Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Reforming Nepal's Education Sector

By: Bikal Dhungel

This article deals about the education sector of Nepal. The first part will give some information about the current status of education sector and the second part will give recommendation about how to reform to improve the educational outcome in general.

Nepal is one of the least developed countries in the world with quasi non-performing education sector. The government has failed to play its part to provide quality education for all. As a result, private sector has emerged and growing continually which can fully replace the public education sooner or later. The education system of Nepal is as follows. Private schools start with Nursery, where 3 or 4 years old join and spend in total of 3 years before going to the first grade. There is a state examination at grade 10 called the SLC and after that, three specialization schemes are available where the students choose between Science, Commerce or Arts. After two years of education, students can choose to go to the University for Bachelors Degree. In public or government schools, it is slightly different. Student directly join the first grade, and do until 10th grade. After that, students can choose the three schemes like the pupils in private schools. In government school pupils can choose between Mathematics or other subjects in 8th grade.

There are about 80% public schools and 20% private schools in Nepal. Almost all private schools are located in cities. Talking about quality, even though the government school teachers get training as an educator, their performance is too poor in terms of teaching than in private schools. Very few private school teachers were trained. Moreover, public school teachers enjoy other facilities like fixed job, sick allowances, pension scheme etc whereas private ones do not. Still, the absenteeism is very high in public schools, about 20% in a year. In private, this is significantly lower. Teachers fear their job, so avoiding unnecessary absenteeism, providing bad teaching is less likely. Making it short, despite all the facility packages for teachers, quality in public schools are too bad whereas in private, they are not. One reason of this bad quality can be explained by the organisation of teaching and school policy. Public schools have fewer classes, they have no homework, and exams are held at the end of the year. Private schools have lots of classes, if a teacher is absent, classes can be held on the weekends, students get home works and the secondary levels even projects and there are three exams per year so that the school is more up to date about the students performance. Weak student get support either by the school or the parents can afford a private tuition. As a result, the perform better. Public school students come from poor family who do not take tuition and as the family themselves are less education, they cannot get support from the family.

The outcome of the education system can be seen in SLC result. Less than half of the attendees pass the Iron Gate. For number of years, the actual percentage remained between 35 to 45%. Students should score 32 out of 100 to pass. An informal rule is, if student score up to 27, 5 marks could just be granted. This implies, more than half of the students cannot even score 27% of the grade. This figure is way too poor. This shows the failure of teaching. Only about 30% students from public schools pass SLC. Most of them with very low marks. Private schools have higher pass percentage but given the facilities provided, the result is still not convincing. So, what is the consequences of this outcome ? The consequences are very serious. First, if more than half of all children every year are wasted, if their talents are wasted, this is a huge loss for the country itself. Second, when the children from rich families do better in schools, have better opportunities in the future, and the children of the poor continue failing, they will have a gloomy future, they will never come out of poverty trap and the inequality between the rich and poor will continue to remain. Further consequence of this is poverty. This can even invite violent conflict because the poor will always see themselves discriminated and the state is not doing enough to address their problem. Nepal has a huge population growth. Most growth is happening in poor families. Without better schooling and better perspectives for the future, the are forced to go to other countries in search of employment without regarding their health and other worse effects.
Before we go to second section, let is talk briefly about another problem, which is, 11th and 12th grade. Almost everywhere in the developed world, school doesnt finish at 10th grade. Developed countries teach upto 12 or 13th grade and only after that, the University will start. In Nepal school ends at 10 and as it is called Iron Gate and is seen as an achievement for students passing this Gate, students have a feeling of freedom after that. They think, they have grown up and use their freedom to do things that they were not allowed to do before. Most of the students do not perform well in 11th or 12th grade like in the school upto 10th grade. Second aspect of this is the growing business of private colleges. They charge a lot of money, unnecessary fees and other extra costs. This mostly does not represent the facility they provide. This again is differed between Arts, Commerce and Science. The business of colleges has grown so massively that, the admission fee in an average college is more than 5 times the admission fee in an average school.

So, what can be done to Nepalese schools and education system ?
There are many aspects that need improvements.
  1. Financing Education : A report by the Ministry of Education wrote that, the average cost per student in a month is about 3000 rupees for the government in public schools. In private schools on the other hand, it was only about 1200 rupees. This is the cost for the school, not the school fees. School fees are higher because schools also generate profit from this. But from this figure we can say that, if the government abolish all the public schools, pay the tuition fees of the students in private schools, the government is better off, and the students will also be better off because they can get quality education and the education outcome will definitely improve. This is a radical but an appropriate suggestion: Abolish all government schools.
  2. Make schools 12 years: School should not stop at 10th grade. It should continue until 12th so that the greedy private businesses of high education cannot rob the public. Secondly, as the education simply continue, 11th and 12th grade can be organized more flexibly by providing more choices of subject, technical or non-technical subjects.
  3. Exit Scheme for those interested in vocational training: students who want to continue the education further in the university can top up to 11th grade, those who are for vocational training should have an opportunity to quit and participate in training. This gives more flexibility and the economy will have needed technical experts.
  4. Perform the exam in regional basis: The SLC exams should not be held nationally at least not in the first few years. The curriculum should also suit with the geographic or cultural factors of the given area. Moreover, as the quality of education is not same everywhere, the best way of judging the student is to hold regional exams. Even if government schools are to remain, SLC exams should be held separately between government and private schools.
  5. Introducing a Teaching Licence: Apart from the specialty of teachers in their field, there should be a compulsory training as an educator for the teachers. This training should include Child Psychology, Arts of Persuasion, Creative Works etc.
  6. Independent Thinking Scheme: Education is not merely a collection of facts. Students should not be forced to learn things by heart, which they forget at some point anyway. Students should be taught the fundamentals, then independent thinking should be promoted. Things like group discussion, debates should also include so that the students learn to think of their own instead of repeating the facts.
  7. Regular Breaks in Schools: Our mind has limited capacity. It cannot absorb facts for unlimited time. It needs break. After every 2 classes, at least a 10-15 minutes break should be there. Schools in developed countries have this scheme which they call study sessions.
  8. Make water available in all classes: This has been ignored mostly but one important thing we should not forget is, water is a scarce good in developing countries like Nepal. Schools in Kathmandu mostly dont have clean water taps. Either students bring water from home, or they dont drink the whole day. Students in secondary level dont bring water. But they forget that not drinking water for a long day reduces their concentration and can even have negative impact on their health. Make water compulsory in schools.
  9. Reforming Curriculum: Nepalese Curriculum is biased. They include exaggerated history which is nowhere to be found except in these books. This should change. There should be strict control on who writes the book, and the contents should be checked thoroughly. Either there should be same contents in all school is another matter of discussion but the aim of schools should not be to make everybody same but to motivate them to be themselves, have their own ideas etc.
  10. Establish Teacher-Guardian Contact : Every month, there should be an hour or two meeting between the guardians and class teachers where they discuss the ongoing issues. In Germany, there is this scheme. It is called 'Parents Hour' where parents of certain students meet with the teacher and talk about how to deal with the given issue if there is something that needs to be changed. This improves school performance drastically.
  11. Grading System: Grading should not only be based on the exams. It should also include class participation, performed homework, discussions and also exams.
  12. Updated way of Teaching: Especially in the university level, courses should be offered according to the demand of time. Subjects that do not represent the growing demand of the economy should be reformed. For example, large fraction of people who came from government schools study Sociology because it is mostly the only available subject in government colleges. Subject offerings should be diverse.
  13. Best Practices from Elsewhere: Today's age is a scientific age. More and more research are being done in education sector. When there is a proven way of better performance, the education system should be in a condition to adapt to the system. It also means that Laws should not be made to strict that it is hard to change. Etc


These policies can change Nepalese education sector for better. Finally, they are just opinions. Not all are facts and opinions can also be biased.  

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