Complete chapters on many subjects now stand deleted as a part of a “rationalisation” meant to reduce the “burden on students”
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — Chapters on democracy, the periodic table, and sources of energy have been dropped from Class 10 government-issue textbooks released by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)
Class 10 students will no longer have these chapters due to a “rationalisation” meant to reduce the “burden on students,” media reports said on Thursday.
The removal of the theory of evolution from the Class 10 curriculum stoked significant concern earlier this year.
Among the topics dropped from the science textbook are also chapters on environmental sustainability and sources of energy. Full chapters on democracy, challenges to democracy and political parties have also been dropped for Class 10 students after the latest revision.
Here’s the list of chapters dropped from Class 10 textbooks.
Earlier this year, the NCERT had come under fire for dropping the theory of evolution from the Class 10 science textbook. More than 1,800 scientists and educators had written an open letter expressing concern over the rationalisation exercise.
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.
On April 3, NCERT omitted the chapters on the Mughal empire from Class 12 textbooks. Two chapters titled, ‘American Hegemony in World Politics’ and ‘The Cold War Era’ have also been removed from the book.
‘Democracy and Diversity’, ‘Popular Struggles and Movements’, and ‘Challenges of Democracy’ chapters were removed from the Class 10 book ‘Democratic Politics-2’.
On April 5, NCERT dropped a portion referring to the Gujarat riots from the Class 11 Sociology textbook, months after it removed the reference to the 2002 communal violence in two Class 12 textbooks.
In the Class 11 Sociology textbook titled “Understanding Society”, the deleted paragraph talked about how class, religion and ethnicities often lead to segregation of residential areas and it then cites the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 to illustrate how communal violence furthers ghettoisation.
On April 13, a chapter on India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was removed from the revised political science textbook.
