High school students will have radically different textbooks soon, with several key subjects dropped from government-issue reading material that has sparked concern about their academic proficiency.
Here are 10 facts on this big story:
- The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) deciding to cut chapters under its "rationalisation" move could hit over 134 million students in the age group of 11-18.
- Class 6 students will no longer learn about food and where it comes from. They also don't have chapters now on the key elements of democracy and on India's climate and wildlife.
- Students in Class 7 will not learn about the struggle for equality now, a chapter that explained the factors that contribute to various forms of inequality in India. The chapter also had information on the famous struggles for equality, such as the women's movement and Tawa Matsya Sangh, which fights for the rights of displaced forest dwellers in Madhya Pradesh.
- NCERT says that the cuts, which were first announced in May 2022, were made to ensure a "speedy recovery" in learning after the coronavirus pandemic. "Difficulty level, overlapping content, and content irrelevant in the present context" are some of the reasons listed by NCERT for dropping the chapters from the curriculum.
- Two of the topics which seem to have been hit the hardest across classes are democracy and Mughal rule in India, chapters on which have been dropped from Classes 6, 9, 10, 11, and 12th.
- Chapters on poverty, peace, development, states of matter are among those that are no longer a part of NCERT's Class 11 textbooks.
- For Class 12 students - Gujarat riots, understanding partition, cold war and reproduction in organisms are some of the chapters which have been dropped.
- Earlier this year, more than 1,800 scientists and educators had written an open letter against the theory of evolution being dropped from the Class 10 science textbook.
- The government, though, has rejected all criticism as propaganda.
- "Due to Covid-19, rationalisation of courses was going on, to reduce the burden of studies on the child. If a child wants to study, Darwin's Theory is available on all websites. In Class 12, there is already Darwin's Theory in the syllabus so there should not be such false propaganda," Minister of State (MoS) for Education Subhas Sarkar said.
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