Two weeks after the publication of SLC results, private schools are still publicizing their SLC statistics, sometimes even individual students’ scores, on colorful ads in national newspapers. Their success is impressive, but it points to a failure in Nepal’s public school system. Out of 96 students who appeared in the SLC exams from a government school in Ilam this year, only four passed. A neighboring private school had 18 students take the exam; all of them passed in the first division. National statistics suggest that the trend is relatively common, despite the fact that government school teachers are required to be trained and are paid better than private-school teachers.[break]
According to the Ministry of Education’s data, 55.5 percent of students who took the SLC as regular candidates in 2067 BS passed the exam. The success-rate was 85.82 percent for private school students, but only 46.62 percent for public school students. High SLC success rates and test-scores are misguided measures of a good education— just because someone gets a higher score on the SLC does not mean a student is smarter, more hardworking, or better-educated than his peers. But when the majority of the public-school students still fail the SLC exams, then there is no question that something is wrong with our public education system. We are left with two options; we can leave school-level education completely to the private sector, or we can reform our education policy to create a more efficient public school system.
If education is truly to be recognized as a Human Right as declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Constitution of Nepal (1990) and the Interim Constitution of Nepal (2007), a good public school system should be available and free for everyone. While proponents of privatization and competition argue that private schools are becoming less exclusive, they are still not affordable to a majority of Nepalis, including those who live under the poverty line. Unless our public schools are better, the quality of education a child will get, as well as their life chances, will be limited by how much their parents can afford to pay. A strong public school system guarantees that even the children of the very poor get a good education and have the possibility of upward social mobility.
For society as a whole, private schools have a two-pronged effect. One the one hand, when education is privatized, different educational institutions compete with each other, and to survive this competition, they offer quality that does not exist otherwise. Since private schools are not allocated any money from the government’s budget, more tax money can go to public schools. On the other hand, however, as long as the children of those with influence (such as politicians, businessmen, development workers and journalists) do not attend public schools, they will have no stake in improving the public school system. The quality of public schools has already fallen into deterioration and neglect.
Private schools use SLC results and numbers to attract their customers: students and their parents. So they conduct classes at all hours of the day, make extra classes compulsory, and hold numerous mock exams so that students are prepared for the big exam. This approach may or may not contribute to students’ learning, but it does boost their performance in SLC.
Public schools, on the other hand, have nothing to prove. There are no owners to benefit from a large enrollment, and teachers with permanent jobs do not have to fear being dismissed from their jobs if their students don’t perform well. Around six years ago, an English teacher at a public school in my locality in Lalitpur went on a month-long vacation in the middle of the school year. There was no arrangement for a substitute teacher; one student who did well in her subject taught his classmates for the whole time. This kind of indifference is sure to produce bad results.
However, there are other factors that contribute to the bad performance of public school students. Public schools often lack the infrastructure that private schools have, including technology and computer labs. According to MoE data from 2011, on average there is one teacher for 10.8 students in private secondary schools in Nepal. For public secondary schools, there is one teacher for 31.4 students. One of the reasons our public school teachers cannot generate the same results as their counterparts in private schools maybe that they are responsible for more children each. They have to teach in crowded classrooms where they cannot afford to pay attention to every individual student.
Moreover, students who attend public schools generally work in and around the house, and have parents who have not gone to school. Such parents are unable to help them with their studies, or to pay for extra tutoring. We see these kids as failures before they can appear for any exam and give up on trying to help them. When they realize their situation is not improving irrespective of how hard they try, they give up on themselves. This is known as self-fulfilling prophecy. Kids fail when we can only visualize limited avenues through which they can succeed. Performance in SLC is no measure of good education, but passing the exam is a must for those who want to study further, given the current structure of education in Nepal.
Our preoccupation with performing well in SLC has adverse effects, both on structural and individual levels. SLC preparation takes away from classroom time that can be spent on actual learning, and the budget spent on holding the exams, getting exam papers corrected, and publishing results can be spent on hiring more teachers or developing infrastructure in public schools. The dismal SLC results should not discourage the Nepal Government from making investments in the education sector; that should actually be a priority in a developing country like ours. However, it is high time we examined what we are spending our education budget on.
The focus on standardized testing is not even serving those who triumph over the exams. It is taking away from the human aspect of education—the caring relationship that is supposed to exist between students and teachers. In the mad frenzy that includes competitions between individual students as well as schools, students are reduced to statistics, and not seen as individuals with futures. We spend a whole year preparing our kids for the SLC, and teach them some facts that they will forget in a few years. Instead, they should be learning how to learn; skills including inquiry, analysis, and retrospection. In that process, they will learn to synthesize information and answer questions, students from private and public schools alike will be able to pass the SLC, and we will save ourselves from embarrassing statistics as well as commodification of education.
The author is a recent
graduate in the Social
Sciences, and is interested in Nepal’s education sector
aditiadhikari@gmail.com
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