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India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

nature.com

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Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#121

Post by jcranmer »

ff2400t wrote: post #109
jcranmer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

One important thing to know about people like these is that they don't have a rational argument They have a Believe and they like to shout it out to the world.

Oh, I'm absolutely aware of that, I was just curious if there was literally anything they could point to that could, if viewed at through significantly rose-colored lenses, be seen as support for their statement. Like maybe (given my previous experience with Hindu nationalists) some passage in the Vedas that was interpreted to mean ancient Hindus were actually a spacefaring race or something.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#122

Post by wrycoder »

dmix wrote: post #97
alephnerd wrote: post #53

Earlier 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]…

He seems to be an upstanding and popular fellow, but sadly lacking in scientific education. Seems strange for India.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#123

Post by SAS_SBS »

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…

Most Indians are in fact happy about that slide, given that 80%+ of the country are Hindus. What a shame!

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#124

Post by jackmott42 »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #114
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…

> 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 su…

It doesn't matter if a story makes sense, just that it is easy to understand. See much of rhetoric in America right now, and Russia regarding Ukraine.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#125

Post by CamperBob2 »

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.

I wish people weren't so damn trigger happy.

Translation: "I wish no one owned a history book."

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#126

Post by SAS_SBS »

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.

Completely agree with this statement. I work in HFT and have Indians asking me all the time: "what should I do to get a quant job or a low latency C++ job?". 99.9% of these folks have zero interest in Math (good luck being a quant) or have zero interest/passion in low level systems programming (good luck developing low latency systems). All they care about is the prestige and high pay in the HFT industry, and that if they can have a exam-like route to crack the interviews, they'll go forth and cram the hell out of things. No thanks, we don't want folks like that.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#127

Post by Bekknqv »

dexzod wrote: post #111

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?

They're trying to reduce the burden on students.

Don't exactly know if evolution violates some Hindu teachings, but a statement was released last month stating that evolution was removed from the grade 10 book because it's present in the grade 12 book-

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/darwins...

Similarly, I'm guessing the periodic table was removed from the grade 10 book because it's already present in the grade 9 book.

IMO they probably should've kept a page or two about evolution though, because after grade 10, students are free to pick their own courses (which doesn't have to be biology), but this is probably debatable. I'm all for reducing the burden though.

This Nature article is pretty poorly written (by Nature's standards) and lowkey sounds like the drivel I'd expect from Indian media.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#128

Post by bluepod4 »

I’m not too familiar with Indian education systems. Does anyone have an idea if and how this would affect future JEE exams? I’m specifically referring to the removal of the periodic table for students under 16 years old.

Also, maybe I missed it, but what’s the point of _removing_ the chapters instead of just not _teaching_ them?

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#129

Post by SAS_SBS »

Dig1t wrote: post #11
benced wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is far more common in India to go to a private school. As a rule of thumb, if you know an educated Indian, they went to private school. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/in... This makes this decision both more and less outrageous. On one level, it had less effect than a similar decision than the US. On the other, it helps cripple the poor in India (who are actually poor, not American poor)…

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?

Some public universities like the IIT's, some NIT's, ISI (Indian Statistical Institute, not the intelligence agency), and some other public schools in other fields are prestigious. The public K-12 schools are mostly a joke.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#130

Post by rajup »

Bhilai wrote: post #71
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…

> 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…

> 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

There is evidence for plastic surgery being known in Ancient India through works of Sushruta/Charaka. Leaving apart the sewing of an elephant’s head on a human body, which was probably added for religious/mythological effect I don’t quite see what’s nonsensical here?

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