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

291–292 of 292 posts

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#291

Post by funnybusiness2 »

Are these changes to school textbooks politically/religiously motivated? Debatable.

Do these changes de-emphasize science education or merely reorganize it? Also debatable.

Are these debates fairly represented by this nature.com article in a balanced way? NOT AT ALL.

The bigger story here is the decline in credibility suffered by nature.com due to its publication of such an unbalanced article.

nature.com used to be one of the gold standard for scientific publications. When they publish garbage like this, more people start to lean "anti-science".

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#292

Post by funnybusiness2 »

rideofvalkyrie wrote: post #290

Don't let facts stand in your way to senseless propaganda. The textbooks are all available online. Periodic table: https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?kech1=3-6 Evolution: https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?lebo1=6-13 http://www.indiatodayne.in/national/story/ncert-syllabus-row... TLDR: Nature and most other western publications failed to do basic fact check, neither periodic table or evolution are 'cut' from textbooks.…

Unfortunately, its likely much worse than merely failing to do fact checking.

India has been handicapped by a highly insufficient educational system set up by the British (and later run by its puppets) for a very long time, that was meant to produce robots/slaves/peons, not independent thinkers.

They are finally having discussions about how to redesign the education system, to empower its people to become future leaders, innovators. Given that India has a very young population, if they do this redesign right, it will pay off handsomely in the future.

Of course, there are many parties who do not want to see that happen. So what do they do? They disrupt the public discourse taking place around this in the country by spreading disinformation via publications such as nature.com, that get scientists in India riled up against the education related gov't bodies, instead of collaboratively working with them.

For a good overview of how idealogical subversion of this kind is carried out I would recommend watching interviews of Yuri Bezmenov on youtube.

Post reply on HN