Deletion of portions from textbooks by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in a unilateral manner is a challenge to democratic and secular values, Minister for General Education V. Sivankutty has said.
The NCERT had made many deletions in textbooks for Classes 6 to 12 in the name of syllabus rationalisation in the wake of COVID-19 to reduce the burden on children. As this was a challenge to democratic practices existing in the country, Kerala had clarified that it could not accept these. The deletions, including those related to Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and periodic table, denied the nation’s common history, constitutional values and current challenges faced by the country.
By removing these portions from the NCERT textbooks written in the spirit of the National Curriculum Framework of 2005, the values upheld by the framework had been crushed. The State had announced that it would bring out supplementary textbooks that upheld democratic and secular values and true history. Kerala which embraced public education to protect these values, actual history, and promote scientific thinking would become the defender of public education, the Minister said in a statement on Friday.
