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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

#91

Post by vinay_ys »

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#92

Post by ta_vf7xjd34cc »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #79

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 imm…

[flagged]

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#93

Post by DANmode »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #52
screye wrote: 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 ma…

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#94

Post by dmix »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #52
screye wrote: 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 ma…

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#95

Post by AtlasBarfed »

meepmorp wrote: post #86
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What does any of this have to do with the US?

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#96

Post by omginternets »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #81
WhatsName wrote: post #4

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.

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…

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?

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#97

Post by dmix »

alephnerd wrote: post #53
neilk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Pal_Singh_(Uttar_Pradesh...

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#98

Post by mythrwy »

29athrowaway wrote: post #27
blagie wrote: post #18

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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…

Evolution is not a fact. It's a theory.

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.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#99

Post by FreshStart »

postalrat wrote: post #88
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #77

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.

What countries don't look back at their past glories?

Germany, the US in more lefty towns, eastern Europe were the colonial past half devoured the culture. Conquered and defeated empires.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#100

Post by givemeethekeys »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #80
givemeethekeys wrote: post #45

I'm calling shenanigans. There are many education systems in India. There's a central one, but each state has its own. Indians at every economic level (except maybe the very top) value STEM education above everything else. I wish we'd learn to dial back the hysteria. I wish people weren't so damn trigger happy.

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.

> They don’t value STEM education. They value they jobs and prestige STEM education can get them.

Second sentence disagrees with the first sentence.

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