THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The unilateral move of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to eliminate certain lessons from the school curriculum is a challenge to democratic secular values, General Education Minister V Sivankutty said on Friday. “Kerala has declared that the move is unacceptable as it challenges the entire existing democratic order in the country.
NCERT removed certain portions from the textbooks from classes 6 to 12 in the name of rationalisation and reducing the study load of students,” Sivankutty said.
He said NCERT has adopted an approach to remove portions including the general history involving the contributions of Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, the theory of evolution, the periodic table, the democratic system, constitutional values, and current challenges facing the country.
“NCERT was built on the basis of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005. But now, the goals set in NCF are being scuttled. It was announced that the state government will publish supplementary textbooks incorporating the omitted sections, thereby upholding the original history while enshrining democratic and secular values,” he said.