this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
1299 points (99.1% liked)

Science Memes

11021 readers
3452 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

India just removed pythagorean theorem from their educational curriculum for the very reason you mentioned.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I've already seen this exact same claim these days, so now I decided to try and find out what's happening exactly.

https://www.dw.com/en/indiadropsevolution/a-65804720

Apparently, it happened last year, not just now, as you said, and I'm sure I've already seem someone else (maybe on Lemmy, maybe on reddit) also describe it as a very recent event.

However I can't find absolutely anything else regarding the topic. So I tried googling in Hindi instead, with the help of some machine translation.

https://www.aajtak.in/education/news/story/pythagoras-theorem-has-vedic-has-roots-karnataka-panel-proposes-to-sanskrit-as-a-third-language-1496805-2022-07-10

This is the only piece of news I've managed to find, again not very recent, and not nearly as dramatic as the DW article makes it out to be. Some official has described the Pythagorean theorem as 'fake news' because that same theorem had already been developed in India before Pythagoras, i.e. the point is that the name is a misnomer. They say nothing about removing the theorem.

The reduction of teaching of the periodic table and evolution that DW mentions is also explained in the PDF that the article links as mere reorganisation of the topics due to the circumstances (difficulties in teaching during corona). They don't suggest actual removal of the topics. (The PDF is an official explanation from the Indian "National Council of Educational Research and Training".)

I'm getting the impression DW is just fearmongering. Ideally there should be some article with exact and complete quotes in Hindi. I know that media freedom in India is not great (esp. considering the situation with Wikipedia), and it's probably not easy to get to the bottom of it, but this story looks very suspicious.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

You know more than me then. I was just irresponsibly repeating a headline I saw on Lemmy yesterday

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

I believed it completely at first too, perhaps we even saw the same headline...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Probably! I knew there was another subject mentioned, but couldn't remember what it was, so I didn't mention it. Now that you said the periodic table, I'm certain that was the second subject mentioned.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Even carpenters and masons need geometry

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Do they though? You need like one guy on the job who understands that stuff, and then a bunch a grunts with speed squares.