Sonali Sathaye
What and how do you teach young people as they witness and navigate the currents of the climate crisis? Sonali Sathaye reflects on teaching courses on climate change to urban youth in Bangalore, India. Alongside factual knowledge about the climate crisis, young people need to be given the emotional and ethical wherewithal to face a society which prizes consumerism over sustainability, the short-term satisfaction of personal desires over the long-term health of eco-systems and of themselves.
Introduction
Teaching in schools is hopeful work; it is founded on the premise that a meaningful future awaits a student in which she may employ the knowledge she has gained to create a healthy, happy, peaceful life. Increasingly however the degradation of the basic elements of physical and social life – the pollution of air, the increasing heaps of garbage on the streets and fields, the plastification of the human body and the environment – have called into question this hitherto unthinking assumption of continuity, of progress and security. Even until a decade or so ago, the AQI – air quality index – was an unknown metric, today it pops up unasked for on our daily computer screens. Against this backdrop of instability, teaching becomes a fraught profession. The question that raises itself is how and what to teach young people to prepare them for a world in which the most basic processes needed to sustain life have become the cause for deep anxiety, a world where one might well have to choose between clean air and the job one enjoys or needs?
Over the last five years I have devised and taught courses on climate change, side-ways, as it were. Instead of meeting it head on, it has been framed in terms of, variously, the Partition of India, Money, Food and Food Systems as well as a course called “The Circumstances of Me.” All of these courses were addressed to people approximately between the ages of 14 and 19. While the main participants were students at a small alternative school in Bangalore, I have also been fortunate in being able to teach the Food course to a few other schools in Bangalore and in the case of the Partition course, to be able to run joint sessions with undergraduate students of design from India and Pakistan.
As important to underline is the class composition of students: the courses were created for students who belong to the middle- to upper-class in South Asian society. The language of instruction both in the classroom and resource materials has been English. In addition, the types of experiences that the students referred to in discussion and in writing underlined the privileged position they occupy in their society.
“Teaching Up”, following on anthropologist Laura Nader’s “studying up” (1974) is essential then for many reasons, not the least of which is that asking young people who are poised to become some of the biggest consumers of their societies some common sense questions will hopefully lead them to an examining of what constitutes the “good life”. As they grow up, the practices they adopt – of food, of clothing, of media, of consumption in general – have the power to amplify or reduce the patterns of consumption prevalent in society today. The hope was that in learning of these processes – especially those of colonialism and capitalism – students would be able to critically examine and discard ways of being that were detrimental to the mental and physical health of themselves, of their society, and indeed of the entire world.1
This was my hope and wish. I do not know the extent to which it was met vis-a-vis the students, given that it is famously difficult to quantify the effect of something like a class on one’s thinking and behaviour especially in the short term. What is true is that the teaching of these classes allowed me to come into direct contact with what I now see as key, even if relatively new, habits of thought that run through some sections of middle- and upper-middle class Indian society. It is essential that these patterns of thought be engaged with if we want to seed the possibility of creating a less consumerist, more ecologically-conscious society from the ground up.
Below, I give a brief description of the kinds of questions we tackled in the Food, Money and Partition courses respectively. I follow that with an analysis of what some of the responses that these generated might tell us about the larger cultural currents in which we participate. Finally, I offer brief and broad reflections on possible ways to speak to these currents.
The Courses
The climate crisis has been a long time coming; it is, after all, a wholly natural response to the ecological disruptions unleashed by human beings. Colonialism (and today Neo-Colonialism through corporations) in its restless movement, its inherent logic of destroy and conquer to create profit (to enable more destroying, conquering and profiteering) has been altering landscapes (and seascapes) in earnest since at least the 1400s. Our educational and economic certainties were fashioned against a backdrop of ecological stability that were central to their existence and that we are only now coming to recognise, as the certainties disappear. Thus it is that we now have to teach about things in the classroom that earlier were reserved or meant to form part of a child’s “primary socialisation” – from sexuality and relationships to food and money and technology, the increasing complexity requires more juggling, more complex relationships than ever before.
A key facet of the navigation involves an understanding of the historical and contemporary processes that shape our world. In practice this is to make strange much of what a young person might see as “natural” in their world. For example, Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education from 1835 (in Pandey, 2002) entirely changed the Indian education system, devalued certain kinds of knowledge and created an India in which some Indians became “English [] in manners, morals and intellect”. It is not coincidence but design that English-speaking is a category of social division unto itself, more than a hundred years later.
Similarly, that our taste buds increasingly crave sugar is not because it is “natural”. The history of sugar on the planet is intertwined with the history of colonisation, corporatisation and labour, as Sidney Mintz (1986) tells us in his book on the historical roots of the modern sugar industry. Multinational companies, the armament or plastics industry, may be invisible or seem irrelevant to what students see as their personal lives or even their “identites” but they have been important behind-the-scenes players in what we eat, what we breathe and drink, what we wear and how we think for decades, in post- as much as pre-indepedent India.
Anchored in the diagram of the Planetary Boundaries2, the main question that threaded together the sessions of the Food module was, why is it that agriculture implicates all earth systems and yet globally hunger is at an all time high? Is the problem really that we do not/cannot have enough food to feed the seven billion people on this planet? The module included discussions, reading, films on historical, digital, economic, psychological, ecological aspects of food and food growing. It culminated with a visit to an organic farm on the outskirts of Bangalore.
Some of the questions students were asked included, does instinct guide what we eat today? If not, what does? Why is the “treat” food for so many young people pizza and chocolate, despite the fact that students speak of the varied choices they have these days – between Japanese, Mexican, Italian, Chinese? Why is there greater homogenisation in ingredients, taste and desire even as there is more apparent choice? By middle-school, most students said, most of what they learnt about food came from advertisements. The role of corporations in targeting young customers, in promoting unhealthy junk food, has been documented for decades now (Pollan, 2011; Gomez, 2023).
The course on Money investigated its subject through various disciplines, including Ecology, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, and of course Economics. Students were asked about what they felt should be free for all creatures, just by dint of being alive. For example, should water be free? Clean air? Sunlight? Or in a market economy, is it only fair that clean water be reserved for those who can pay for it? We also talked about the concept of “ownership” — who owns a forest? Or a river or a mountain? Those who may have no direct contact with it but have the money to “buy” it or those who have cared for it over generations and know it intimately?
In the course on the Partition, the emphasis was on finding the common ground between nations – is the nation state a good arrangement for resolving the common crisis that is ecological collapse? On the whole, young people felt it was not, since the nation state had no meaning at all in the natural world, being an entirely human-created entity. Interestingly, young people discovered that actually what does cut across national boundaries at the moment is not an understanding of the natural world but rather of a shared industrial popular culture – young English-speaking Pakistanis and Indians could bond over the same foods, tv shows, brands, music, regardless of their national alleigance!
Reflections on Teaching
I offer here some reflections on what I learnt during the teaching of these modules. The data is anecdotal; understanding urban youth culture was not something I had gone in search of. So there was no research design, no representative sampling, no structured or unstructured interviews. There was, however, plenty of participant-observation. The object of study revealed itself to me in the doing of the work. Incidentally, this is by no means to suggest that most students responded thus. It is to say, however, that some of the responses were significant enough for me as teacher to puzzle over and piece together, finding myself sometimes flummoxed and at a loss to understand them. Below is my working out of where they may stem from.
Teaching these courses showed me the power of the zeitgeist. I had not expected the “spirit of the time” to hold so fast and have such reach for young people who were in the early years of their life journey and whose main sources of socialisation had thus far been mainly friends, family – and media (not wide travel or work experiences). Perhaps naively, I had expected young people to react with indignation, even anger, when they learnt about the ways in which their personalities, their wants and desires, their very blood and bone, were being manipulated through tales of omission and commission, for profit. I had expected them to take a hard line in rejecting such practices (and the products that they promoted).
Instead I found them to be exceedingly willing to understand matters from multiple points of view, to not take stances based on notions of right or wrong; they spoke a language of “rights” and “choice” in which words like manipulation or propaganda had no place. Above all, they were suspicious of anything they saw as smacking of an “agenda” based on notions of morality. They preferred, instead, to trust to their own subjective experience, in turn according everyone else that same right.
Taken together, these views reflect some of the key tenets of “postmodernism.” Postmodernism was an influential sociological perspective greatly influenced by French philosophers from the late 20th century which rejects the idea of an objective “truth” in favour of an atomised, subjectivised “experience.” In my admittedly small representative group, student responses demonstrate the mistrust of facts, of scientific positivism and the valorising of “subjectivity” that are considered typical of “postmodernism” (Spiro, 1996). Students expressed extreme discomfort with what they saw as “judgemental” attitudes about right and wrong, about processes and people, because they impinged on the “rights” of others, crossing as they did their personal “boundaries.” These notions have come to work as a sort of commonsense morality in contemporary urban youth culture in India.
Thus it is that through an instant sleight of hand, facts – about pollution, profiteering, exploitation (of the land and people) – became “points of view” which people were free to choose to believe/act upon – or not. Discussing the prevalence of palm oil in junk food or the strategies that fast food companies employ in the branding and popularising of a proven health scourge, students were, for example, nonetheless deeply ambivalent about campaigning against fast/junk food amongst their peers and younger school mates. Yes, they could see the problems with junk food but: “who are we to take away their right to eat the food of their choice?” The question of whether anyone should be eating this so-called food given its proven environmental and health dangers did not raise its head. The question of how it came to be made available to children in the first place did not feature either. Taken as a given the products sold in the marketplace, the eating of junk food became a site through which one exercised one’s “rights” and “choice.”
In other words, the psychologisation of phenomena precludes the possibility of objective, factual description. By converting larger social/sociological narratives into personal stories it also precludes the challenging of the status quo. When told of an airline company that put profit over the safety of its product, for example, some students were uneasy about what they saw as a too harsh condemnation of the airline executives because “they too had to put food on the table for their families.” Again, when shown a film3 that reveals the manipulation of consumers in advertising and commerce, students were full of admiration for the ability of the advertiser to “read” the customer accurately – never, apparently, putting themselves in the shoes of the customer!
In any case, these students were not overly worried about being the object of manipulation and propaganda because they believed implicitly that each person is the architect of their own, singular, life; the outcomes of the choices they make. They shrug off the irony of a mass produced exhortation to be “themselves” as promoted in a soft-drink advertisement which features a popular actor sharing the slogan “You Do You” – an “anthem” which according to the corporation which makes the drink, wants to “empower the youth of India, urging them to be who they are without seeking validation from society” by drinking this sugary drink sold in plastic bottles all over the country (and world).4
There is nothing problematic in this process, say students, because after all the corporation is fulfilling its dharma, as it were – selling its product, it is only doing what it is designed to do. To judge the product thus sold is to go outside the frame and bring in something else, something extra and unfair, into the conversation. After all, nobody is being forced to drink the drink. It is “up to” the individual to choose the extent to which they want to believe or be tricked into believing media messages.
In this, students are also following seamlessly in the tradition of the Englightenment thinkers which sees society as a collection of unique, autonomous individuals whose “rational self-interest” decides the social contract which automatically leads to the formation of an ethical society (Smith, 1776). The individual, in this formulation, exists a priori as a unique entity. The question of whence and what constitutes that uniqueness is rarely engaged with. Urban upper-class young people in India in the 21st century seem to whole-heartedly endorse this credo.
Conclusion
Assuming an adversarial relationship with the collective that is “society”, consumption becomes a shorthand for the assertion of individuality, rendering invisible the forces that aid in the creation of that personality, the ways in which individuals are nudged (or tutored) to want or desire an experience (so that they can be more “themselves”). What constitutes “subjectivity”, actually, in a world where we are more than ever exposed to messaging from corporations, the nation state, social media, where algorithms feed us what we like (or don’t) and we consume them to create “ourselves” in an apparently endless loop?
If the climate crisis is born out of increasing production, consumption and waste generation, then a society which hawks the creation of a subjective, free, unique self out of the materials of mass industrial goods (in this I include digital entertainment of all kinds) is directly implicated. The same process also automatically obstructs the possibility of climate action by psychologising, personalising, an issue – instead of seeing it as part of larger social currents and not restricted to individual resolution.
The irony is that approaching one’s life through the myth of subjective individuality makes one more vulnerable to manipulation, particularly by the market and its readymade identity kits. Psychologising, instead of sociologising, makes the word small and heavy (Mills and Fernando 2014; Sathaye 2008; Sax and Lang 2021).
If, instead, one were able to see the extent to which we are products of our socialisation one may begin to divest oneself of some of its blanketting weight. Recognising the structural factors that go to make “you” up, recognising that you are not unique but share much with humans and non-humans is, paradoxically, when one can be most individual and “free” of society.
So I learnt that in itself knowledge cannot trump the effects of socialisation. Connection can. It is necessary that students allow themselves to feel involved in the world beyond their own interests – that they see the links between “their” interests and those that surround them, human and non-human. For example, students in the Food course were visibly moved by the richness and beauty of the soil of the organic field in Mulbagul. What is more, they connected the fertility and health of the field with the warmth and dignity of the family who had farmed it for generations even as they recognised that the farming life was insecure, difficult. Yet, reading about the difficulties of agriculture was different from being served a meal directly from the “thota.”
Based on these reflections, one of the propositions for educators is to host critical conversations on the question of “what is natural?” when it comes to food, language, schooling, clothing, relationships, and so on. This questioning will offer students (and arguably teachers as well) to begin to understand the degree to which we are products of our society. An obvious way to do that is to engage with people from different social backgrounds and contexts — age, class, location, etc – to see differences based on socialisation. Similarly, it may be powerful to observe the degree to which ways of life are increasingly the same, regardless of location, age, etc. Reflecting on what might be the reasons behind these differences and similarities is a thought-provoking exercise for students. Another exercise would be to chart the different systems that coalesce to produce an “object” (e.g., a shoe or a tv show) both in terms of the physical journey or an intellectual/philosophical one, in which questions such as whose demand led to the creation of that object, why was it made, who for, who owns it, who benefits, may be explored (Singh 2024).
Teaching is about the delicate, sometimes impossible, task of speaking honestly about the world, with its deep inequities and collapsing biological systems, while still assuring the student that what they do and live and think matters, attempting to teach tragedy without overwhelming the whole terrain in darkness, hopefully allowing some light to get in.
Sonali Sathaye is an educator who enjoys teaching in schools, at the college and post-graduate levels as well as in non-formal settings. An anthropologist by training, her main intent in the classroom is to have young people take their own lives seriously, to understand that what they think and do matters. Relatedly, she emphasises a systems-based approach in her teaching of Theatre, Sociology, History, English or Planetary Health. She has also created and taught independent courses that cut across disciplinary boundaries on subjects such as the Partition, Money, Food, as well as, most recently, a course called “The Circumstances of Me.” Sonali Sathaye lives and works out of Bangalore.
References
Gomez, E. 2023. Junk Food Politics: How Beverage and Fast Food Industries Are Reshaping Emerging Economies. Baltimore: Hopkins Press
Macaulay, T. B. 1835. The Introduction of English Education. cited in Pandey, B. N. 2002. A Book of India. pp 49-50. New Delhi: Rupa Books & Co.
Mills, C., and Fernando, S. 2014: Globalising Mental Health or Pathologising the Global South? Mapping the Ethics, Theory and Practice of Global Mental Health. Disability and the Global South 1:188–202.
Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books
Nader, Laura. 1974. Up the anthropologist—Perspectives gained from studying up. In Dell Hymes, ed. Reinventing anthropology. pp. 284–311. New York: Vintage Books
Pollan, Michael. 2011. The Omnivore’s Dilemna: The search for a perfect meal in a fast-food world. London: Bloomsbury
Sathaye, S. 2008: The Scientific Imperative to be Positive. Self-Reliance and Success in the Modern Workplace. In: C. Upadhya, and A. R. Vasavi eds., In an Outpost of the Global Economy. Work and Workers in India‘s Information Ttechnology Industry. London: Routledge.
Sax, W. S., and Lang, C. 2021: The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Singh, V . 2024: Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice. Routledge.
Smith, Adam. 2008 (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Oxford World’s Classics. London, England: Oxford University Press.
Spiro, Melford E. (1996). Postmodernist Anthropology, Subjectivity and Science: A Modernist Critique in Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (4):759-780.
Footnotes
- Unequal patterns of consumption – of fuel and electricity, of food, of materials – is a key
factor behind the climate crisis (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02151-7.,
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2021/09/climate-change-and-inequality-
guivarch-mejean-taconet). ↩︎ - See: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html ↩︎
- See: 3 “Happiness Machines”, episode 1 of The Century of the Self series by Adam Curtis, BBC, 2002
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfkyppvCQI ↩︎ - See: 4https://www.exchange4media.com/marketing-news/ranveer-singh-says-you-do-you-to-the-youth-in-new-pepsi-
anthem-125620.html) ↩︎
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