India takes theory of evolution and periodic table out of school – 01/06/2023 – World

Students from India who return to classrooms this month for the beginning of the school year in the country will not have contact with basic subjects of the discipline of science, such as the theory of evolution, the periodic table and subjects related to environmental sustainability.

The exclusion of content, the target of criticism from thousands of experts, comes with the approval of the National Council for Educational Research and Training, NCERT, a state body of the Ministry of Education of the nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the BJP.

The change in textbooks is expected to affect millions of 14- to 16-year-old students. According to information from the Qatari network Al Jazeera, the NCERT material is currently used in over 24,000 affiliated schools in the country and over 240 Indian schools abroad.

It was in the Covid pandemic that the exclusion of content began. Claiming the need to ease the demand on students who were studying remotely at the height of the health crisis, the body linked to the Education portfolio reduced the list of topics to be taught – and there went the theory of evolution.

The aggravating factor came later, already in the first semester of this year, when the didactic material began to be printed also without these subjects, even if, now, the classrooms are once again occupied. In rare manifestations, NCERT alleged the need to “rationalize education” and reduce repetitive content.

In a document recently released by the education agency on didactic content, there is an excerpt that brings together “thematic content that was discarded and, therefore, should not be evaluated”.

The list reveals exclusions that go beyond the theory of evolution. It contains everything related to energy sources, debates on democracy and diversity, as well as political parties and social movements.

The response from experts was almost immediate. In April, more than 1,800 scientists and educators signed a joint open letter, organized by the Calcutta-based Breakthrough Science Society. Among other things, they recalled that only a small number of students choose biology as their training area — only those who do, after all, will have contact with these topics excluded from the basic curriculum.

“Knowing and understanding the theory of evolution is fundamental to understanding the world around us. Although many people don’t realize it, principles of natural selection help us understand how any pandemic progresses or why certain species become extinct, among many other issues. fundamental for a rational world view”, says an excerpt from the document.

“Darwin’s observations that led him to the theory of natural selection educate students about the importance of critical thinking. To deprive students who do not particularly choose to study biology of any exposure to this subject is a sham of education.”

In the justification of NCERT, the contents may have been excluded for some reasons. Among them: “being irrelevant to the current context”; “difficulty level”, “be easily accessible to the student without the need for teacher intervention” or “repeat similar content”.

For many analysts, the curriculum changes are closely related to the Hindu nationalism that dominates Prime Minister Modi’s policies. This is because, in addition to science areas, there were cuts in the history content to which students will have access.

The new books no longer include sections on the hundreds of years of the Mughal empire, in power from the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, or the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which riots between local communities left more than a thousand dead —mostly Muslims—in the region where Modi was chief minister.

Hindus constitute about 80% of the Indian population, while Muslims represent around 14% (official data). Under Modi, in power since 2014, the stigma and persecution of this minority has grown, and the attempt to represent India as a historically Hindu country has escalated.

The exclusion of these excerpts was celebrated by the prime minister’s allied base. Ruling party leader Kapil Mishra said on Twitter that deleting the Mughal story, which he called false, was “a big decision”. “These are thieves and squatters who are now no longer in our history books but in the rubbish heap,” he wrote.

Under Modi, India, now the world’s most populous country, has seen a wave of autocratization. Some of the main research institutes consider the country an electoral autocracy — a system that has multiparty elections, but falls short of other democratic pillars due to irregularities in institutional guarantees, such as freedom of expression.