In times, when humans have become machines, and life is programmed to function in a defined framework, the basic question that arises is, ‘Do we want our next generation to lose the essence of empathetic values further?’
‘Education Through Empathy, Critical Thinking’
Ever since we started this fellowship we kept visiting schools regularly and what we noticed was that the inter and intra-relational coefficients between teachers, students and local communities seem to have undergone drastic transitions from times we both were in school. Some of our prominent observations from the field have been listed below:
Firstly, the pupil-teacher relationship remained unidimensional in which teachers seldom took a keen interest in the emotional wellbeing of students. Their relation started with classroom and ended with syllabus.
Secondly, within the students, constant societal hegemonic nomenclatures fed by the society has built unsaid divisions and fault lines based on skin colour, gender, socio-economic status, students’ educational performance etc.
Lastly, it was noticed how violence and abusive language had been normalised in the lives of these torchbearers of our nation. How multiprong socialisation that we all are part off, had begun to manifest itself in these young children. Insensitive acts of hurting animals, damaging plants, and teasing co-fellows were considered as enjoyable pastime.
Both of us through our years in School had constantly faced bullying on many counts that had led to diminished level of confidence. Though over the years with a constant supportive ecosystem, we have slowly and steadily attempted to move off that pain and self-loathing that follows, the shards of those experiences remain. It took us years of persistent effort to break the cycle of low self-esteem. Indeed, at most times, even today speaking eye-to-eye remains a constant struggle. Depicting how difficult it remains to undo just 10-15 years of school bullying from our lives. The battle to rebuild means many who don’t find a healthy ecosystem to completely lose emotional and psychological balance, while other who do like us have to work hard for countless years to undo the haunted memories of past.
During the initial months of our fellowship Imad was selected as a part of the flagship first World Youth Conference on kindness and became a steering lead for ‘Global Youth Alliance on Kindness’ anchored by UNESCO-MGIEP. His learnings from the same made us think of a mechanism that we as part of our core work as consultants/fellows to district administration could pilot. Perhaps, a working model, that could build strong intra-inter pupil-teacher relationships as well as contribute to growing their proximity to nature. We hoped that our intervention would lead to a constant decline in acts of bullying in schools that we hope to take on board. This was how the idea of Empathy Clubs was born.
The Indian education system, right from the ‘Gurukul’ system of education, aims to propagate the idea of affective education, which focuses on enhancing a student’s development in terms of his/her attitudes, interests, character, values, and other areas within the social-emotional domain. Although the central and various state boards of education often create well-structured plans to include all the above categories, the transformation of the same in the school curriculum is often fragmented in an inequitable balance. The result is mass production of individuals who may have advanced academic skills to pursue their careers further but do not have adequate empathetic, and pro-social (E & P) skills to adjust well into the society at large.
According to the Deputy Development Commissioner, Anshul Kumar I.A.S. the need, therefore, is to develop a curriculum which takes into its fold the categories as mentioned earlier with equitable balance. Only then it can be claimed that schools focus on all aspects of human development which includes cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains.
While erstwhile District Magistrate, Shri Rahul Rajan Mahiwal kickstarted the program, it was the newly appointed Deputy Development Commissioner Anshul Kumar who spearheaded and anchored the entire initiative. It was his dynamic forecasting and inputs that further strengthened the initiative and constant engagement with the fellows that ensured the initiative was able to deliver the desired results.
‘What Are Empathy Clubs?’ TADP Cell Aurangabad strongly believes that Kindness, Compassion, and Empathy are three magical words that could accelerate voyage towards the emotionally resilient world. Taking this resolve to the remotest part of the Naxal hit regions, district administration aspires to ensure emotional resilience and kindness towards fellow humans, animals and nature become the core value of the students. The idea is to encourage and support students to narrate stories of the smallest acts of kindness and empathy that they are part of in their day-to-day…
