Education Conscientizes About Social and Political Conditions

Abstract

Education, whether at the grassroots level or in institutions on higher education, ideally, enables greater participation in decision-making processes that impact the larger community. I recalled Nussbaum’s anecdote about a “program in rural Bihar run by the Patna-centered NGO Adithi,” which, despite the lack of infrastructure, encouraged “creative education.” Nussbaum, on her visit to that NGO, noted that the women who were enrolled in the adult literacy program were stimulated by the assignment of delineating the “power structure of their village,” because they recognized that the ability to “read and write” gave them the tools to criticize “entrenched structures of power” (282). They celebrate “education as an antidote to fear and oppression” (ibid., 283).