Skill-Oriented Education
MINISTER for Education Amod Prasad Upadhyaya said the other day that His
Majesty’s Government has been making preparation for the introduction of vocational
and skill-oriented education system in order to enhance the quality of education and
produce more skilled and qualified human resource in the country. Addressing a function in
Biratnagar, Minister Upadhyaya said that the government was thinking to hand over the
responsibility of school management to the civil society in order to improve the school
management system. Of late, there have been a lot of complaints that the management of the
public schools is weak and not keeping with the changed global context. This, in turn, has
resulted in the degradation in the quality of education imparted in public schools. It
needs no reiteration that the government has been according high priority to education
sector and has kept on allocating a large chunk of national budget for the improvement of
education in the country. However, in terms of quality, our education system is far from
satisfactory. Educationists had long been demanding reforms in our education system since
it has failed to produce qualified and competent needed by the nation. For, global
experiences have proved that unless and until skilled, qualified and competent human
resource is produced, the country will not be able to keep ahead in terms of social and
economic development. In other words, skilled and competent human resource is the major
key to the nation’s prosperity. As far as the deterioration in the quality of
education in Nepal is concerned, educationists have been attributing it mainly to the
politicisation of education. And, to the political parties’ penchant for viewing
schools and other educational institutes as the ready grooming grounds for their cadres.
They further claimed that this is encouraging teachers, mostly in public schools and whose
sole duty is to impart quality education to the pupils, to often run after political
parties for their personal benefits rather than in improving their professional competence
and efficiency. This is quite evident from the huge gap between public and private schools
in terms of imparting quality education. Against this background, major reforms in the
educational sector is urgently needed. In this regard, the civil society, as pointed out
by Minister Upadhyaya, needs to be involved in managing schools since they are one of the
major stake-holders as far as imparting quality education in public schools is concerned.
It is to be hoped that with the involvement of civil society in the management of public
schools, the existing situation in the education sector will improve for the better.
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