Social Sensitization

Our Work

Social Sensitisation

The Context

Education plays a key role in the progress of any nation. It is not just about nurturing creative, empathetic individuals equipped with diverse knowledge and skill sets. Rather, it is about transforming people into informed, concerned, and critical citizenry who participate authentically in everyday life and contribute to the larger public discourse to bring about social change. Viewed in this light, education becomes an instrument towards freedom, and the template or the vision for such freedom is brought to life through the Preamble to the Indian Constitution.

However, in functioning within a society mired in dysfunctional power structures and stark inequalities, education today has been reduced to perform a much limited or instrumental role of merely producing employable and skill-centred subjects with little self-awareness and sense of belonging to their immediate surroundings. Such a citizenry is characterised by individualistic, consumerist, and competitive tendencies, and is largely responsible for colluding or abetting, if not directly fuelling, the major crises of our times; viz rising inequality, acute poverty, climate change, divisive politics, etc. However, since the functioning of educational institutions is at odds with the liberatory role of education, citizenship, and society at large are at odds with the values enshrined in our Constitution.

Though ‘education’ may sound like the domain of teachers and schools, as a process, each of us must understand, decode, and question. Whether we are engineers, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians or activists, the education we have received has not only shaped our world-views and ethics but also defined how we associate with each other and engage with the world around us. Therefore, any social sensitisation has to start from a critical discourse on education, and how it domesticates us internally and decapitates us externally.

The Challenge

Three key obstacles that prevent education from being liberatory, and citizens from acting constitutionally are:

  • A disempowering pedagogy that not only cements the hierarchy between teacher and student but also normalises practices of domination and regimentation in the name of discipline. The practice of treating students like blank slates for depositing knowledge stifles their inner voice and kills their agency in the praxis of expression and self-discovery. By the time one finishes college, one loses connection with their feelings and is unable to ground themselves in and act from their authentic self in their day-to-day life.
  • An alienating curriculum that neither helps the learner make sense of their context nor allows autonomy or choice in learning what they want/need. Since the curriculum is confined within a tightly regulated framework and insidiously tied to a homogenising assessment system, knowledge gets reduced to lifeless facts with little consequence to one’s life beyond earning a degree. This impacts the way a learner processes information, expands consciousness and makes connections with their outside reality. Critical thinking or the faculty to question, in particular, is systematically discouraged and systemically disincentivised. This reduces the learner to become a docile object of the status quo, instead of empowering them to be conscious architects of their fate.
  • A market-based, market-driven ideology that limits the vision for dignity, development and democracy to a purely economic paradigm. A paradigm which reduces the human condition to mere statistics and societal problems into individual concerns. An education entrenched in such an ideology prioritises performance over ethics, incentivises competition over collaboration, and favours homogeneity over diversity. Structurally, this creates power imbalances and inequity in society. At the level of consciousness, it not only intensifies but also normalises the contradictions between one’s values and actions. Over time, one loses faith in the power of the collective and becomes a cynic, incapable of dreaming and hesitant in taking a moral stand. Without a larger value-based framework rooted in people (rather than the market), education remains a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

Our Conviction

It is insufficient for people to merely engage in dialogue towards learning or unlearning one’s social realities. They must also use their newfound knowledge to act upon their current context to change it. But this cannot be a one-time affair, as the context created needs critical reflection before further action. This constant dialectic between reflection & action upon reality and the iterative process by which it is ultimately transformed is what lies at the heart of any kind of social sensitisation.

This framework of ‘praxis’ follows what renowned Brazillian educator Paulo Freire had developed in his seminal book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To make learning meaningful, action possible, and change sustainable, the following areas of change help participants reclaim and integrate their HEAD, HEART & HANDS, respectively:

  • Bringing out & nurturing the Authentic Self: – creating a space for self-exploration and authentic disclosure of one’s feelings, where participants do not feel burdened by the need to be politically correct in front of strangers. Consequently, building on the solidarity created, to democratise the governance of the space, making each participant a co-creator, and a co-owner. This shift not only breaks the fear of authority in the mind but also creates a context for knowledge to be co-created by both facilitators and participants, as equals in the process of collective discovery and unfolding.
  • Laying down the foundations for Critical Thinking – shifting from a ‘problem-solving’ to a ‘problem-posing’ mindset, where questions are used to expand the boundaries of consciousness and increasingly progressively view facts within a particular economic, sociocultural, and political context. Over time, this creates shifts in the way the mind makes connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information and allows one to view their subjective inner realities within the larger objective framework of systems, structures, and institutions. outside.
  • Introducing a primer for Dreaming the Impossible – reaffirming the power of a dream, grounded in a past mired with problems, yet not letting the past constrain either the boldness of the vision or the unwavering conviction that it will come to fruition in the future. However, mere clarity in vision or confidence in strategy cannot turn a personal ambition into a collective dream. A radical shift is required in attitudes (from performance-driven to people-led), mindsets (from doing charity to showing solidarity) and perspectives (from asking for reforms to demanding rights). In this context, the Preamble to the Constitution of India is a charter that not only sets the benchmark for how limitless a dream can be but also captures the countless dilemmas and the debates that went behind the drafting & sequence of each word. Whether it was to grant universal adult suffrage or to have reservations for socially marginalised groups, each and every point was thrashed out between members of the Constituent Assembly for months before reaching finality. The rich legacy of dialogue and negotiation etched in the Constitutional Assembly Debates lays out the arduous process each participant needs to go through in order to refine the dream to perfection. Finally, the values and ethics that formed the basis for a secular, socialist democratic republic show the innate trust the makers of the Constitution had in the people.