After completing my SLC with a good first division, I planned to pursue my further studies in humanities. The first question I faced from my parents and peers was why I chose humanities, even after securing a good score? They stressed that humanities is reserved for those with low scores who are not intelligent enough to pursue science or management streams.
People assume that humanities cannot promise them a better future because of its less rigorous syllabus in comparison to other disciplines. But actually, humanities is a wide field of study that lets people learn a lot about human society and civilizations, ideologies and beliefs, and how social interactions transform a human from a biological to a social being. But now the attraction of this stream is beginning to fade, as today’s generation does not see a future in this discipline. As a result, many popular colleges are now phasing out the stream due to lack of sufficient students. Also, parents do not encourage their children to study humanities, because students often cannot secure good percentages in this discipline.
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Many foreign scholars have even assumed that our education system itself is unsystematic, starting from our curricula to the way we conduct examinations. We don’t have standards to measure how much a student learns from one academic year, how much s/he understands, and how much of it s/he can use practically in daily life. Our education system evaluates the student’s competence through three-hour writing examinations. But doesn’t it seem unsystematic to measure how much a student learns in one academic year simply by setting a question paper of a hundred marks, and making him/her pour all the knowledge on paper within the limited time of three hours?
Another dark side of our education system is that it lacks vocational education. For instance, students of grade ten have deep knowledge of electricity and magnetism. They know the working mechanism of a light bulb. But ironically, they cannot repair the damaged fuse of a light bulb in their home. This raises the question: how can our products compete in international platforms, and where do we expect to reach in the future with such products?
Our education system is not able to meet international standards. For example, if Nepali students want to continue their studies abroad, it is difficult for them to find matching courses at reputed universities. If they do manage to get in by good fortune, even then they are required to take many extra courses to meet the standards of the university. Maybe because of these reasons, the craze for A-Level has increased recently in Nepal, after doing which a student can get into foreign universities with more ease. We can find many colleges in Kathmandu which have adopted A-Level instead of plus two to provide choice and diversity to students.
In Nepal, school ends after grade ten, whereas in the US, grade twelve is also a part of high school. In Nepal, students start specializing on a particular subject after grade ten, but in many foreign countries, there is the concept of general education, where students of every discipline are required to study subjects like sociology, literature or psychology in their first two years of bachelor level studies. In some institutions, students can also get associate degrees after attending two years of bachelor level courses. But our education system doesn’t have such provisions. Also, our grading system is totally different from foreign universities’. I asked the admission counselor of University of Rochester how he compared Nepali students with other students in the admission process. He answered simply, “That is why we ask international students to take standardized tests.” The admission counselor’s answer made me realize how limited the opportunities are for a Nepali student.
One consequence of this imbalance in our education system is the decline of the discipline of humanities. For example, many students who want to be journalists do not want to study mass-communication. “I can be a journalist even after studying science, but can I be an engineer with a degree in mass-communications?” they argue. This argument seems relevant in the context of Nepal. But how can we expect a student, who even doesn’t know the basic principles of journalism, to be a good journalist? Many friends of mine who were interested in journalism, diplomacy or politics in schooldays are now studying either science or management. With time, they are sure to lose the talent they had in their fields of interest. But isn’t it better to be a decent diplomat than be an incompetent banker who has chosen a career under pressure?
Many colleges are now phasing out the discipline of humanities. If this trend continues unchecked, after a couple of decades we won’t find a single college offering this discipline. There will be surplus manpower in science and management sectors, resulting in high unemployment, and the country will face a shortage of human resources in the sectors related to humanities. The blame also goes to our education system, which can neither balance the curriculum of humanities in respect to other disciplines, nor make the educational system vocational so that students can be self-employed if they don’t find job opportunities. Does our education board have any effective policies to combat this situation?
One alternative can be the concept of general education, where students of all streams are made to take mandatory courses in their core subjects, and but are also allowed to take other courses in other minor subjects. If students of science and management streams are allowed to take courses like sociology, literature, etc, as optional subjects, it will help check the imbalance of human resources that we might face in the near future, and can also globalize our education system to some extent.
The author is executive director at Grassroots Movement for Justice
Sumesh1993@gmail.com
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