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India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

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Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

home schooling is practically illegal in most of western europe and school is taking more and more of the child's life

You can still teach your kid at home. I for one am glad that Europe expects and enforced certain education standards.

it is education standard if you are on the right side of it, sometimes you see it as the formation of the new soviet man if you are not

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#52
post #23

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 conte…

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.

[1] https://www.outlookindia.com/national/cow-dung-protects-from...

[2] https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/economy-politics/story/i...

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#53
post #47
post #23

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 conte…

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. In 2018, the education minister declared Darwin was wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/23/indian-educati... This is just one of many such troubling incidents, including apparent indifference to the murder of pro-rationalism academics. Anec…

Slightly pedantic, but Satya Pal Singh wasn't Minister of Education.

That said, the rest is true.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#54
post #18

[flagged]

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#55
post #17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#56

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#57
post #47
post #23

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 conte…

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. In 2018, the education minister declared Darwin was wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/23/indian-educati... This is just one of many such troubling incidents, including apparent indifference to the murder of pro-rationalism academics. Anec…

[deleted]

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still teach your kid at home. I for one am glad that Europe expects and enforced certain education standards.

it is education standard if you are on the right side of it, sometimes you see it as the formation of the new soviet man if you are not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man

I’m sure homeschooled kids aren’t indoctrinated, at all.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#59
post #18

[flagged]

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 scienti…

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Exam" isn't commonly used in American English. Huh? Is this a homeschool trend? Final exams are the cornerstone of US secondary and tertiary education.

The word "exam" isn't really used in American English. Tests are definetly a thing in the US.

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.
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