Education and Social Awareness

Social awareness is an important part of a child's education. It teaches students to consider other people's points of view and to understand their needs. Interacting with people from different backgrounds helps children improve their social skills. Students who are socially aware can identify available resources and use them to address societal needs. It also reflects in their classroom behaviour and creates an ideal learning environment. It teaches communication, collaboration, social responsibility, and professionalism skills that will be useful in their professional lives.

Social awareness is defined as the ability to understand and empathise with people from various backgrounds and cultures. It is critical for a society's development that people have this ability. People with greater social awareness can effect change in any sector that requires it. Whether it is poverty or climate change, every problem of today can be solved by a socially aware population.

One of the goals of education is to increase social awareness, which includes a better understanding of society and knowledge of available alternatives. According to Amartya Sen, the concept of development, which is usually associated with education, should promise various types of freedoms, including the freedom of choice. That is because when we teach students social knowledge about society, we make them aware of the reality of the society around us. For example, as previously stated, students educated in such a system will be more aware of poverty and, at the very least, will have a desire to work to improve things. The same is true for climate change. These students will be the change agents of tomorrow, and we must provide them with basic social knowledge in order to instil a desire for change.

A socially aware population can think from a change perspective (even if not all of them, at least some) because we have given them the impetus and knowledge to drive an urgency for change, and they can actually work to achieve this in the future. I believe that the best time to instil social awareness and non-biased knowledge of society is during the school years because once we become adults, we adopt a certain perspective, which is difficult to unlearn and replace.

The education system as a whole plays a critical role in shaping an individual's personality as well as their way of thinking. We usually get our perspectives from our surroundings and environment, and as children, we spend the majority of our time in schools and educational institutions that shape our perspectives. When it comes to schools, when we are young and our minds are still developing, we tend to believe everything we are taught and see without question.

Awareness of the alternatives and scepticism toward what is taken for granted are prerequisites for this freedom. I'll concentrate on our educational institutions' inability to raise social awareness about the fast food culture, which is being resisted in many countries, including India. Fast food culture is relatively new in Pakistan. Some multinational food chains have opened stores in all of Pakistan's major cities over the last decade. These restaurants offer a variety of burgers, fries, and desserts. According to a number of research studies, fast food is harmful to the human body, with obesity leading to serious illnesses. Similarly, there are soft drinks that are harmful to one's health.

According to Vandana Shiva, a well-known Indian environmentalist, the society that has shifted to a fast-food culture has developed health issues. She claims that "Singapore is having to establish new obesity clinics, and Japan has seen a 70% increase in food-related illnesses." Similarly, popular soft drinks favoured by multinational corporations contain artificial colouring, flavouring, and additives that are harmful to one's health, and frequent consumption can lead to serious health problems. Aside from the other harmful components of fast food mentioned in some research studies, researchers have also highlighted addiction as a consequence. Pure food items have no taste for fast food eaters. The majority of people who succumb to fast food culture are young people. Even very young children are addicted to soft drinks and prepackaged milk. They dislike the smell and taste of pure milk.

This impression is bolstered by an onslaught of print and electronic media that associates pure milk with bad odour, dirt, and disease. Some advertisements attempt to persuade customers by instilling fear in them. One milk advertisement paints a threatening scenario and then offers itself as a saviour. These advertisements are so prevalent that they shape the opinions of young children and their mothers. In a subtle way, the excessive media campaign replaces individual choice with corporate logic. This is done so well that people begin to regard their own food as inferior and accept the imposed food as their own choice.

This state of mind can be explained using Gramscian concepts of 'cultural hegemony' and 'spontaneous consent.' Food is an important cultural item. Thus, fast food items not only have a negative impact on health and the local economy, but they also displace people from their own soil, society, and, ultimately, identity.

The so-called elite culture is represented by fast food culture, which is associated with the elite class in Third World countries. Thus, a segment of our population visits multinational food chains because they represent a certain elite culture, and by sitting in those establishments, there is a hidden desire to be a part of that class. In Pakistan, an intriguing but meaningful term for elite families has been coined: burger families. These terms and attitudes are a direct result of fast food culture.

All of this is made possible by the media's power, which plays a critical role in the construction of a certain kind of social reality that benefits the corporation's interests. Every corporation has a large budget for media campaigns. The unfortunate part is that, with the help of the media, natural foods are denigrated and artificially processed foods are promoted as the only option. Multinational food chains are exploiting indigenous resources, changing local people's eating habits, negatively impacting the local economy, and maximising their own profits.

The educational institutions' role in raising awareness among their students is inadequate. A number of large educational institutions, in fact, advocate and promote fast food items by housing fast food outlets on campus. In exchange, they receive monetary benefits in the form of a building facility or the provision of furniture, among other things. These fast food and beverage items are thus validated by another social institution, the school/college/university. This validation is significant because it legitimises the social reality that the media has already constructed. The role of schools in raising food and eating habits awareness is critical. It should be part of the social awareness educational agenda. If schools are convinced that junk food is bad for students, they should not have such establishments on campus. Schools should hold seminars to educate students about the dangers of various fast food items that contain harmful ingredients.

Students should also be informed about pure foods and their effects on the body. Doctors, nutritionists, and environmentalists could lead these seminars. Such awareness campaigns should be part of the school curriculum because education is about more than just obtaining a certificate.