"The Epoch of Education”: For the Country's Development
Stacey Pigg argues that the Nepali usage of bikds articulates an ideology of modernization because it represents society through an “implicit scale of social progress” (ibid., p.
500). I suggest that education is a scalar unit used to measure social progress. In the previous section, I demonstrated that people measure themselves and others according to educational attainment. In this section, I will show how they assess their village, their region, and the country’s progress based on the educated aggregate. The measurement of education in the aggregate allows people to connect their own progress with the country’s progress, which currently provides people with a sense of agency in postwar Nepal when so much is beyond their control. However, foregrounding the individual and scaling up do not take into account what the government’s responsibility is in enabling the progress of its citizens and if it is living up to this commitment. This is a particularly salient consideration in postconflict Nepal wherein the government and international agencies are initiating programs and policies that encourage citizens to invest in the country to maintain peace and security.At Thakur Ram Girls Hostel, one young woman asserted education dictates the current age (sikshama nai chhalirahechha yo yug); “we live in the age of knowledge,” she explained, “and so education is necessary to take the country forward” (16-December-2013). Her claim places education within the realm of inevitable global progress by abstracting the individual family’s project of securing their future to the national project of development. Many people asserted that their education was not merely for their own well-being but for the development of the country. There is a direct link between the individual and nation. People should invest in themselves in order to improve the society.
One gentleman explained that more than for obtaining a job, education is for the development of social values because education teaches the, “art of living.” He clarified, If one masters the art of living, one will be sustainable, he explained, and that person can create opportunities for others” (31-July-2013).The connection between the personal and the social was also articulated through people’s understanding of the impact of education on the community environment too. This emerged when an elder village leader explained to me what education has done for his village of Jauwaguthi:
In fact, the village gets changed when everyone is educated. In the Madhes, there was caste discrimination and people tended to earn money by illegal means. Now these trends are in decline. By bad ways, I mean theft, smuggling, and the like. Educated people don’t tend to carry a load of hashish from Nepal to India...People have become aware these days...The number of educated people is increasing day by day and the children from poor financial background have also starting attending schools. This is only a good thing. (5-February-2014)
This leader’s explanation offers practical reasons why education improves communities; it provides people opportunities other than illicit work by giving people skills that allow them to be assessed as employable on something other than their caste status. What we see here is that education allows people to circumvent other categories of backwardness that create impoverished lives and reflect poorly on the community as a whole. People are very sensitive of the toll illegal activity has on their village’s reputation. A common story I heard from older dacoits (bandits) is that they ceased their thieving after fellow villagers implored them to stop because it sullied the village’s reputation, making it difficult to marry their sons and daughters.
However, what this explanation does not take into account are the reasons why illicit activities were so prevalent in the late 1990s through 2010.
In 2003 when the district’s government sugar mill closed down, many farmers lost their main access to cash: sugar cane. Sugar cane had been the main cash crop since the late 1960s when the sugar mill was opened for operation. Due to government mismanagement since the reinstitution of multiparty politics in the 1990s, it ran at a loss. The king’s government finally closed it down in 2003. Not only did over 2000 people lost their factory jobs but farmers also lost their main source of cash. Due to the security vacuum and the open border, drug cultivation and smuggling became the new sources of cash for many households. The rhetoric of education “making people aware” does not factor in the government’s role in making illicit activities the only income-generating option for many Parsa families. Drug cultivation has been greatly curtailed since 2012. However, increased education is not the main reason for the decrease. The increase in labor migration has maintained incomes in agrarian households. Lauding education for bringing awareness in this context obscures the endemic socioeconomic problems and the government’s role in causing them.I also observed how communal prestige of education can curb gender discrimination. In Biranchibarwal Dibya Girls School was opened in 2009. This school runs from grade eight to ten (age 13-16) and prepares young women for the School Leaving Certificate exam. The school was created to circumvent what one community organizer explained as a “negative tradition”: pulling girls out of school around grade seven and preparing them for marriage. Before the Dibya School was established, female students who studied in grade eight and above had to travel outside the village and were vulnerable to harassment. In order to spare them this hardship and possible disgrace to the family, most families preemptively stopped their education. By establishing a school just for girls in the village, they stopped this “negative tradition” and further educated their daughters.
Many explained to me that the village has become known because of the school. Girls from surrounding villages come to attend, and Biranchibarwal has become a prestigious village to marry one’s daughters to or receive daughters from. One young man explained, “Other villages like to develop relations here because we are seen as forward minded. People know their daughters will be cherished here because the Dibya Girls School proves we give priority to our own daughters. Plus many young girls like to keep studying. If they get married here, they still can continue their education” (20-December-2013). Biranchibarwal residents are proud that the village has a reputation for being an “educated village.”As a community development tool, education provides social reform through the promise of social mobility. Educated people embody the modernizing project that improves their village and by default the country. This dynamic took a particular form at the Thakur Ram Girls Hostel. Over three quarters of students were studying education, a trend also reflected in villages. These young women explained to me that they chose education because of its flexibility. It was a strategic choice to keep their employment options open after marriage because a teaching schedule did not interrupt household duties. Another benefit many young women cited was that even if they did not work, they could teach the kids in their household. Education is giving these women skills that could yield potential earning power outside the household and allows them to educate in the domestic sphere, a service that in the previous generations was purchased or bartered for. One young woman at Thakur Ram Girls Hostel explained to me, “I chose to study education because I want to contribute to the nation through teaching, even if that only means teaching the children inside my husband’s household. That is still contributing to the nation, no?” (3-February-
2014). These young women have chosen their course of study to accommodate the social limitations they face, and by doing so, they have internalized the educational development rhetoric and made it a personal agenda that ensures both social mobility for their families and social reform for the nation.
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