A concerned scientific community feels that students will be handicapped if they are not exposed to major discoveries of science.
Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Credit: Pixabay
The National Education Policy in 2020 emphasised reducing the content load. According to the curriculum, topics were dropped based on their difficulty level, repetition in other subjects, and overlapping information in lower or higher classes. The Union Minister of State for Education, Subhas Sarkar said in part that when the rationalisation of courses was being done due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, to reduce the burden on students, Darwin’s Theory on Evolution was not there upto Class 10, he added. “There should not be such false propaganda”.
#WATCH | MoS Education Dr. Subhas Sarkar says, "Claims that Darwin's theory has been dropped from NCERT curriculum are misleading. When rationalisation of courses was being done due to COVID to reduce the burden on students, there was no Darwin's theory upto class 10th. If any… pic.twitter.com/1stAYdw37R
— ANI Digital (@ani_digital) April 29, 2023
A “Travesty of education”, that is what more than 1,800 scientists, educators and school teachers have called the removal of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution From NCERT text books of Class 9 and 10. Institutions such as Tata Institute of Fundamental Research or TIFR, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research IISER and IITs have signed the open letter “An Appeal Against Exclusion of Evolution from Curriculum’. Their main concern is about the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) decision to drop important topics such as the Theory of Biological Evolution from its syllabus for class 10. The English Naturalist, Darwin, extensively studied nature for over two decades. Through his research and studies, he found out that the animals today not only share some similarities with other animals, but also with species that existed millions of years ago.
“Heredity and Evolution” a chapter in science text books of class 10 was edited and renamed to simply “heredity”. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Life on Earth, and Evolution have been omitted from the syllabus. The letter in part states that the principles of Natural Selection helps us understand how a pandemic takes place, and why certain species go extinct. These critical issues must not be left out of the curriculum. Students need knowledge to understand the world around us.
