India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

Who is removing the option to teach anything at home?

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.

>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?

Evolution is not an opinion, it is a fact based on reproducible and falsifiable experiments.

You can even simulate evolution and see it at work.

https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/

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.

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.

[0] https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/ap-exams-overview