Union Minister of State for Education Subhas Sarkar refuted the reports around the removal of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from the textbook of Class 10 published by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
"Claims that Darwin's theory has been dropped from NCERT curriculum are misleading. When rationalisation of courses was being done due to COVID to reduce the burden on students, there was no Darwin's theory upto class 10th. If a child wants to study, Darwin’s Theory is available on all website. In class 12, there is already Darwin’s Theory in the syllabus so there should not be such false propaganda," he said.
Recently, over 1,800 scientists, science teachers and educators signed an open letter raising concerns regarding NCERT's decision to drop the theory of biological evolution from the science syllabus in Class X curriculum of the CBSE. They demanded that the theory of Darwinian evolution in particular be restored in secondary education.
"In the current educational structure, only a small fraction of students choose the science stream in grade XI or XII, and an even smaller fraction of those choose biology as one of the subjects of study. Thus, the exclusion of key concepts from the curriculum till grade 10 amounts to a vast majority of students missing a critical part of essential learning in this field," the letter titled 'An Appeal Against Exclusion of Evolution from Curriculum' said.
According to a document released by NCERT on the list of rationalised content in textbooks for class X, Chapter: 9 'Heredity and Evolution' has been replaced with 'Heredity'. Among the list of dropped chapters are Charles Robert Darwin, Origin of life on Earth, Molecular Phylogeny, Evolution, Tracing Evolutionary Relationships and Human Evolution among others.
