Experts shocked as NCERT removes periodic table, evolution from school textbooks

School students will no longer receive education on critical scientific topics such as evolution, the periodic table of elements, sources of energy, and environmental sustainability. These changes, affecting approximately 134 million students aged 11-18, have caused outrage among researchers and educators.

The removal of evolution from the curriculum for students aged 15-16 had already garnered significant attention and sparked a petition in protest. However, newly released textbooks by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) have revealed further cuts, including a chapter on the periodic table and various pollution- and climate-related topics for younger learners. Furthermore, biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics, and physics subjects for older students have been affected as well.

Critics argue that the removal of chapters related to water, air pollution, resource management, and different energy sources contradicts the relevance of these subjects in today's world. 

“Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it,” says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California, as quoted by scientific journal Nature. “It’s that fundamental to biology.” The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists”.

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], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.

Experts point out these changes are alarming to experts in science education.

“The idea [behind the new policy] is that you make students ask questions,” says Anindita Bhadra, an evolutionary biologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata. But she says that removing fundamental concepts is likely to stifle curiosity, rather than encourage it. “The way this is being done, by saying ‘drop content and teach less’”, she says, “that’s not the way you do it”.

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

Despite relying on expert committees to oversee the changes, NCERT has not engaged with parents and teachers to explain the rationale behind these modifications. The lack of response from NCERT and the absence of public comments on the matter have further fueled concerns regarding the reasoning behind these decisions.