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?
India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
111–120 of 292 posts
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.'
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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?
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#114This 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…
> 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.
What’s there to be proud of about that?
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]…
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)
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#116This 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 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 Hea…
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Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#117India 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?
You left out “imagined”.
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#118India 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 w…
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?
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#119This 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…
> but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India.
Isn't this part actually true, because Britain pillaged India for centuries?
Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 w…
> I had a Hindu nationalist recently berate me about how the "US had lost the Space Race, ISRO was the clear winner." ... did they give any examples of ISRO space accomplishments that predate US or Soviet accomplishment?
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.