National Progress Through Education
In the last 20 years, Nepal’s literacy rate has increased over 30%, and the number of people earning their School Leaving Certificates is up tenfold. This is due in part to the state sponsored development campaign (bikas), which has been ongoing since the 1960s with international aid support increasing every decade (Ahearn 2001; Bista 1991; Panday 1999; Pigg 1992).
The government provides free education till class ten, heavily subsidized university education, and since the 1990s has supported a burgeoning private school industry (Caddell 2002, 2006; Carney and Bista 2009; Dixit 2002; Liechty 1997; Shields and Rappleye 2008; Valentin 2011). Families across socioeconomic demographics have invested in their children’s education in the hopes that it will yield salaried work. Educational attainment is viewed as the key to a more secure life. This trend has increased while the government has adopted neoliberal economic policies that have reduced the number of secure, lifelong bureaucratic jobs that were so prized by the current generation’s parents. Political instability over the last decade and half has also left the private sector anemic with many factories closing down due to political extortion, unreasonable union demands, inflation, and the weakening of local currency. Thus many young people have trouble securing stable employment both in government and private sectors. What happens when young people are unable to secure stable positions? How do they make meaning of their education after they fail to reach the end in which they initially invested?The relationship between education, employment, aspiration, and outcomes has been well established in multiple localities (Appadurai 2004; Butler and Hamnett 2011; Davidson 2011; Jeffrey et al. 2004; Mains 2007). Education’s “other” - that “which remains untaught and unsaid in order that education can continue to identify itself as a project of progress and enlightenment” (MacLure 2006, p. 730) - is by now well known.
Many historically marginalized communities have turned to education to uplift themselves merely to understand the complexity of their marginalization is difficult to overcome. As their world expands beyond their locality, they discover they are on the periphery of multiple power structures (Liechty 2003; Madsen and Carney 2011). The young Nepalis with whom I worked may be establishing themselves in a precarious world amid instability and uncertainty. However, they still place themselves in their social terrain wherein the ideology of modernization is a determining coordinate. They distinguish themselves both culturally and socially because of their educated status (cf. Jeffrey et al. 2004; Levinson etal. 1996).I suggest that my young interlocutors see themselves as a particular product of development (bikas). Bikds takes a specific sociocultural form in Nepal, which has been subject to the international aid regime since the 1960s when the Panchayat Government under the Shah monarchy made development a central pillar of its nationalizing project. Stacy Pigg asserts that “Nepalis do not perceive the ideology of development as culturally foreign: They come to know it through specific social relationships” (1992, p. 496). She argues that development in Nepal weaves the fabric of local life and patterns of Nepalese national society into a specific aspiration for modernity that was constructed by traditionally elite cultural values. What we see in the way these young people perceive distinction is a pattern of social reproduction that replicates the national project by bringing “localized differences into alignment with a picture of Nepalese society as a whole, thus integrating all rural areas into a nationally shared vision of Nepalese society” (ibid., p. 520).
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