What NCERT is telling us about India’s precolonial history of science and how we can honour and recognise older forms of knowledge in school curricula

The amendment to India’s constitution contained these words. The writers of the constitution believed that the pursuit of evidence, reasoning and humanity were the responsibilities of every citizen as India emerged from arguably the most tumultuous period in its history after it gained independence from Britain.

Science educators are particularly concerned about the removal of evolution. A chapter on diversity in living organisms and one called ‘Why do we fall ill’ has been removed from the syllabus for class-9 students, who are typically 14–15 years old. A chapter about heredity and evolution for class 10 pupils has removed contributions to evolution from Darwin. That chapter is now called just ‘Heredity’. Evolution, says Joshi, is essential to understanding human diversity and “our place in the world”.

NCERT says that ‘rationalization’ is needed when content overlaps with material covered elsewhere in the curriculum, or when it considers content to be irrelevant. Moreover, India’s 2020 National Education Policy says that students need to become problem-solvers and critical thinkers, and it therefore advocates less memorization of content and more active learning.

NCERT also wants “a rootedness and pride in India, and its rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems and traditions”. The motivation for removing the likes of Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday can be interpreted as a way to learn more about India’s precolonial history of science.

India is not the only postcolonial country grappling with the question of how to honour and recognize older or Indigenous forms of knowledge in its school curricula. Mtauranga Mori has been taught in a number of New Zealand schools. But it is not removing important scientific content to accommodate the new material, and for good reason.

What science and history tell us about India: a case study of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh institute

The process of evolution by natural selection is one of the key concepts that explain the world at large, and encourages students to wonder about. Life, in all its magnificent permutations and combinations, is the product of evolutionary processes. The building blocks of our physical world are a small set of chemical elements. How and why these two spheres are the way they are can be traced back to lessons NCERT has axed.

Moreover, there’s a great deal of literature and teaching practice that outlines how scientific concepts can be taught using visual methods, such as videos and animation, instead of by rote learning. An alternative is to embed concepts using non-fiction narrative storytelling. In the case of the periodic table, this would involve detailing how individual elements found their places in the table; the highs and lows, dramas and inflection points as researchers sought to get to the truth and be recognized for their achievements.

Learning core scientific concepts, practising problem-solving and delving deep into the history of science — both local and global — needn’t be done in isolation. The development of a scientific temperament and pride in heritage can go hand in hand. We have written in these columns before about the need for a firm grasp of what came before. In short, science and history complement each other.

Researchers who study India’s education policy have told Nature that organizations that are critical of science are advocating for or influencing these changes to textbooks. They point to one organization in particular: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has close ties to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

NCERT does need to listen to the opinions of the entire community. But, as an autonomous body, it must be free to make its own decisions, and should always do so on the basis of the best available evidence. Public confidence in its decisions will be helped if it engages with all users: pupils, teachers, parents and researchers. Not doing so fuels all kinds of speculation, some of which might not be accurate.

Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.

In India, class 10 is the last year in which science is taught to every student. Students who decide to study biology in the final year of school will be the ones who learn about the topic.

The NCERT announced the cuts last year, saying they would ease the pressures on students studying online. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India, says that science teachers and researchers expected that the content would be reinstated once students returned to classrooms. The NCERT shocked everyone by printing textbooks for the new academic year, with a statement that changes will stay for the next two academic years, in line with India’s revised education policy approved by government in July 2020.

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 content was irrelevant. It hopes to provide opportunities for learning and creativity.

The Axed Content on Civil Society and the Industrial Revolution: The Case for Science Teacher Training in India at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences

A section about electricity and magnetism in the 19th century has been stripped from the class 10 syllabus. chapters on democracy and diversity, political parties and challenges to democracy were eliminated from non-science content. Older students are not allowed to read a chapter on the industrial revolution.

More than 4,500 scientists, teachers and science communicators have signed an appeal organized by a Kolkata-based campaign group, Breakthrough Science Society, to reinstate the axed content on evolution.

Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air pollution does not interest us. It is more so now, she says. A chapter on different sources of energy has been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.