A charade of an educational system

A charade of an educational system


Among the vilest human creations that has hampered the development, commercialising education has to be on the top of the list.

Education is too damn expensive in Nepal. I cannot say education is totally wrong and the fact that some education is better than no education, but clearly there's a lot of business involved in schools. School fees are going ballistic. Parents should not accept how expensive education is and I’d gladly join a protest against overpriced education. It is a basic right and every student should get a chance to study for free. The government might be busy trying to focus on so many things but then we have well too many ministers who should really focus on trying to sort these things out. Children deserve quality and free education to develop our country and I don’t think we have been provided with either.


Fig: Monthly Fees of expensive Nepali schools [1]


I’d be glad if every school is free and has the same educational standards. Think of how many hours children spend travelling in buses in the metropolitan capital of Nepal which could have been put to so much better use if they’d gone to schools in walking distance. They would have peers from the same area and would be beneficial for them to involve in extra-curricular activities. Youths in Nepal waste hours in unproductive leisure time every day being involved in nothing because of which they are so prone to indulge in unnecessary activities that get them in trouble with the law. 

We need to resurrect the education system. Why should so many youths have to go for college in foreign countries if the education here was decent enough? We could have experienced teachers from foreign countries in Nepal rather than many of us investing tonnes of money to get a quality education. Perhaps we don't even have the right educational facilities, but it is necessary to adopt to the world so advanced. We lose out best bright minds to countries abroad, which is a mournful thing. If an equal opportunity was provided to Nepalese children, I'm sure many unprevilaged children would get a chance to have education and would help develop our country.

As much as I think education is important, I also think schools are getting us nowhere. What I think about schools is that they should teach us all the basics so we could be skilled enough to assimilate information and express them in our own ways. We would need to teach children language, develop their communicational, analytical and logical skills, and creativity is as important but lacking because of which Nepalese children do not grow up to be innovative. Schools should clearly give out the message that education is simply not enough to develop oneself. Nepalese students could learn more from the extra-curricular activities and the internet.

Whatever I have become today has very less to do with what I learned in school and more with the ideas that came to me when I didn’t have homework or the ideas that come to me at random times when I’m lost in my own thoughts. I’ve learned more from music, books, films, documentaries and real life stories of people than from school. This education we have in our country does not make you special. I know so many people who are extremely talented and are dropouts or not so educated, for example, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. What matters is developing your core bases like analytics and logics. I don’t need to remember all formulas by heart, I just need to know when and how to use them.

“We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control
Do dark sarcasm in the classroom, teacher leave the kids alone
Hey teachers, leave us kids alone
All in all you're just another brick in the wall”
-Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall, Part II

You might have probably heard this controversial song. Besides the brilliant solo and catchy phrases, this song has a deep meaning. I am with Roger Waters on this when he says we don’t need no education because in certain cases it is thought control. Students don't perform well in school because they feel like they don’t belong in classrooms. They probably they don’t think it’s practical enough or it's simply boring. In the case of Roger Waters, he was a poet who couldn’t find his passion in the curriculum. About the title of the song another brick in the wall, it means education was yet another stumbling block adding bricks to confine him from discovering himself.

Maybe it is still not possible to have free education or change the curriculum right away, at least it could be a little less expensive. Imagine saving just Rs. 1000 every month of the child's school fees, parents could save that amount of money to buy a bicycle for their kid or invest it in their hobby. As for me, I believe in Finland's education system where teachers are very experienced but all kids do is play all day and everything they learn is out of curiosity. No exams, no labeling of which child is better than the other in terms of grades.



Video: Finland's Revolutionary Education System



Author +Abish Shakya 
About the Author: 21. Coder, blogger, guitarist, atheist, nihilist, vegetarian and night owl. Into current affairs, culture, altruism, environment, football and classic rock. 
Follow me on Twitter: @abishakya


Source: [1] Title: Pvt schools going above govt ceiling, Newspaper: The Kathmandu Post, Author: Binod Ghimire, URL: http://bit.ly/1TXSf9i



2 comments:

SG said...

The points you made were well researched. Some of them are valid arguments, but some of not(in my opinion). Why is charging a higher price for education a bad thing, when there are plenty of other options for parents to choose from? These are private organizations who invest a lot of money into providing finer education, of which they are looking to earn the money back and make profit. You can't expect such institutions to lower their fees because that would be bad business. Such is the case everywhere in the world. For example, in USA, universities such as Harvard, Yale, Tufts, prices are about $60 000 per year. No one complains, because they provide fine education and people trust their system to generate skilled workers who are extremely good at what they do. Also, the argument referring to the names of dropouts you mentioned isn't justified. They were enrolled in Harvard, Reed etc, which are specially selective in the application process. So just because they're dropouts does not mean they're not smart.

I believe, what should be actually focused on is providing quality education by THE GOVERNMENT. Those corrupt f*cktards do not spend proper money on funding for proper education for the public, so because of that people start complaining about some 10 schools that represent about 100,000 students at maximum(roughly 2.5% of all students in Nepal).

Abish Shakya said...

Well everyone wants to study in a good school and yes the schools with higher fees ARE better than most schools, but doesn't everyone deserve good quality education? I personally think teachers need to be paid MORE than they are but education isn't for just the silver spoon. Everyone deserves a quality education. I personally studied in a good school but my parents couldn't afford if and my relatives had to chip in a huge amount of money for my education. Maybe the government could subsidise something to make things easier for people like me who get into a lot if trouble to pay for education. They could maybe pay for just my tuition fees.

And about the computer geniuses, I was referring to how the things taught to us is only textbook stuff and not something taught to us at school. I mean to say we need to develop skilled students and we won't necessarily need higher education.

Cheers mate.

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