Education Key To Democratic Citizenship

Education plainly means the grasp of self-worth. It enables individuals to use freedom, not determined by luck, ignorance or circumstance. Quality education helps to shape attitude, disposition and values (intrinsic and instrumental) and lifts them above deceit and distortion. Democratic education is value-based. It seeks the harmony of ends and means and cultivates moral virtues, not militant culture or trade of acrimonies slighting civility. It thus brings private individuals into the public sphere of citizenship and makes them responsible. Obviously, disposition is allied with their ethics to act decently without being habit-driven which involves impulsive acts without much thought and care. 

Educational thought is vital for leadership to ward off rash conduct in the problematic conditions of public life and enable them to acquire cognition, aptitude and insight to solve vital issues of Nepali society. Howard Zinn argues, “Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.”  Democracy provides a normative frame for citizens to feel, experience, reflect and act in their best interest and enables them to use the pursuit of creativity, rights and duties. To entrench civic virtues, Nepali leaders and people need to tend thoughtfulness and human warmth while dealing with each other and even those outside their social and political affiliation. 

Community institutions

The community institutions of Nepal -- families, schools, cultural groups, public libraries, local associations, spiritual bodies, etc. and the state are better equipped to promote civic virtues for social and national integration than commercial media and political parties which tend to stratify and inform the populace along partial lines. In no way they act to foster common goodness of pluralistic Nepali society.  Truly democrats have the ability to transcend partisan parochialism, tribalism and atavistic longing but nurture context-dependent, reflective knowledge rooted in civic and constitutional patriotism as a basis of national solidarity and national identity and constantly engage in the welfare and reforms of society for civilised coexistence.

 In this sense, scholarship in democratic citizenship is defined not by disciplinary canons but versed in inter-subjectively accepted wisdom carrying and caring the national mosaic. Nepali educational and civic institutions must abstain from anti-intellectual bias by producing educated youths in an assembly-line fashion unfit for civic culture based on the spirit of citizenship duties, curiosity and analytical skill. Democratic responsibilities require them to become reasonable to each other and the nation. The art of association is intrinsic worth of Nepalis derived from faith. They have also cultivated inter-faith rituals to educate the public beyond the concern of self as a way of internalising the yug dharma.       

Ancient Nepal, like Greece, cultivated awakened individuals to perfect a polity. Modern democracy is rooted in freedom, equity, participation, ownership and constitutional and human rights. It disciplines power through checks, balances, decentralisation, popular consent and circulation of leaders of each generation and classes through election as a source of legitimacy. In Nepal, the embodiment of all these elements requires constitutional knowledge and behaviour and free judgment about rules, institutions and actors. Democratic education demands a positive social milieu that upholds individual autonomy, cultivates reason and feeling and allows live conversation in the public sphere and sometimes spurs burly differences. 

Social studies, social sciences and humanities being taught in Nepal are less in tune to inculcate either democratic values or instil in the leaders basic skills in problem solving. As a result, problems are compounding in the nation and construction of law-abiding habits has yet to evolve. Declining standards of educational institutions in both teaching and research and falling job opportunities has led to a massive migration of Nepali students, educated persons and workers abroad leaving the nation drain of the dynamic youth population for nation building and propeller of change. The effects are paradoxical: they bring remittance to keep the national economy floating while unable to participate in social dynamics and exercise popular sovereignty and constitutional duties.       

This means constitutional awareness of both Nepali leaders and people is necessary for their perspective transformation from their primordial, ascriptive and excessive partisan orientation to citizenship-based, modern, meritocratic and achievement-oriented ones. One problem with Nepali party schools is that they train the cadres with their programmes as the best while malign other parties’ programmes thus creating a learning gap in enlightenment rationalism, which poses trouble to discover shared ground for collective action on issues of public and national interests, except power-sharing. Indoctrination of cadres and voters in Nepal has not given them the opportunity to creatively use their talents and inventiveness for fear of disciplinary action from top leaders.

The private educational institutions are attuned to cultivate youth to market efficiency and its standards; underrate civic spirit and a culture of equal opportunity to youths of different social, economic and political backgrounds. Often they push youths' abilities beyond limits and make education less aesthetic and enjoyable. Only public educational institutions can carry an equal opportunity culture but their record of academic achievements in Nepal are depressing evident from the results of Secondary Education Examination. Educational standards are measured by reducing school dropouts, rate of success of students and their skill enrichment. 

But public education mostly engages in lecture methods, like top leaders delivering speeches to a loyal crowd in national conventions or mass rallies, making the recipients of knowledge passive agents and turning the cadres and followers silent listeners without much curiosity about new ideas, concepts and values of democracy. Resorting to old lecture notes and guess papers does not make Nepali youths adaptable to the swing of things to change the context, cognition and visual methodologies of democratic understanding. The oscillation of Nepali youths to militancy, migration or passivity is the example of deformities in the educational system. The shared principles of constitutionalism and parallel curriculum for political parties can guide multi-stakeholders of Nepali society to democratic ideals. 

The democratic milieu can spur the ability of leadership to educate citizens about the art and articulation of policy issues, their representation and delivery of public goods. Political socialization of Nepalis into active citizens enables them to conform to the democratic functioning of political parties, polity and the state and learn essential traits in adaptation. No society can be formed without it.  Democratic education is articulate and enhances cognitive ability in independent thought and judgment.  It intrinsically whets the awakening of individuals and exposes them to high quality of values, facts and experience to amicably perform their roles in the family, vocation and polity.

It is a praxis that fosters Nepalis’ creativity, sense of inquiry and individuality, expunges the gap between facts and insight and transforms various sub-cultures into a national civic culture. It thus deters those forces from capsizing democratic way of life either because of authoritarian temper, arrogance or even ignorance. Scientific education is basic to enable Nepalis to deploy technology in cognition and production thus reducing toils on human and animal labour, escape from manipulation and build an understanding. It helps to ditch immaturity, prejudice and subordination to the tutelage of machine politics that do not offer them the life of ample opportunity and choice. 

Enlightenment

The vital purpose of education for democratic citizenship is to achieve enlightenment without disrespecting the sanity of the nation's tradition in the context of forming conscious demos and humanity and without sacrificing personhood embedded in civic autonomy and harmony with nature. As a transparent rule, democracy thrives with the enriched cognition, feelings, sentiments, attitude and orientation of people to utilise their right to information. It is not impersonal like science but has the potential role for the liberation of people from archaic constraints that restrict their freedoms and dignity. 

It can flourish if Nepali leaders and citizens acquire democratic ability, outlook and makeup to participate in various aspects of life and various levels of governance affecting them. The moral purpose of democratic Nepalis can be found in helping those in distress either racked by human-induced direct and structural violence or natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, famine, pandemic, etc. Their common life can be created on the basis of virtues derived from classical treatises that see awakened life in a web of biology, sociology and cosmology. 

The features of modern life in Nepal shaped by private property, private education, private health and communication and interest-promotion has posed problems to bring the rule closer to the people. Similarly, a balance in the huge growth of rights relative to duties and matching economic capacity of the polity are vital to overcome rationality deficits that constrain distributive justice. In this sense, democratic education can equip people with equal rights and skills thus cultivating their qualities for self-accountability and self-governance.  

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