The Indian noted academics have said that recent NCERT deletions from the school curricula are selective, anti-academic and driven by “political considerations”.
These deletions, they said, lacked academic merit and might deprive students of perspective on a range of subjects and concepts, from the socially marginalised to the Mughals, from democratic rights to equality.
At a discussion on the NCERT’s recent curriculum revisions, Anita Rampal, Apoorvanand, Neeladri Bhattacharya and Satish Deshpande and others highlighted a pattern: the deleted content was mostly about caste, diversity, Islam and the Mughals, a report in The Telegraph said on Saturday.
“Any change to the content should be driven by a vision or new principles, (it should not happen) on the basis of political considerations,” Bhattacharya said during the discussion organised by the Indian Academic Freedom Network.
Rampal, Apoorvanand, Bhattacharya and Deshpande were all involved in the NCERT’s process of drawing up syllabuses and textbooks between 2005 and 2008.
The recent NCERT modifications include the removal of evolutionary theory from the Class X science syllabus. The national textbook body justified the deletion by maintaining that it was meant to reduce the burden on students, keeping in mind the pandemic-induced learning gap.
Rampal and Apoorvanand said the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), the document that guides the writing of textbooks, and the NCERT textbooks prepared between 2005 and 2008 were focused on pedagogical principles, The Telegraph report said.
However, the concepts of justice, disparity-equality and diversity that had been integrated into the textbooks at the time have been selectively dropped during the revisions carried out in 2022 and 2023, they were quoted as saying.
Rampal criticised the draft NCF prepared by the NCERT, saying it would give students a skewed exposure to the world of ideas.—INP
