Social Science as a Critical Pedagogic Tool for Value Education

This paper aims at exploring the usefulness of social science and it's teaching as critical pedagogy and transaction of values in Indian classrooms. It gives a brief background of social science pedagogy and its linkages with value education in critical manner. In modern times, the responsibility of socializing a child lays to a great extent, outside the community with school also. School successfully socializes the child and enculture them into the value system of society and value education acts as one of the tools. Value Education is often criticized of preaching prescribed and fixed norms. Hence, arise the pressing need to re-contextualize and reframe the basics of Value Education using Social Science as a pedagogic tool for inculcating Values. Values embedded in society have deep impact on life of a community. Social Science, as a discipline, provides a socio-cultural, political, economic and environmental lens to understand various dimensions of society contextualized in its past as well as present. Social Science asks students to critically reflect and assess the practices embedded in societal structures and processes. The questions that this study aimed to explore were: Are we really investing in children a critical moral and mental energy to make them alert to the social forces that threaten these values? Is there a contrast in our aims and our current practices in the name of Social Science pedagogy or is it successfully inculcating 'desired values'.