‘The Tales from Campus: A Misguide to College’: The first lessons on empathy for young adults

Indoctrination is everywhere. Whether proclaimed or discreet, visible or invisible, vociferous or quiet, every cultural text that circulates around us has an ideological axe to grind. However unobtrusive or innocuous it may seem, it is out to champion some point of view, legitimise some thought system, justify some mode of behaviour or plan of action, and to lay down, however casually, the blueprint of some world order.

Narratives of identity are forever in place, simply waiting for us to, inadvertently or consciously, step into them. Every individual is a teeming and rioting bundle of narrative scripts that they have received from the domestic, social, cultural, economic and political spheres that they inhabit. If, at all, the human brain makes its appearance in the world as a tabula rasa, this blank slate takes little time to be filled. Inputs arrive thick and fast from all directions telling us who we are and how to make sense of ourselves and of our world.

Every text or narrative that is handed down to us, is out to win us over to its specific side. But there is also a self-awareness that develops, slowly, often painfully, and chiefly as a result of experiences that go contrary to such...

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