The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has explained the reasons behind their decision to permanently drop certain chapters from Class 10 textbooks on Thursday.
The NCERT has deleted the chapters 'Democracy and Diversity', 'Challenges to democracy' and 'Popular struggles and movements' from the social science textbook 'Democratic Politics' Book 2 of Class 10 and removed the periodic table from Class 10 textbooks.
The NCERT published a thread on Twitter outlining the following reasons:
According to the NCERT, the exercise to rationalise the contents of textbooks began during the pandemic for several reasons.
NCERT claims that there were concerns related to curriculum load including the content load spread over syllabus and textbooks were raised from different corners.
According to the government body, content was omitted as it overlapped with equivalent content in another subject area in the same class. Other reasons offered by the NCERT included a high level of difficulty, easily available content that does not require involvement, and outdated or irrelevant content.
Concerning the removal of periodic table and evolution ideas from Class 10 textbooks, the NCERT stated that the topics have not been deleted from the educational curriculum.
"They are available in appropriate detail in classes 11 and 12," the tweet continued. It is stated that students in grades 11 and 12 will study the specifics of the Periodic Classification of Elements.
Apart from the deletion of the periodic table and chapters related to democracy, in April, the NCERT decided to remove Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution from Class 9 and Class 10 science textbooks.
Furthermore, references to Mahatma Gandhi's assassination and independent India's first education minister, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, were removed from the Class 11 Political Science textbooks. Reference to Mughal history has also been shortened at various levels from NCERT textbooks.
