Quality Education As Incubator Of Progress

Life itself is a learning process about the world-changing advance in science and technology, developing understanding by widening perspective and acquiring necessary skills to overcome the course of natural selection. 

The optimal use of educational insight can help to improve conditions of living and gain practical experience to boost overall progress.  

In a knowledge-driven society, economy and politics, liberal education releases a spark of self-perfection and improves other’s lives even of those persons who are caught at the bottom of the social and economic pyramid. Nepal’s adoption of a welfare state with right to education is expected to nurture the social mobility of the underclass. Its classical treatises have emancipatory impulse and vocational needs of social and economic systems. 

The Upanishads sought to delink knowledge from rituals.  Rational knowledge linked with the basic human values beyond self-interest, enables one to exercise a life of liberty, choice and innovation while spiritual knowledge helps to know self, others and oneness of all living species on whom human survival and progress rest. 

Education is power and its effective use can enable one to cope with human nature by disciplining self, without colonising, dominating and crippling this oneness. 

The fragmentary nature of sciences and social sciences into several branches has yet to awaken students to this oneness and find sensible choice. Education is a mark of civility. Its diffusion reduces the scale of violence, vices and prejudice.

Donation for lofty cause

Resonating the connectivity between conscience and sensitivity, many Nepalis have donated a large chunk of their wealth for the lofty cause of education and sought to enhance the sensibility, mobility, civility and leveling up of ordinary people. The synergy of knowledge and experience generates practical wisdom filled with blessing that makes personal and professional life mature, able to judge what is right and what is wrong. It has also made life entrepreneurial, satisfying and enjoyable. The social spirit of the educated Nepalis is important to attach them with each other and yearn for their love to the society of origin and the nation.

For acquiring knowledge Gautam Buddha focused on self-illumination, not authoritarian teaching of passive learners or a gift received from teachers only conforming fixed curriculum. Educational innovation is important for them to escape from self-alienation and perpetual trust in the advice and judgment of others regardless of its prudence. Active reflection is the basis of inquiry, curiosity and wonder. It establishes the utility of education for truth seeking, critical reasoning and subduing primordial passion so that education does not become a commodity to be sold and bought. 

The unity of Nepalis sought within its culture and constitution can build robust citizenship while loitering outside can turn them either parochial or rootless clientalised to an unjust market. It perpetuates the harsh inequality of power which true education naturally despises.  At a time where cross-fertilisation of knowledge has become a rule, cultural talent can build national confidence. 

The bubble of entrepreneurship springing from the grassroots Nepali society can empower the belief of the educated to take effective leadership in replicating successes, build bridges across the nation’s diversity through the exchange of ideas, goods and services and bring fresh impetus to the productive sectors.  Rig Veda says, “If you don’t implement your knowledge it becomes a burden.” But if its seeds are infused with the stuff of abidya (false consciousness) rooted in earning money and political distinction, production and diffusion of praqgyan (flashing beams of intellectual light) turns thorny. It breeds dependency and defeats the very purpose of education to cultivate the autonomy of a person freed from self-subordination to political fracas unable to adapt to social aspirations.

Each year thousands of new generations of Nepali students are reared in scientific-technical, vocational, humanity and social sciences. Yet, after their journey to graduation, the ideas and ideals they had acquired from good teachers and the experience of discipline do not seem exhilarating because many of them find a divorce in their passion and profession in the process of flaring up their potential. 

They face an uncertain future because education in Nepal is not attuned to a call to national service, get engaged in creative social life with full of supercilious purpose and freed self from the ordeal of national life. The splendid transformative power of education thus lost its grit and drive. The magnificent support students get from their families during the entire education-cycle though not reflected in the certificates is valuable and matchless without comparison. 

The plot of their new pathways defined by the pull of the job market may offer new choices but family support is burden free which they do not have to pay back except affection to parents and grandparents. Rousseau says, “It is education that must give souls the national form, and so direct their tastes and opinions, that they will be patriotic by inclination, passion and necessity.” In Nepal, convocation events mark an academic ritual. 

It furnishes an elemental proof that students have fruitfully completed a course of study for which they are conferred with the university certificate with different scores. It assumes that they have acquired certain level of specialised knowledge and skills enabling them to know how the world of real life works. It can add a new feature in their personal bio-data. 

But the question is: have educational standards of Nepal made students functional to keep the nation’s march to progress, or only opened personal career opportunity in various jobs, honed market-compatible minds hankering only after competitive salary, made them entrepreneurial or a lack of choice forced them to join global job market to breath an expression of secured life. Once they leave the college their successful leadership in various walks of life meets the vision of Nepali constitution. 

Wherever they are, their emotional bond stays with their families, colleges, universities and the motherland as a sweet memory. In a highly competitive nature of the market, it is vital to make education efficient to catch up, compete and even excel in certain areas of its competitive advantage. Nepal is rich in natural resources, cultural capital, youth bulge and geostrategic site between two huge landmasses of Asia - India and China. 

What is deeply amiss is the management ability of national leaders to utilise them for nation building despite their promises to modernise Nepal. The lack of political will and endless haggling for power and patronage consumed their vision and enfeebled their ability to change the educational face of the nation. Quality education can open the students to a new phase of life with prodigious intellectual gift, great passion and zeal. Students’ future career depends on how they demonstrate the feat of artistic genius and technical capabilities and take responsibility as family members, educated persons, as citizens of Nepal and as universal human beings entitled with human rights. Deployment of knowledge to personal and social upliftment is elevating. 

At a time of turbulent scientific and technological change and evolving management and behavioural practices the frontiers of knowledge and organisational boundaries are changing fast.

Nepali educational policy wonks must have to keep abreast with the innovative and complex changes thus anticipating the future of evolving educational management practices, update the curriculum and blend teachers’ training and research. It enables the nation's competitive spirit in the world of education. Educated Nepalis are able to change their archaic belief system, outdated structures and practices attuning to new reality and consorting integrity, moral strength and the very purpose of education to connect with a cause which is larger than absolute self-interest and self-aggrandisement and enhance human ability and public good. 

The business model of education tailors only the narrow motive of achievements in profit maximisation and discourages the cultivation of social virtue, civility and justice which are important to build character and disposition affirming democratic society. The prevailing crisis of value in Nepal’s educational system can be ameliorated if educational institutions are free from unjust partisan politics.  

Critical challenges

The ability to rise up to a series of critical challenges Nepal is facing depends on the quality of education and its practical utility. Constellation of diverse causes is propelling migration of Nepali labour, brain, business and capital. 

Availability of life-saving basics and opportunity within the nation can retain them and commit them to national purpose.  But it requires exploring a wider range of inquiry, options and possibilities, inspiring those responsible to improve the condition of life and make the nation livable and lovable again. 

Leaders, educational policy wonks, business, administration and the people can do it collectively and open conversation with every one interested in repairing creaky knowledge production, management and intergenerational transfer so that national gains a spur of confidence. This means national leaders have to yearn to make a difference by changing structural, policy and culture of education. 

Stability of Nepali democracy merits solidarity between educational leaders, students and the people, their engagement in crafting reforms of education so that the nation does not face a false choice between status quo and frequent unpredictable leap of student and teachers unions into agitational politics. 

Autonomy of educational institutions, recruitment of best teachers and valuing trust in self, one’s own ability, enthusiasm, strength of collective vision for quality education can unburden the necessities of life and incubate possibilities for overall progress. It requires lending hands by family, society, the nation and global fraternity and translating the vision of education to make students good citizens. Prospects of egalitarian society underlined in the constitution are achievable with a massive dose of investment in the nation’s public and community education system where private education can complement. 

(Former Reader at the Department of Political Science, TU, Dahal writes on political and social issues.)