CONFLICTS OF SCIENCE TEACHING: AN ANALYSIS OF NCF VISION AND GROUND REALITIES

The National Curriculum Framework, 2005 envisions the development of scientific temper through science education at each stage in class-rooms in India. But due to various reasons discussed in the paper, more often than not, science education fails to develop the scientific temper in its students. To analyse the causes, a case study of the science education in the government schools of Haryana was done and some interesting points emerged for future discourse including (a) Lack of basic amenities for science teaching in government schools (b) inefficacy of pre-service and in-service teacher training programs, (c) Curriculum is too huge to be covered through organising practical teachinglearning experiences, (d) government teachers are reluctant to take pains due to job-security. This paper hopes to open a discussion on the ways and means to make science education a “systematic experimentation as a tool to discover/verify theoretical principles, and working on locally significant projects involving science and technology” that has been envisioned to be an important part of science curriculum at senior secondary level by National Curriculum Framework, 2005.