EDIT: Made a very silly mistake (in my defence, it was late at night).
The FULL periodic table is there in grade 11, not 9.
Grade 9 only introduces you to the first 18 elements on the table.
> How do you even teach biology or natural sciences without dedicated a significant amount if time for evolution (not just a page or two... lol..)
I'm no biologist or teacher, but I don't feel like you need to jump into evolution to understand how everyday things like digestion or photosynthesis occur.
There are plenty of introductory articles on the internet that could fit in a page or two. Interested students could go home and look it up.
I meant it as a means to provoke curiosity and to be made aware of.
Certain pages on the textbooks here have these boxes with some trivia about scientists/inventions. I remember reading those boxes in school and then coming home and looking things up to learn a bit more. You aren't graded on them, but they're interesting to read.
> Are these subject not taught at all in Indian school? Before 11/12 grade (assuming the students picks them)?
You don't get to pick anything other than your language until grade 10.
Biology, physics and chemistry are compulsory until grade 10.
If a student picks biology after grade 10, they will be taught evolution in more detail.
> What do they focus on instead?
It starts around 6th grade.
Begins with humans and plants, their anatomy, nutrition, reproduction, everyday activities etc.
Then you learn about cells and tissues, hormones and sex-ed, evolution and heredity, AFAIK.
You can already check the omitted chapters and the textbooks themselves on the NCERT website.
That article barely explains anything and is literally tagged as 'humour'.
Looks like they're more interested in playing politics than discussing the changes.
The primary reason cited for these changes is that they're aimed at reducing the burden on students. They've tried to reduce the syllabus by about 30%.
Right, but the goal here is to reduce the burden by removing things that are already present elsewhere.
You could probably make the same argument for a bunch of other 9th grade topics.
Regardless, teachers won't just pretend like the periodic table doesn't exist though, they'll talk about it in 10th grade too, because it ties into a few other chapters, but the key difference is that the students won't be graded on it in their final exams.
Don't exactly know if evolution violates some Hindu teachings, but a statement was released last month stating that evolution was removed from the grade 10 book because it's present in the grade 12 book-
Similarly, I'm guessing the periodic table was removed from the grade 10 book because it's already present in the grade 9 book.
IMO they probably should've kept a page or two about evolution though, because after grade 10, students are free to pick their own courses (which doesn't have to be biology), but this is probably debatable. I'm all for reducing the burden though.
This Nature article is pretty poorly written (by Nature's standards) and lowkey sounds like the drivel I'd expect from Indian media.
Teachers will still be teaching (and this is probably what NCERT expects) these basic topics, because teaching the topics that remain won't be easy without them.
My sibling was in grade 10 when COVID hit, some topics that had been removed from the final exam were still taught (although in a somewhat brief manner, considering this was online schooling).
Indian politicians say a lot of dumb and pseudo-scientific garbage, but a few subpar comments here are wildly quoting those to act as if they're rewriting all of science in India. They've purely made omissions, no additions/revisions.