HEGEMONY AUDIT WORKSHEET

Nobody put a gun to your head and told you what to believe. They did something far more effective. They made you think you chose it yourself.

That is hegemony. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political theorist who wrote his most important ideas from inside a fascist prison, identified the most sophisticated form of political control ever invented: not force, but consent. The dominated begin to see the interests of the dominant as common sense. They stop questioning. They start defending the very system that limits them.

This worksheet breaks that spell.

The Hegemony Audit Worksheet is a four-part analytical tool from Notes On Power Academy that applies Gramsci’s framework directly to your life, your beliefs, your school, and your own mind. It does not lecture you about power. It makes you find it in yourself.

What you get:

Four structured sections moving from analysis to personal confrontation. You will examine seven common South African beliefs and ask whether they are natural facts or political arrangements dressed as common sense. You will audit three beliefs you hold about yourself and trace exactly whose interests they serve. You will interrogate what your school presents as normal and imagine what a counter-hegemonic education would look like. And in the final section, you will sit with Biko’s hardest question: where have you internalised the terms of your own oppression?

Who this is for:

Grades 8 to 12, educators teaching power, politics, and critical thinking, and any adult who has never been given the language to name what they have always felt.

This is not about guilt. It is about clarity.

What have you been taught to accept as normal?

Unchained. Unafraid. Unmistakable.