Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 292 posts

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#151

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

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…

Historically it has never been. Even in day to day life neither science nor evolution or periodic table has been debated. While it could be very innocuous, the new BJP government is also a bit on the "our history, our culture" side.

I am hoping this is just the NCERT just removing modules that students just rote learn.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#152

Post by buildbot »

anticodon wrote: post #119
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…

> but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India. Isn't this part actually true, because Britain pillaged India for centuries?

Couldn't the same be said for the dominant group before and after? Honestly asking, but looking through the history, that area has been in turmoil a long time, which is true of most places. And also does not excuse imperialism either of course.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#153

Post by xeonmc »

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…

To lose one civilization may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#154

Post by Bekknqv »

bluepod4 wrote: post #128

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?

The periodic table is actually already present in the 9th grade textbook.

As it stands, they haven't changed the JEE syllabus, so you do have to learn it either way.

Probably just to save paper and make lighter books? Not sure. Back in my day, they'd just ask us to ignore chapters that weren't in the syllabus.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#155

Post by snapcaster »

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.

Yeah such a backwards culture. They should have the common sense to be born in my country which invented Freedom and Democracy and is a shining beacon for the entire world!

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#156

Post by duskwuff »

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…

The corollary story that usually shows up is that Westerners "stole" scientific discoveries from India and suppressed them while the country was under occupation. There's a fairly standard example of this at:

https://pparihar.com/2017/05/22/modern-inventions-stolen-fro...

And the BBC reported on some instances of this sort of thought at the Indian Science Congress in 2019:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46778879

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#157

Post by 1024core »

alephnerd wrote: post #115
dmix wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I, on the other hand, can't stand when people cherry-pick facts to try and make a point.

The INC is doing the same caste/tribe based division of power that you accuse the BJP of. Have you seen the list of ministers in the latest Karnataka cabinet: https://thefederal.com/states/south/karnataka/karnataka-cabi... ?

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#158

Post by dexzod »

Bekknqv wrote: post #127
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 pres…

Oh wow, this is not the only thing axed from curriculum. This article goes in some more detail: https://thewire.in/education/h-for-hindu-rashtra-is-a-ration...

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#159

Post by psychoslave »

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.

> The narrative is that all knowledge originated in ancient Indian texts and was stolen by the west.

There is plenty of objective material to feed discourses about admirable achievements that Indian people offered to mankind. I mean, think Pāṇini or Ramanujan to cite only two people whose work are well known in HN community. But obviously they are numerous example in many western scholar fields and beyond like yoga or Kamasutra.

It makes all the more ridiculous any attempt to exaggerate about glorious past: those who do prove themselves not living up the depth and fine grained nuances of their actual heritage.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#160

Post by onetimeusename »

SAS_SBS wrote: post #118
local_crmdgeon wrote: post #83

Earlier 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…

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 t…

I've seen this too. My ex is kind of a Hindu nationalist and her friend group and family are full of them. Her brother even threatened her for dating me saying he would cut off all contact and never let her see his children unless she consented to do an arranged marriage with an Indian (which she secretly came here to escape).

But then the same Hindu nationalists had this weird tendency to think they were entitled to US based tech jobs. They would claim Indians were responsible for all the tech companies in the US being successful and not Americans and that America is this awful, sad, corrupt society that they really wanted to get into despite India being better in every way apparently. It was irritating at times and sad because this isn't uncommon imo.

Post reply on HN