The term coined as rationalism meant to reduce burden on students by removing chapters from textbooks has reached the next level, all thanks to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
The group of council members decided to remove Periodic Table and Democracy from Class X textbooks.
The removal of these concepts has received concerns from teachers, parents and education experts who question how children learn scientific basis of universe, if they are questioned on lithium discoveries in Kashmir after Class X. What can they write and on the other hand there are opinions that this chapters removal might be a refresher taking today’s context and relevance.
Senior Professor Nageshwar said, “It is an absolute lack of commitment towards democratic values. Recently, a scepter was installed instead of the national flag which talks about monarchy rule. Earlier, we knew that chapters of evolution were cut off. So, they don’t want children to learn the scientific basis of the universe. Science cannot be learnt with religion. The concepts elementary in nature cannot be missed with rationalisation in English and Mathematics. Will they remove grammar from English and addition, subtraction from Mathematics? Rationalising must be appropriate.”
Ritej, a parent of child entering Class X said, “Periodic table talks about building blocks of elements. For instance, if a child is not taught on lithium, what they will understand on general knowledge when they read about lithium discoveries in Kashmir.”
A group of teachers commented that the syllabus is continuous from Class I to X, in every class, the topic under each concept is made more comprehensive but the basics are taught in the beginning. So, rationalising these chapters will be less impactful considering students must have been taught earlier.
Dr Priti Nigam, PhD in Philosophy, said there has been an observation by academicians as well as parents associations that post pandemic there is need to make the courses more relevant as per changing relevance and weed out a few sections. I am sure a focused group of NCERT and experts would have done required due diligence while selecting the sections which are dropped. It is true that what was relevant to engineering students a few years back like AI or ML and Analytics is today getting introduced at the school level. This only indicates that our school curriculum and courses need to be refreshed on the basis of today’s context and relevance.
