“India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks — experts are baffled.” The news caused consternation among teachers, citizens and well-wishers of India around the world. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — defended the deletions as rationalising student workload by postponing learning about these fundamental topics to later years.

The news transported me back to the Chemistry laboratory in school, where the periodic table, first posited by Mendeleev, found prominent display. It evoked a visceral memory of the moment I “got” the table. Do you know that whiz bang moment when you crack a puzzle or mystery? Lights flash and trumpets sound as a portal to a new universe springs open.  As I gazed at it, utterly transfixed, the table revealed its repeating pattern, the building blocks of all matter in the known universe and the logic that makes these seemingly random elements a coherent whole, stamping its indelible imprint in my brain.

Years later, reading Uncle Tungsten – Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, the recollection of his childhood years by the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, I stumbled upon his description of the identical rapturous experience when, aged 12, he encountered a three-dimensional version of the periodic table and grasped the “super-arching principle uniting and relating all the elements.”

Beyond the similarity of his experience and mine, his account was pivotal in allowing me to believe I was not a complete freak, or, at least, that there were other freaks like me out there to whom that grid resonated with the music of the spheres.

The experience of reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was similarly profound. It wove our school curriculum that narrated Gregor Mendel’s painstaking experiments with peas of different colours*, with Darwin’s great breakthrough on natural selection to provide blinding insight into the building blocks and the evolution of life itself. Extending the logic to the realm of ideas, Dawkins constructed the notion of the meme, a notion with whose virality we are now all familiar. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us all to wrap our heads around concepts of mutations and genetic variants, even if unwillingly.

More than the nuts and bolts of which topics fit into what stage of a child’s education, it is to these magical experiences that our education systems need to aspire. As my all-time favourite teacher pointed out to me when I complained about the irrelevance of some particular piece of the curriculum, we do not go to school to learn ‘things’, we go to learn how to learn. The ‘things’ are merely hooks on which good teachers hang the teaching of those skills to create boundless curiosity about how the world and we ourselves work, and a lifetime love of learning for its own sake, not just for career prospects.

One could argue that the type of education I’m describing is utopian – accessible to a fortunate few. Yet it’s inarguably true that we have designed the entire edifice of our education system to achieve the polar opposite with predictable outcomes. We have atomised knowledge into rote learning and regurgitation of pointless ‘facts’ rather than seeking to kindle the spark that sets our children on a self-propelled quest to unravel the secrets of the universe. Good teachers across disciplines know this. A music teacher who spends weeks drilling their pupils in music theory or scales is far less likely to achieve success compared with one who starts by teaching their students to play well-loved tunes. In music, art, sport and more we know that it’s the joyfulness of the experience that drives the development of talent, not vice versa. Tragically, these find less and less emphasis in our schools.

I am deeply troubled by the changes being wrought in our children’s curricula. Even more by the unilateral, almost clandestine, processes by which the changes are made. Perhaps learning about evolution and the periodic table later rather than sooner will make little, if any, difference. Erasing vast chunks of our shared history, and eliminating topics on climate change, as some of the other curriculum excisions propose, are likely to have even more hazardous effects. Parents too have colluded in prioritising those fields of study that train their children for the job market, rather than educating them to become well-rounded citizens and humans. And teachers and administrators have gone along claiming powerlessness.

As we witness other countries banning books that provoke thought, curiosity and debate in favour of monotone pablum, we must return to fundamental questions on the purpose of education and the best means to achieve those ends. All it needs is a grid on a wall, some peas in a patch of soil, a visit to a museum or simply the willingness to engage with a child’s insistent questions.

*Hmm.. Mendel, Mendeleev. What’s up with that?