A class apart
PRAMOD MISHRA
The SLC results are out; 68.47 percent of the candidates have cleared
the Iron Gate, and this year's result is said to be the highest in its
75-year history. Commentators are in a celebratory mood at this year's
unprecedented yield. But what they should be asking is why the
unprecedented result has denied the privilege to the remaining 31.53
percent. Who are these failures? Where do they come from? What will
happen to them in the New Nepal or in the 21st century world of
information technology and knowledge economy? What sort of work they
will do? What does the gap between the overwhelming number of third
divisions and the 11,000 first divisions mean for the nation's
future?
In the 1960s, when I started school in a Morang village at the
southern edge of the charkose jungle, my class was the third batch and
it had only three pupils — a Rajbanshi girl, a Rajbanshi boy and
myself. And for all intents and purposes, I was a Rajbanshi. I spoke
the language; it was my only culture; and my kinship network, socially
formed by my mother, spread across villages among the Rajbanshis.
In later years, after DDT came, the first batch of settlers from the
hills began spending more time in the plains; and their children, too,
joined the school.
In the first five years, from classes one to five, our school moved to
five different sites and expanded from one to three rooms. Save for
the last schoolhouse, whose walls were made of sapwood, had a thatched
roof and lasted a couple of years, all the others were made of bamboo,
hay and thatch. By the end of the year, local cattle would eat away
the walls, the rains rotted the roof, and the effort would begin anew
at the end of the school year to collect bamboo and thatch and hay
from the villages around, which grown boys carried on their backs
(most boys were already in their early teens when they started
reading, writing and basic arithmetic). By the time I reached class
five, deforestation had begun in earnest, providing sapwood for the
walls of the three-room school.
Our first teachers were Indian traders and confectioners who had
ventured into malaria-infested Morang to buy a seer or half-seer of
rice, mustard and jute at the weekly market and then sell them in bulk
to the merchants in Rangeli, four hours south. The Rajbanshi village
chief, Jahar Singh (we also had a Sher Singh, and the two names
frightened outsiders who didn't know what to expect in the den of
lions) had coaxed one of these grain traders, a man named Poddar whom
his pupils called Long Jaw, to be our first master. The second master,
the pupils called him Sukhna for his emaciated looks, had a sweets
shop at the village bazaar. I suppose they had a few years of
schooling in their home villages and had come to make a living through
petty trading away from the unemployment and famine of Bihar.
Both the Rajbanshis and the first batch of hill men had begun to
realize that their children should learn the alphabets and basic
arithmetic, from addition to division. And those boys who had
ambitions went for higher multiplication, from 11x11 to 20x20. It was
our solid geometry and complex calculus that only tougher boys with
greater grey matter pursued.
These Indian traders knew Manohar Pothi, our first primer, which said
Mahatma Gandhi was the father of our nation. It was soon replaced by
the Mahendra Mala series, which shifted the focus from Gandhi to King
Mahendra, from dahi to mohi, and from Hindi to Nepali. We used white
clay to write on black slates and wiped them clean as many times as we
wished with our hand. Ink was made by dissolving pieces of purple clay
from Buchchi's shop in water, and pens were made from bamboo slivers.
The older boys could always make better pens because they had knives
of their own and could use it better, sharpening the bamboo into a
smooth body and slitting through the sharpened, sloping head to make a
fine nib. I always envied their skills, but could never emulate them,
for I had no knife and I could never achieve any success in
calligraphy, which remained a lifelong regret.
When the first matric-failed teacher, a brother-in-law of a local
Rajbanshi landowner, arrived from a different village (I was in class
three), it caused a sensation among the pupils and the guardians
alike. They all said that we finally had a master with a degree. We
all aspired then to be matric-failed. In class four, when Hari Prasad
Dulal arrived from the eastern hills with normal training received at
a place called Dharan — as DDT had begun to show results on the
mosquitoes, cats and the jungle — his normal training sounded most
abnormal and exotic. He indeed transformed the learning experience.
Grown boys no longer showed off and bragged about their welts, and the
younger ones no longer pissed in their pants. Dulal Sir coaxed the
pupils and teachers into bands of dancers and singers and led them
around the villages during festivals to raise funds for thatch,
sapwood and stationery. Good looking boys became marunis in sari and
blouse and I danced as a clown with a fake rubber nose and an upturned
moustache. Dulal Master was the first to introduce blotting paper,
rubber eraser and stamp pad in the school.
Then a perpetually drunk panchayat chief founded a high school in the
middle of the jungle on a whim and named it after his mother. We now
had a multi-room schoolhouse made of sal trees — floor, walls and
pillars — and a roof of baked tile. Resourceful as he was, he brought
(at least this was the rumour of their awe-inspiring degrees) a mix of
I.A.-failed Indian traders and B.A.-failed wandering hill men as
masters. I finished class six and seven there. Then the school, too,
failed. And both the teacher and the school disappeared from the
village for good.
Years later, the primary school evolved into a high school, named
after the then crown prince. The teachers now had certified degrees,
but new handicaps replaced the old. The village, as in most other
places in Nepal, has a government school now, where the poorest of the
poor can't afford books and minimal fees, and the "boarding schools",
where the pupils have to wear ties. Even the poor now have ambitions
to send their children to the English-medium school, whereas the
government school now has too many pupils and too few teachers. Towns
and cities have options and facilities, villages don't. A few well-to-
do can avail of the best for their children, while the poor are left
behind everywhere. Those groups that have had a sense of entitlement
to knowledge and the land have a vision for themselves and their
progeny; those who have lived without a sense of entitlement and
connection very often don't know what education will bring them. They
still don't send their children to school, or even if they do so,
there is little motivation and drive.
The SLC results of this year, as in other years, carry all the
complexity of Nepal's geography, class, caste and ethnic divide. Old
handicaps of the initial years have gone, but new ones have appeared.
Chinese pens have replaced bamboo slivers, Enid Blyton may have
replaced Manohar Pothi, but can there be a new revolution in mass
education replacing the first, hesitant beginnings? Nepali patriots
are obsessed with Nepal's border with India. Can they be similarly
obsessed with India's giant strides in education? The Indian
government is already acting on the recommendations of its Knowledge
Commission under its prioritized Human Resources Development Ministry.
But top Nepali political leaders still give interviews about defence,
home and foreign as the plum ministries deserving their high ambition
and status. Who gives a fig about education? What is the Constituent
Assembly going to do about education in the New Nepal and make sure
that there is equality of opportunity for everyone in education?
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
For more options, visit AIMSA group at
http://groups.google.co.in/group/aimsaformadhesi
AIMSA Blog Url- http://indiamadhesi.wordpress.com
or visit http://www.aimsanepal.org
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
