Social Sciences as a critical pedagogic tool for transacting value based education

Abstract

In contemporary times, socialisation of children is not entirely limited to family and community. Social institutions such as education system, media, economy and religion share the responsibility of transacting social values to the young ones and ensure that there aren’t many deviations from the acceptable social norms. Schools, in particular share this role immediately with family. Social Sciences, as a discipline, provides a socio-cultural, political, economic and environmental lens to understand various dimensions of society, situated in its past and present. Social Sciences hold the potential to make students critically reflect and assess the relationship between various social structures and engage within the processes of the society they inhabit. This article aims at exploring the usefulness of teaching social sciences as critical pedagogic tool for transaction of desired values in Indian classrooms, more so in the pandemic times. It conceptualises its main argument through thorough analysis of NCERT’s social sciences textbooks for standard six to tenth. The article presents a brief background of social sciences pedagogy and highlight its linkages with value-based education in critical manner. Direct teaching of value-based education is often criticized for preaching prescribed and rigid norms. This article presents social sciences education as a pedagogic tool to recontextualise and redraft the foundations of value education transaction in Indian classrooms. The questions that this study aimed to explore are: Are we really investing in children the required critical and mental capacities that make them evaluate social practices? Should inculcation of values be limited to value-based education classes or can other disciplines like social sciences contribute in making learners alert to the social forces that threaten these values? Is there a contrast in our aims and our current practices of Social Sciences pedagogy or is it successfully inculcating ‘desired values’?