in the Midwest and Northeast, and I do not recall any year end cumulative test. If I recall, we got a grade each quarter (or half) and then that was averaged for the final grade.
Maybe it's a regional thing. I definitely had cumulative final exams in GA & FL in the 70s and early 80s. The new generation are in the South and West, and while I don't know all the details of each child's school, the wailing and gnashing of teeth about 'final exams' is consistent across all of them[1]. Since we don't really have national standards in the US for such things, it's shouldn't be a surprise that there could be differences in how grades are handled.
[1] To be fair, the kids could just be using 'exam' and interchangeably with 'test' and it isn't a capstone for the year. But that still belies the assertion that 'exam' isn't used much in the US.
Exam's used in American English, plenty. It tends to connote something a bit more serious or formal than a test, but I don't think you'd get much of a difference in reaction just using the two interchangeably, in most contexts. At worst, you'd come off a bit pretentious, using "exam" to describe lesser tests.
"Test" dominates in primary and secondary school, "exam" becoming more common in post-secondary education and for professional certifications et c., but both occur in both contexts.
I grew up in the Cincinnati area and spent a large portion of time in North Carolina. I now live in central Ohio. “Exam” is definitely a word that gets used wherever I’ve lived. Examples have already been brought up — final exams, AP exams, actuarial exams, comprehensive exams, etc.
I hear “exam” all the time in American English, though “test” is perhaps slightly more common. The “T” in LSAT, SAT, PSAT, etc. is “test”, but they are “AP exams” [0], “bar exams”, etc., and both “test prep” and “exam prep” are commom terms for the industry that esiats to take money from people hoping for better scores on any of them.
>It's still being taught in the NCERT books as well, but now in 12th grade instead of 10th grade.
You're not required to take Chemistry and Biology after the 10th grade, so technically you could miss out on the periodic table and evolution still.
That said, I'm pretty sure I only learned the periodic table in 11th grade Chemistry class myself (15 years ago), so I guess it must've moved down to 10th grade at some point after that?
They're removing streams from the Indian education system. The NEP is making the Indian system much more American and will push for electives and classes instead.
So hypothetically, if I was targeting Medical, I could still take some classes in Commerce at the 10-12 level.
I'm just speaking from a content perspective. I'm American born and raised, but often used Indian STEM textbooks to prep for STEM related AP exams as well as competition exams like USAPHo, AIMEs, etc in High School.
In my experience for STEM, JEE >>>> ICSE >> CBSE
All programs will accept the CBSE (it's exclusionary not to), but the CBSE curricula does lag.
Either way, for admissions here in the US, IB/AP+SAT would be preferred over ICSE or CBSE, and the kind of person targeting American undergraduate from India can afford to study IB+AP.
Interesting that you rank some state boards as better than CBSE. Where I'm from (Karnataka), the state board textbooks felt like they weren't nearly as rigorous or interesting as the CBSE equivalents. Any particular state boards that you're referring to?
There are also schools in India (mostly in the large metros) that directly offer the IB and Cambridge Assessments for high school. They follow the same international curriculum.
Kinda wild to see comments on here saying that India's slide into religious fascism isn't a big deal.
"We/Indians don't politicize science"
"There are many education authorities"
I think this is only affecting a particular grade, but we already have seen the slow rollout of other efforts.
You can't normalize politicians saying stuff like "our ancient civilization had nuclear energy".
edit: surprised that I wasn't immediately downvoted. A year ago, talking about this was instant downvotes, on any platform. I guess enough people have noticed this behavior.
There is a silent secular majority in the country that wants absolutely nothing to do with this drivel (i.e., the slide referred to in the parent and what some politicians say as referred to in the GP post).
We have always had crackpots (sometimes crackpots in positions of power/influence) who spout nonsense on all flavors of political ideology. Unfortunately, media (traditional and social media) amplifies the nonsense.
As a secular Indian, I highly doubt that majority, or even plurality of Indians are secular. If anything, I've seen most of my friends go from being secular to conservative moderates/hardliners in last few years. I know quite a few people who would support Muslim genocides, including my family.
Agree with you, majority are going from secular to conservative. May be the secular party should ask why.
But also want to add that Indian version conservatives aren’t really comparable to the western one. Just take this issue on evolution itself Hindus and Buddhists are among the most who believe in evolution.
> This, my dear friends, is Abrahamic privilege at work
I mean, yes. There are idiots in the world, and they're not limited to one religion. We generally decry putting them in positions of power, particularly over eduction.
Completely irrelevant. I find this whataboutism as a very common pushback when I comment on my sadness on the direction of India. I have no connection, but I have empathy for my friends that feel like they lost a home.
This news seems misleading. A charitable reading of the article would assign it a category of "clickbait". The periodic table and evolution are still part of high school curriculum.
Here are the links to the class XI textbook for Chemistry (the so called rationalized text books for 2023-24).
6.1 Origin of Life
6.2 Evolution of Life Forms - A Theory
6.3 What are the Evidences for Evolution?
6.4 What is Adaptive Radiation?
6.5 Biological Evolution
6.6 Mechanism of Evolution
6.7 Hardy - Weinberg Principle
6.8 A Brief Account of Evolution
6.9 Origin and Evolution of Man
The Nature article's summary below the headline states
> Nature has learnt that the periodic table, as well as evolution, won’t be taught to under-16s as they start the new school year.
Yeah, duh! It is taught in Class XI and XII in Chemistry and Biology, just not in Class IX or X as it used to be done previously. Weaving this as some major conspiracy is dishonest and ridiculous.
For the benefit of US readers: Class IX is freshman high school year, Class X is sophomore year, Class XI is junior year, Class XII is senior year.
I found it really beneficial to be exposed to these concepts at a very young age, giving me a lot of exposure over many years and helping inform my overall view of science and the world as I grew up. I had a particularly keen interest in evolution starting with a visit to the Museum of Natural History in NYC at age 6! My mother bought my friend and I pamphlets on evolution (my mother had to clear it with his parents before giving it to him) and it became on ongoing fascination for me for many years.
I know little-to-nothing about elementary education in India, but I always appreciated the broad-based approach to education I experienced in the US, with various concept introduced very early, and then re-introduced periodically over the years. If anything, I would support throwing more knowledge at young students, knowing that they'll only absorb a fraction of it. Though I suppose that approach is anathema to standardized testing.
I don't think this is political or some other non-educational agenda driven. No politician in India has ever thought of education curriculum as part of their vote bank political thinking nor will they take the effort needed go interfere in the academic processes that result in these textbooks.
Anyway, it really doesn't matter if some of these topics are removed from these specific textbooks because most science students who are aspiring to go for engineering or medical undergrad college will study those topics as part of preparations for college entrance exams. Stuff like evolution, environmental pollution and periodic tables will be studied by even those who are applying for Indian civil service exams.
Also, there is no danger of creationism taking hold in India just because evolution is not taught in high school. Also, religious beliefs in India are very diverse and rich and highly complicated that nobody who is inclined to learn sciences will confuse religious beliefs and mythological stories with practical sciences.
Edit: btw, all textbooks are available for free download here: https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php
You can evaluate for yourself and make your own mind. I for one envy students of today with all the rich multimedia material at their fingertips especially to learn formal and natural sciences.
Cutting and defunding education seems such a prevalent global trend, I find it hard to believe there is no hidden agenda.
At least here it seems to happen with the clear political agenda. Who needs evolution and democracy anyways other than those inconvenient to the indian government.
It's a question of where your core axioms come from.
The core axiom from which a person builds a belief system can be that contradictions are wrong or that authority (the bible/priest/parent) is right.
This is why conservatives frequently fail to respond to pointing out their contradictions. Their core axiom is one of authority, contradictions have little bearing on their analysis of what is true or not. New information cannot invalidate their already known truth, so what they already "know" twists and molds the new information, rather than their current understanding adapting to the new information.
This makes (real) education directly at odds with conservatism. Inquiry is an anathema to dogma. Conservatism is happy to teach things that are useful which is why you'll hear conservatives extol the virtues of technical education, but doesn't want to teach methods of inquiry or analysis or questioning ones self and ones assumptions, which is why you'll hear conservatism denigrate liberal arts or frequently secular education.
One confusing factor for American conservatives is that the American tradition that is being conserved is a somewhat liberal tradition. So conservatives attach themselves to many (correct) liberal values, but fail to see that they believe those values as the result of their tradition (meaning as a result of authority), and not as the result of a process of rational inquiry.
Put more succinctly: an educated population is a threat to authority and therefore conservatism.
I'm not sure veneration of authority is a central aspect of conservatism. As I understand it, conservatism is about returning to a previous state of affairs that is perceived as favorable compared to the present, or about maintaining the status quo. It seems to me that two people who were raised in different contexts could be considered conservative with respect to their own contexts, while at the same time one being an authoritarian and the other being a libertarian.
> returning to a previous state of affairs that is perceived as favorable compared to the present
and
> maintaining the status quo
are primarily directed at hierarchy. The exact ideas of any conservative might differ between them (e.g. they might prefer different time periods to "return to", or focus on different areas of society and politics as important right now), but at their core they are directed at building and maintaining strict social/political/economical hierarchies. Often times it's about perceived "natural hierarchies" (e.g. meritocracy in the labor market, or competition in the free market), often times about traditional ones, and sometimes about preventing "unnatural ones", but I honestly can't think of any current or recent conservative legislation (internationally) that doesn't follow this pattern.
A lot of developing countries are in a phase of working out their future paths. Most of them inherited colonial institutions and power structures and are finally hitting a point where all the old guard has died or become irrelevant.
There’s a period of negotiation - figuring out what parts of your colonial history you want to keep, what to change. So many things we assume as “normal” invariably have roots in colonial past. Current systems of Democracy, strict courts of law, scientific education, while great, were introduced by earlier colonial rulers.
Most countries will now spend a few decades fumbling around in internal negotiations to figure out whether they really need 14 years of scientific schooling, democracy, etc.
Why do you suppose that educational institutions are on the chopping block? That would seem like precisely the part of one’s colonial history to keep.
I understand that it has become common to attribute a number of injustices to heritage from the colonial period, but why education in particular? Why that more than fashion, say, or the institutions of law?
For one, educational systems is pretty much where you're truly indoctrinated into the system (any system) and its values. The current Indian education system was inherited from the British and still retains most of its elements. A post-colonial state seeking to right all the injustices of the past - some real, some imagined - would likely want to change the first step its citizens take into the new system they want to create.
In India's case, the dilemna is that the jobs the citizenry aspires to are only accessible through the current British-origin education system. This current government has made a huge push for Hindi language education, for instance, so much so that it even mandated courses in science and medicine be taught in Hindi, even when there are few good translations or instructors.
The citizenry, of course, finds its own way. Despite all the Hindi push, every city is lined with tuition centers that promise to teach you English, because that's the ticket to a better job.
Am I understanding correctly that courses are (mostly?) still taught in English? If so, that suddenly makes the situation a bit more legible to me from the outside!
What a deceptive headline. They cut these things from general science courses (what Americans would consider K-8), but they are still part of "high school" biology.
The closest I see the article coming to explaining the changes are in this passage:
"... considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the content was irrelevant ... It also aims to provide opportunities for experiential learning and creativity."
i.e. to reduce redundancy, make room for something else in the curriculum, or to improve grade point averages.
Another possibility not mentioned would be to provide ideological cover. Delete some things unrelated to ideology, and you have some degree of plausible deniability re. accusations of dogma.
But I find the earlier rationales more plausible. Particularly if they come from people who do not themselves understand the importance of the concepts they are cutting.
It does not actually say that it is taken out of the curriculum. It says that it is taken out from textbooks in a certain year. That means nothing in the context of Indian education considering how accessible a periodic table is.
They actually cut the syllabus for students below class X. It's not a ban or anything. And it's only NCERT's (central board of education) syllabus. Each state has its own education board and syllabus. The headline is not honest.
if each state can just ignore the NCERT curriculum, and if the NCERT curriculum itself is educationally insufficient (not teaching evolution or the periodic table in a school curriculum makes that curriculum a failure), then what is the point of the NCERT curriculum?
It is the common central/federal baseline. It is accepted as a high school credential everywhere in India (other boards are accepted in general too, but NCERT has to be accepted).
This insufficiency with weird omission for evolution and periodic table seems to be due to covid after effects or general incompetence rather than malice.
I studied in 3 different boards at different points of schooling and the rule of thumb was state board, NCERT/CBSE and ICSE in increasing order of “rigor”. The last two years of high school are spent in preparing for competitive entrance exams anyways, whose syllabus usually is a superset of the school syllabus in your chosen field (engineering, medicine, sciences etc.)
So, India has different systems of curriculum, at national level CBSE/NCERT and ICSE, and many states have their own. Each school individually is affiliated to one of the curriculums.
Teachers will still be teaching (and this is probably what NCERT expects) these basic topics, because teaching the topics that remain won't be easy without them.
My sibling was in grade 10 when COVID hit, some topics that had been removed from the final exam were still taught (although in a somewhat brief manner, considering this was online schooling).
Indian politicians say a lot of dumb and pseudo-scientific garbage, but a few subpar comments here are wildly quoting those to act as if they're rewriting all of science in India. They've purely made omissions, no additions/revisions.
EDIT: Made a very silly mistake (in my defence, it was late at night).
The FULL periodic table is there in grade 11, not 9.
Grade 9 only introduces you to the first 18 elements on the table.
Are these changes to school textbooks politically/religiously motivated? Debatable.
Do these changes de-emphasize science education or merely reorganize it? Also debatable.
Are these debates fairly represented by this nature.com article in a balanced way? NOT AT ALL.
The bigger story here is the decline in credibility suffered by nature.com due to its publication of such an unbalanced article.
nature.com used to be one of the gold standard for scientific publications. When they publish garbage like this, more people start to lean "anti-science".
They don’t value STEM education. They value they jobs and prestige STEM education can get them.
Remove the ability to get well paying engineering/medicine jobs from the equation and they’ll treat STEM education with the same disdain they have for commerce, or worse, humanities.
There is very little real appreciation of education. Only its byproducts, namely, jobs.
Completely agree with this statement. I work in HFT and have Indians asking me all the time: "what should I do to get a quant job or a low latency C++ job?". 99.9% of these folks have zero interest in Math (good luck being a quant) or have zero interest/passion in low level systems programming (good luck developing low latency systems). All they care about is the prestige and high pay in the HFT industry, and that if they can have a exam-like route to crack the interviews, they'll go forth and cram the hell out of things. No thanks, we don't want folks like that.
Then why don't the firms have a psychological evaluation to ensure that only people who are passionate about math or low level programming are hired in such firms?
Seems like a win win situation since such folks can nurture their interest, mingle with other like minded folks and company also benefits by their efforts.
> I read an internet comment that said "They don’t value STEM education. They value they jobs and prestige STEM education can get them." The second sentence seems to contradict the first. Can you explain if it does?
And it gave quite a good explanation. If you'd like I can share the chat, but perhaps you'd like to give it a shot yourself?
This makes this decision both more and less outrageous. On one level, it had less effect than a similar decision than the US. On the other, it helps cripple the poor in India (who are actually poor, not American poor).
Both public and private schools in India use NCERT books and have the same examinations. Private schools only ensure things are taught better, what is taught is still the same.
In my experience, government schools are far more likely to be state government schools than central government schools, and so they are more likely use the local state board's curriculum instead those of the CBSE or ICSE.
That goes against what I heard from my Indian friends. I was told that public schools are actually more prestigious than private schools, they are more rigorous apparently?
According to a commenter up-thread, what Americans call "public schools" are referred to as "government schools", and what Americans call "private schools" are referred to as "public schools".
Probably a carryover in terminology from Britain, where extremely prestigious schools like Eton are called "public schools" for historical reasons.
> where extremely prestigious schools like Eton are called "public schools" for historical reasons.
In the UK public and private referred to who could access the schools (assuming they had the money), whereas in the US they refer to how the schools are funded.
Now the UK has a kludge. The former private schools don't really exist, they've mainly changed into independent fee-paying public schools not controlled or funded by the state.
In the meantime (i.e. centuries ago), the state started funding schools, including religiously selective schools and has been increasingly giving more independence to the schools it funds.
> I assumed the terms are basically synonymous in the UK?
No, 'public school' would be understood to refer only to the most elite of private schools in the UK, such as Eton, Harrow, Winchester, etc. A run-of-the-mill private school would not be considered to be a public school.
> public schools are actually more prestigious than private schools
They are, but they are still private schools, not government schools. They are based in British public schools, where the word 'public' refers to the fact that students of any religion could historically be admitted to them, not that they are state-owned or state-controlled.
It depends. Some private schools like Delhi Public School Barakhamba are extremely prestigious, but making a private school is very easy so quality control is trash.
Sometimes private schools can be shittier than the government run schools (eg. in the town my family is from in Himachal) but in other places the private schools will at least not have absentee teachers (a common issue in much poorer regions of India).
P.S. the public school moniker for some Indian private schools is a holdover from the British era. Most modern private schools don't call themselves "public" anymore - they prefer being called "International Schools".
Some public universities like the IIT's, some NIT's, ISI (Indian Statistical Institute, not the intelligence agency), and some other public schools in other fields are prestigious. The public K-12 schools are mostly a joke.
(I'm Indian but left India ~15 years ago, so my info may be out of date.)
It's free in government schools, what Americans would call public schools. Middle and upper class kids usually go to public schools, what Americans would call private schools, which have fees and may use non-NCERT textbooks too. I believe that for a school to be ratified it is only required that it teach at least what is mandated by the relevant education board (generally the national level one, CBSE), so it would be okay for a ratified school to use a private textbook that teaches the NCERT syllabus + periodic table + evolution.
Also college coaching classes (for IIT-JEE etc) may continue to cover these topics anyway. Even during my time they were covering topics that had been cut from the government-mandated curriculum, so it wouldn't be surprising.
Its free but there aren't enough schools and many kids dont attend.
The trend in the us is not making sure only the wealthy get a good education. more people in the us than ever go to college and we are smarter and more educated than ever before.
Back home we had a bit of a vulgar song for the periodic table, as kids who were forced to memorize this, the song was much more entertaining and memorable.
Does anyone else get the feeling that the "great filter" to our continued global civilization advance is how you manage, after reaching a certain size, the millions of competing motivations and concerns that branch out and cause confusion when there are no longer just a few clear problems to solve?
I’m not too familiar with Indian education systems. Does anyone have an idea if and how this would affect future JEE exams? I’m specifically referring to the removal of the periodic table for students under 16 years old.
Also, maybe I missed it, but what’s the point of _removing_ the chapters instead of just not _teaching_ them?
Right; we wouldn't want the next generation of one of the most populous nations, that is at a more imminent and grave risk from global warming than most others, to have a science background?
It's like some secret plot perpetrated by an external enemy who aims to eradicate the nation.
Understanding that atoms are the foundation of matter and evolutionary adaptation are fundamental to life goes directly against any religion that purports alternate explanations. There is nothing innocuous about this, it is a theocratic censure.
India is a country of contradictions. My mom was a bio teacher, and obviously believes in the concept of evolution. But she's also spiritual and religious, and believes in creationist theories. She is somehow able to juxtapose both into creating a meaningful "story".
Id encourage non-Indians to read up about India to have the cultural context we grow up in
I scanned the whole article but could not find any mention of the reason behind this move. I mean evolution may be violating some Hindu teaching but what is the problem with periodic table of elements?
Don't exactly know if evolution violates some Hindu teachings, but a statement was released last month stating that evolution was removed from the grade 10 book because it's present in the grade 12 book-
Similarly, I'm guessing the periodic table was removed from the grade 10 book because it's already present in the grade 9 book.
IMO they probably should've kept a page or two about evolution though, because after grade 10, students are free to pick their own courses (which doesn't have to be biology), but this is probably debatable. I'm all for reducing the burden though.
This Nature article is pretty poorly written (by Nature's standards) and lowkey sounds like the drivel I'd expect from Indian media.
Right, but the goal here is to reduce the burden by removing things that are already present elsewhere.
You could probably make the same argument for a bunch of other 9th grade topics.
Regardless, teachers won't just pretend like the periodic table doesn't exist though, they'll talk about it in 10th grade too, because it ties into a few other chapters, but the key difference is that the students won't be graded on it in their final exams.
You can already check the omitted chapters and the textbooks themselves on the NCERT website.
That article barely explains anything and is literally tagged as 'humour'.
Looks like they're more interested in playing politics than discussing the changes.
The primary reason cited for these changes is that they're aimed at reducing the burden on students. They've tried to reduce the syllabus by about 30%.
> IMO they probably should've kept a page or two about evolution though
How do you even teach biology or natural sciences without dedicated a significant amount if time for evolution (not just a page or two... lol..). Are these subject not taught at all in Indian school? Before 11/12 grade (assuming the students picks them)? What do they focus on instead?
> How do you even teach biology or natural sciences without dedicated a significant amount if time for evolution (not just a page or two... lol..)
I'm no biologist or teacher, but I don't feel like you need to jump into evolution to understand how everyday things like digestion or photosynthesis occur.
There are plenty of introductory articles on the internet that could fit in a page or two. Interested students could go home and look it up.
I meant it as a means to provoke curiosity and to be made aware of.
Certain pages on the textbooks here have these boxes with some trivia about scientists/inventions. I remember reading those boxes in school and then coming home and looking things up to learn a bit more. You aren't graded on them, but they're interesting to read.
> Are these subject not taught at all in Indian school? Before 11/12 grade (assuming the students picks them)?
You don't get to pick anything other than your language until grade 10.
Biology, physics and chemistry are compulsory until grade 10.
If a student picks biology after grade 10, they will be taught evolution in more detail.
> What do they focus on instead?
It starts around 6th grade.
Begins with humans and plants, their anatomy, nutrition, reproduction, everyday activities etc.
Then you learn about cells and tissues, hormones and sex-ed, evolution and heredity, AFAIK.
Ding ding ding. India has always been very education and tech forward. Hopefully this is a not the beginning of a trend, but the increased nationalism and authoritarianism (crypto, vpn ban) would fit very well with a dumbed down populace.
This is not what the title makes it to seem, most of India believes science and education leads to success in life and for the country. If anything businesses will now make more money by teaching periodic tables and evolution in "coaching classes"
TLDR: Nature and most other western publications failed to do basic fact check, neither periodic table or evolution are 'cut' from textbooks. They're just moved to a different grade.
Unfortunately, its likely much worse than merely failing to do fact checking.
India has been handicapped by a highly insufficient educational system set up by the British (and later run by its puppets) for a very long time, that was meant to produce robots/slaves/peons, not independent thinkers.
They are finally having discussions about how to redesign the education system, to empower its people to become future leaders, innovators. Given that India has a very young population, if they do this redesign right, it will pay off handsomely in the future.
Of course, there are many parties who do not want to see that happen. So what do they do? They disrupt the public discourse taking place around this in the country by spreading disinformation via publications such as nature.com, that get scientists in India riled up against the education related gov't bodies, instead of collaboratively working with them.
For a good overview of how idealogical subversion of this kind is carried out I would recommend watching interviews of Yuri Bezmenov on youtube.
The only way I can see this making rational sense is if the senior leaders in the government are in possession of secret, solid evidence that population growth is about to become lethal in the extreme, and this is a radical move by the government to precipitate their own depopulation through mass starvation.
But I seriously doubt that's the case and the mechanism of action seems weak.
Lots of science at this level is not taught as you say and they just teach them as fact. They teach kids about techtonic plates, dinosaurs, atoms and the planets as just facts about the universe. why separate out "evolution" as one topic that needs this rigorous standard to be taught to kids?
Evolutionary biology is particularly hard to teach from "first principles" anyway. Once you get beyond the basic natural selection definition (variation, differential fitness, heritability), there's a lot of deeply unintuitive implications that only apply situationally, or mechanisms that result from the details of complex biochemistry. It's difficult enough to teach at an undergrad level that evolutionary theory classes are usually reserved for Juniors and Seniors with some prereqs.
Evolutionary biology is particularly easy to teach from first principles. That's one of the things which makes exploring it, as a scientific process, fun.
I actually don't. I take this on a case-by-case basis. I presented both the heliocentric and geocentric theories to my kid.
Good news: He figured out which one was right quickly enough...
Bad news: ....because someone spoiled it for him
It's easy enough to show experimentally.
Atoms, we're simply wrong about. Most of the things taught K-12 are based on obsolete models like the Bohr model. That one, I'm struggling with how to teach quite a lot.
Dinosaurs and tectonic plates aren't really all that fundamental, so I'd present them as facts. I might have some fun with young earth creationism, though, if I were feeling particularly inspired.
As for evolution:
1) The theory taught in school is wrong in enough ways which matter that I do single it out. There's also a mixture of facts, hypotheses, and errors.
2) The reasoning models underlie a lot of things, from evolutionary psychology to machine learning.
3) It's politicized, and in my local school district, used to tarnish the other political side in entirely inappropriate ways.
4) My school district spends less time on tectonic plates, dinosaurs, atoms, and planets combined than they do on any of (a) evolution (b) climate change (c) critical race theory (d) virtually anything other polarized.
5) They also do it before kids are ready to engage critically.
You can also see evolution taking place within our lifetime (nylonase evolved to eat nylon, a man-made substance from the 20th century).
I do not mean to be rude or start a flamewar, but we have to stand our ground when it comes to scientific progress.
The collective survival of humanity requires us to teach these subjects. Understanding evolution across the geological eras and extinction events is crucial to steering the new generations towards a sustainable future.
Unquestionable facts do not exist in science. It is not how the scientific method works. It is a serious issue that the basic foundations of scientific method are now completely misunderstood by the vast majority of the public. This issue is spilling into politics and academia, as showed completely clearly with covid and terms like 'The Science' being used in an outright authoritarian or even religious way.
I think science needs to be taught through a different lens, without unquestionable facts, all the way from childhood. If done properly it only has positive effects in improving critical thinking and adding a sense of wonder about all the facets of the universe that remain to further understand.
Unfortunately it likely comes down to the unfortunate observation that political powers want a public that is trained to be obedient and accept facts handed down from above.
Essentially every model is wrong and will be continually replaced with an improved one. Classical mechanics was incredibly convincing. Don't fall into the fallacy that our era is the first to have it all solved. It isn't subjectivity, it is the objective philosphy of science and definition of scientific method. There was a time when your messages would be applied to argue that Earth is the centre of the universe and people were killed if they disagreed.
For evolution in particular, I am not religious at all and probably have as much 'faith' in the basics of it as any evolutionary biologist would, but there are massive questions still open, like abiogensis being completely unsolved
>If you have proof for a better explanation then that explanation becomes the accepted one.
There is no proof, there is only evidence. It simply takes some softer wording to say 'we observe x, so we conclude y' instead of proof and facts
This is not to say evolution doesn't occur, of course it does, and most rational people without an overzealous religious bent recognize this. It's an obvious explanation and it fits, it predicts successfully and it explains satisfactorily.
But it's important to differentiate between a fact and a theory. A fact is simple observable phenomena without explanation. An apple fell to the ground is fact. "Why" the apple fell the ground (gravity) is theory.
This doesn't dispute predictive power or best fit explanation of gravity at all. Likewise with evolution. That is how things work, yes almost certainly, but it is still a theory.
It's what science is about and how it defines things!
Apparently some people are looking at the first sentence and assuming "Evolution Denier!" and this is not the case at all. This is simply an argument for good science and correct terminology when talking about scientific principals!
Gravity, and Evolution are theories. That is what they are. They are not facts (scientifically speaking). A fact is something else.
This has no relevance to evolution being best fit explanation for biological diversity (which, just to be clear, I agree with 100%) or gravity being best fit explanation for why things fall down at a consistent rate.
The fossil record isn't particularly good evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection because of the nature of fossilization. It requires special conditions and the overwhelming majority of creatures never fossilize. It is good evidence that creatures that used to be around aren't anymore though.
Evolutionary biologists tend to be very defensive though. If you say to a particle physicist "hey the standard model isn't that great" he'll say "yep, wish we could do better." If you say to an evolutionary biologist "hey the theory of evolution by natural selection isn't that great" he'll resort to ad hominems. This is probably because the standard model is hard science, whereas evolution by natural selection is more of a best effort conjecture.
And there is a really important distinction to be made. Evolution in the sense of heritable traits being selected for is undeniable fact. Dogs are a thing after all so we've verified the effects of selection in a controlled setting. So when someone critiques the theory of evolution by natural selection it should be understood as part of the process of coming up with a better theory, not "muh anti science."
I will push back here. The fossil record shows change over time. There are several theories consistent with the facts:
(1) Evolution by natural selection
(2) Evolution guided by God
(3) God created the world 5000 years ago, but didn't want to leave evidence to leave open the question of faith
There are many others. You will find some more reasonable than others, and for others, it's the reverse. A big part of what I'd like my son to develop is empathy: being able to step into the mind of others, and understand what they think.
Even if "they're wrong" and we're fighting "them." If he were growing up in Ukraine, I'd like him to be able to understand the Russian soldiers' mindset. That fits into Sun Tzu / Understand Your Enemy.
In the scientific process I learned in high school, we have hypotheses confirmed with experiments (the current process adds things like preregistration and replication). For things which only happened in the past, we can't follow this process; it's fundamentally extrapolation.
Yes, we can observe and simulate evolution right now, but unless we invent a time machine, we can't know -- in a scientific sense -- that's what led to where we are today over millions of years. That's the whole micro-/macro-evolution debate.
Getting back to Sun Tzu, without understanding the intellectual basis, it's impossible for you to have a meaningful conversation with a well-educated young earth creationist. In a debate, they WILL win. You might be right, but your arguments won't be. In a discussion, you'll look like an idiot. Stepping up a level, politics will become more polarizing because your side will be painted as idiots to them, and vice-versa.
If you create a simulated environment that results in selection, mutation and crossover, and a measure of fitness, even if not implicit, and then add a few cells, let it run for millions of iterations and then end up with space marines, that would be more akin to what you claim "has no bearing on reality".
I can simulate a creationist environment in which anything in your simulated evolutionary environment also exists. Is that evidence for creationism? No of course not. Computer simulations aren’t evidence for anything.
Come to think of it, according to the simulationists, the existence of computer simulations in our reality is evidence that we live inside such a simulation. So if anything your simulation of evolution is evidence for the simulationist form of intelligent design creationism.
Well, partner, if simulations don't resonate with you go believe whatever you want. Be free and go enjoy the world. Go outdoors, dig a little bit until you find a fossil and then dig a few more of them.
Then, classify those fossils and keep track of where in the geological record you found them. Then try to come up with a plausible explanation of how those fossils ended up there, keeping in consideration their classification and age.
Maybe you will find a consistent trend and then hear about people that have been doing exactly that for many years now. They all seem to have reached a consensus around how those fossils ended up there. It's about a little word that begins with E. You'll find that story very interesting.
The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is not uniquely determined by the fossil record. The fossil record is at least as consistent with other macroevolutionary theories and with non-macroevolutionary theories too. Look at it this way, the existence of gravitational experimental data doesn’t determine Newtonian gravity to be correct. And biology is a considerably more tricky subject than mechanics.
I think we can all agree that physics is farther along than biology. But I bet you’d have no problem telling me at least one major open problem with General Relativity. Can you bring yourself to tell me even one major open problem with the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection? If not is that a psychological deficiency on your part, or is that theory somehow uniquely flawless?
As for consensus, it’s as irrelevant to reality as computer simulations. Historically speaking the vast majority of human consensuses on anything, including science, have been wrong almost all of the time. The overwhelming arrogance to believe that we’re now fundamentally different is stultifying.
It's too bad, because actually teaching the theory of evolution by natural selection seems appropriate. Of course actually teaching it also means teaching the unknowns like, to name just a few, why did life begin, why did the Cambrian explosion happen, why did sex evolve when it reduces many genes' chance of being passed on by about 50%, how does gradual mutation select for structures like eyes, and what causes mutation fixation to increase to a rate that can explain the current genetic diversity on the planet?
And of course for many people it's an emotional issue because they think it has some kind of religious significance. Interestingly, I see that kind of religious obsession from atheists as well as the, in my view, less intellectually sophisticated theists. Personally, being Catholic, I have no problem with the theory of evolution by natural selection. I think the open questions are interesting and like any theory describing something as complex as the entire biosphere there are going to be many difficulties and perhaps there is a better theory waiting to be discovered, but the notion that God might have effected creation gradually through natural processes that He established just isn't a problem for my faith.
Indians predominantly subscribe to the Hindu belief system, which is quite foreign from the Western ideologies imposed on them by the British.
Consider the concepts of atman (essentially, meaning Self) and avatars (essentially, deities coming down to earth to take on human form). Darwinian evolution acts as a simplified, analogous representation of the grander evolution of Self as told in Hindu mythology. According to Hinduism, atman evolves by inhabiting more complete forms of physical vessel, passing from fish to amphibian to cow to human to Buddha.
Additionally, Hindu belief systems admit the existence of reincarnative process, which Western belief systems, including our most fundamental prevailing scientific axiom, do not. Darwinian evolution and an overarching reincarnative process cannot coexist because the former requires that the physical world is the totality of reality while the latter requires that the physical world is a small but important portion of reality. Humans are either the descendants of monkeys via a completely-observable evolutionary process, or forces beyond those which are Seen shape our development.
Western arrogance dismisses these ideas as invalid at face value. A Westerner should honestly seek to understand the Hindu belief system and suss out where it is accurate and inaccurate without resorting to pathos argumentation.
> Darwinian evolution and an overarching reincarnative process cannot coexist because the former requires that the physical world is the totality of reality
What? No it doesn't. In fact, evolution comports rather nicely with reincarnation–there is a finite number of souls reincarnating through ever-evolving bodies, working together across time to press life as a whole forward.
> Humans are either the descendants of monkeys via a completely-observable evolutionary process
Humans are not descendants of monkeys. That is not, and has never been science. Humans and monkey share a common ancestor, as do all mammals.
Unless there is observable evidence for these claims it might be the complete inverse of that?
> from the Western ideologies imposed on them by the British.
So all the people who actually have embraced scientific thought (logical reasoning in general) only did so because the British forced? Seems like a great bunch.. these British, just don't tell this to the French or Germans.
This is more likely for the reasons to be innocuous.
> In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the content was irrelevant. It also aims to provide opportunities for experiential learning and creativity.
> NCERT announced the cuts last year, saying that they would ease pressures on students studying online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India, says that science teachers and researchers expected that the content would be reinstated once students returned to classrooms. Instead, the NCERT shocked everyone by printing textbooks for the new academic year with a statement that the changes will remain for the next two academic years, in line with India’s revised education policy approved by government in July 2020.
Sounds more like students have continued lagging behind after coming back from Covid, than anything malicious. I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science.
I might be wrong, but I would genuinely like to see 1st source statements from the board indicating that these changes are religiously motivated.