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The South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) is feeling excited. 15 hrs SAICE in collaboration with Click Maths the official advocates for the Khan Academy in South Africa attended the GAP Year Graduation and Wellness Celebration Day in Tembisa on 17 August 2019.
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Voiceover: Socialmovements are instrumental to changing the path of a society. When a group of people comes together with a shared idea, they can create lasting effects by encouraging change in their society or by resisting it, both of which will shape the future of their society. But a social movement is not just a group of people with an idea. If that were the case, every little group with a novel idea would be starting a social movement. No, social movements need organization, leadership, and resources if they ever hope to gain momentum and make an impact. There are differenttypes of social movements depending on their goal.
Activist movements are focused on changing some aspect of society, while regressive or reactionary movements are actively trying to resist change. So, you can generally see how a social movement will form.
You get a group with a strong, shared idea that has the resourcesand leadership to survive and they can make a difference in one way or another. Specifically though,it is not well defined. There are severaltheories as to how and why social movements form. One of these is calledmass society theory. Early in the study of social movements people were sceptical of the motivations of those involved in social movements.
They were seen as dysfunctional, irrational, and dangerous, and that people would only join because the social movement provided a sense of community and refuge from the meaninglessness of life on one zone. This view point was strong during the 20th century, the time of Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism,which were social movements that result in the destruction of millions of lives. But this theory did not persist through the century. By the '60's, scholarstook a more open look at social movements, especially after thecivil rights movement, which certainly did not arise simply to satisfy a psychologicalneed for involvement. More recently, a few main theories have been developed. One is the relative deprivation theory, which focuses on the actions of groups who are oppressed or deprived of rights that other people in their society enjoy. So, if you look at thecivil rights movement from this viewpoint, it is obviously a response to the inequality and oppression experienced by people of color in the U.S.
But what is interestingabout social movements is that it isn't always the people who are the worst off who join up. More important is how people perceive their situation.
Someone just scraping bycan be happy as a clam because they made their dream of owning their own little corner bistro into a reality and then a person making 100,000 a year is frustrated because they don't feel like they're respected by their company. So, what you have to look at is the relative deprivation, the feeling of discrepancy between legitimate expectations and the reality of the present. But, that's not enough on its own.
People must feel like they deserve better and they must think that they cannot be helped my conventional means. According to relative deprivation theory those three things are necessary for a social movement to form, a relative deprivation, a feeling of deserving better, and to believe that conventional methods are useless to help. But there are criticisms to this theory. Even people who don't feel deprived will chose to join a social movement. They join because they want to address a perceived injustice that they may not even suffer from themselves. It can be too risky for the most oppressed people to join a social movement because they may not have the resources to participate, they cannot take time off work to promote the idea.
Even so, there are exceptions, as always. Under Cesar Chavez,migrant farm workers united to gain rights and job security. Another issue with therelative deprivation theory is that sometimes, evenwhen all three factors are present, no socialmovement is created. OK so, it has some problems but it's a start at least. Another theory, resourcemobilization theory, looks at the social movements from a different angle. Instead of looking at thedeprivation of the people, the resource mobilization approach focuses on the factors that help or hinder a social movement. You know, practical constraints like access to resources.
Even the seemingly simple act of gathering together a group ofpeople with a shared idea is not allowed everywhere. It takes more than an idea to start a social movement. You need money, materials,political influence, access to media. More than that, a social movement needs a strong organizational base to recruit members and then to unite them on a single idea. A good, charismatic figure is necessary to lead the group and focus the thoughts of members and theoppressed on the objective, to convince them to organize.
Again, looking at thecivil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. Stood as a beacon to the people of color who were oppressed. He knew how to speak to a crowd and unite them in a single idea and how to gain the support he needed for the social movement to succeed. Then you have the rational choice theory which proposes that people compare pros and cons of differentcourses of action and chose the one that they think is best for themselves. The choices and the actions of individuals who are trying to dothe best for themselves shape the pattern of behavior in society.
But there are a lot of assumptions for rational choice theory to work. You have to assume that all actions can be listed in order of preference and that all preferences are transient. That means that let's say I like apples better than pears and I like pears better than bananas. If that's transient then that means I have to like apples better than bananas. It also assumes that aperson has full knowledge of what will happen asa result of an action and that a person hasthe cognitive ability to weigh different actions.
These are a lot of assumptions, which are rarely all true. Social movements can even affect people not actively involved in them. Social movements can cause collective behavior like panics, where widespread, unreasoning fear causes people to act hastily, and crazes, which are like fads where something gets incredibly popular for a short period of time, like the latest craze in music or dieting. This past year the anti-vaccine movement has created a panic that has resulted in outbreaks of diseasesthat were once eradicated from the developed world. Now that we have a couple movements to toss around, it might be interesting to look at what happens to a socialmovement from beginning to either success or failure in the end. In the beginning, theuniverse was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widelyregarded as a bad move.
Wait a minute. Sorry, that's the wrong story. Social movements, right. Those begin with a few ideas shared by a few. Then, you have the incipient stage when the public begins to take notice of a situation that they consider to be a problem. At this point, people begin to organize, to coalesce into an organized group and raise up a general stink.
A social movement's greatest achievement will be to either succeed in changing its host society, or else it will have to adapt. What is interesting about social movements is that in the end, they become a part of the bureaucracy they were trying to change. A successful social movement eventually gets absorbed into theexisting institutions when it has achieved its desired changes. Our entire culture and society is formed from past social movements, both those that have succeeded and those that have failed. Even failure social movements leave a mark on their society. The social movement Martin Luther began against the Catholic church resulted in Protestantism.
His name sake, Martin Luther King Jr., fronted a social movementagainst segregation, leading to the civil rights movement. Even Nazism left its lastingmark on world politics. In their time, each ofthese social movements seemed radical, far fetched, extreme. Now, we accept Protestantism as a founded religion and we don't think twice about the right every person hasto freedom and equality. I wonder what social movements of today will become acceptedthought in the future? So, in the end, the socialmovement eventually declines.
If it succeeded, it has been incorporated into the dominant culture. It if failed, it isn't active anymore, but you can still see the marks it left on society by its passing.
Sitting in a luxurious common room facing the sea and chatting with his friends belonging to various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds is a hard-earned privilege for Salim, a poor boy who earlier worked in a cycle shop in a small Kenyan village to support his education.Life has changed ever since the Aga Khan Academy spotted his yearning for education and innate leadership skills, and brought him to the Academy in Mombasa, which has committed itself to creating leaders who will build and lead institutions of civil society. Salim is among the several such poor students who get world-class residential comforts coupled with a rigorous international standard education free of cost at the AKA, Mombasa. A confident Salim declares he will bring about a change not only to his life but his country as well.The Academy in Mombasa that will soon complete ten years in its journey to develop home-grown intellectual talent of exceptional calibre has indeed seen the difference. A few students who have got into college in the western universities have left an indelible mark on Kenyan soil. One of them started a library in his village, a revolution of its kind, while he was in school and his juniors now carefully nurture that dream.
“The Academies believe that a school must prepare a graduate not only for his job but for a life of inquiry, learning and service,” says Salim Bhatia, Director, Aga Khan Academies.Despite their diverse socio-economic backgrounds, students are at ease with each other as they explore academics and life on the sprawling 18-acre campus.“With pluralism an integral part of the curriculum, the Academy offers multi-disciplinary education with an emphasis on humanities. Students study a range of subjects including foreign cultures, comparative religion, theory and criticism of arts and global economics,” says Rob Burrough, Head of the Academy. Five additional strands to the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum have been added, including Islamic cultural studies in a non-doctrinal and historical context and global economics from a moral point of view. In addition, students enjoy a vibrant programme of athletic and extra-curricular activities, which contributes to their personal growth.They are encouraged to discuss and debate and understand theories from their experiences. The AKA, Mombasa, is the first of the 18 academies planned across the world. The AKA in Hyderabad is the second one that has started its operations this year. Located on a 100-acre campus near the Hyderabad airport, it is the only school in Andhra Pradesh to offer IB curriculum from junior school to senior school.