OPINION (Spotlight Weekly)

On Quality Education

By Devendra Raj Panday

As students in pursuit of higher studies, as professionals, or as the practitioners of whatever other vocations you may be engaged in from now on, may you all be able to harness your full potential as free citizens of this rather demanding country of ours. May you always be able to hold your heads high, not because of money you may earn in future by virtue of the education you receive but because of the autonomy of mind as well as matter you will enjoy as educated people, interested in social work and social development.

I have always felt that the beauty of good education is that it allows you to be yourselves, to live the life you wish to live. Even as one consolidates one's material wherewithal for one's own and the loved ones' comfort, happiness and security, education allows us also to live the life we must live to support the cause of the community.

Development is a favourite subject of mine, a subject that is of immense importance to the life of this nation. I could talk about that, focusing on the work that I have been associated with through the Rural Self Reliance Development Centre something that may be of direct relevance to your areas of specialization. Foreign aid is another subject that has fascinated me intellectually and, in the field, as it were, in the practice of development. I believe I have earned a name for myself, good or bad, on account of this interest. I could talk about that. Similarly, I could talk about corruption, an issue that has been engaging my mind and effort for a length of time now. But what I want to do today is basically talk about you the graduates in front of me or the generation you represent you, in whose name we assemble here.

Speaking to a generation about to face the challenges of the world outside the campus, I should not dwell so much on the discouraging situation facing us. I should more appropriately concentrate on the opportunity that awaits you ahead in life. I wish to do that, but the approach I take must also help to situate you in the real world. We can discern lessons for the future, by recalling what we lost by our acts of comission and omission in the past and how to avoid the same in the future. If I make you feel uneasy on occasions, just remember what one great scholar of South Asia, Radhakrishnan, has said, " The world owes all its progress to men who are ill at ease".

Even with external assistance and support overwhelming us, we could have made use of the opportunity to get the best development results out of them, with the money, with ideas, and with technology coming from abroad. We did not do that either. My generation squandered almost all the opportunities available to it towards this end. The evidence is the continued dependence on external patronage after 50 years, and the growing sense of despair among all classes of people. The present degree of social and political violence must be a rude awakening for the youth today. When I was as young as the students graduating today, I could still remain innocent of such things, and consider Nepal an oasis in violence-prone South Asia. What is disturbing today is not only the state of politics and economy. The real problem is the void in the ideational, institutional and moral realms.

We are a nation which, for all the current failings and anxieties holds a great future in its bosom. The mistakes committed have to be rectified. Opportunities missed have to be seized. And the potentials ignored have to be harnessed. Such opportunities and potentials reside in all our people, in all regions of the country. All we may need to do, therefore, is treat them equally so that they can all blossom and bear fruits together. This is an end worth pursuing in itself. No one knows this better than the graduates specializing in social work.

With the right kind of contribution of the educated class at the right time, we cannot go anywhere but up. The cause of the nation has to be a matter of utmost importance to us for another reason. As educated people, one cannot but be conscious that people like you and I are among the more fortunate ones, with commensurate responsibility towards our country and compatriots. If I may say so, even among the educated ones, the graduates passing out of a college as good and resourceful and innovative as the St. Xavier's and on subjects as important as social work and environmental science have a special responsibility. If we take a moment and reflect on how lucky we are and how we might help others who are not so, we can see the value of such education more clearly, and move on to accept our respective callings in life in the service of the country.

To talk such talk and express such values may appear strange today, in this age of blatant individualism, where the market economy is to exercise its authority based on its own "divine right" to rule, and corruption is the source of political power and social prestige. But, eventually, there is no way other than honest work, fair-mindedness and a sense of community that come with education for a country to develop or a people to build a nation. This is the principal thing to learn, not selfishness and avarice, from countries that we consider developed. Indeed if it could be done through greed, through dog-eat-dog competition, through sycophancy, through culture of corruption, through mutual mud-slinging, or even through foreign help, Nepal would have been a more developed nation already.

The hope about the youth or the new generation rests not on wishful thinking, but on a valid principle, the principle of necessity. With what my generation is bequeathing them, the youth have no choice but to be different from the previous generation, professionally, morally and as citizens or members of their respective communities. They cannot squander the opportunities they will have and still survive. Luckily my generation could, but barely surviving does not make a nation.

There are those who like to be very "positive" and therefore emphasize the gains we have made in the past. The important areas where we have made some gains are education (literacy rate from 2% to 39%), health (life expectancy from 27 years to 57 years), telecommunications and so on. I have no quarrel with this view as far as it goes. Similarly, I would be the first one to recognize some of the important accomplishments of the last 10 years under democratic dispensation. For one thing, I would not be here trying to speak my mind (or probably St. Xavier's College itself might not be here) if it were not for the freedom we enjoy now than ever before. For another, we can take some satisfaction from the freedom and a sense of empowerment that almost every average household enjoys in the country be it in organizing themselves for some community work or social advocacy of one kind or another.

The million rupee question is: what do these discrete, disjointed achievements add up to especially if we have lost precious things in more important areas, areas that are critical to the foundation necessary to hold together what we have achieved and to build on year after year.

Let me be specific and illustrate what my generation has squandered away.

a.. The second important resource we have wasted is political or state power itself. It is as if our general callousness and the pathology afflicting the small group of politically well-placed and economically powerful people have rendered all kinds of political regime unsuitable for development of the country. I personally believe in democracy and wish to do all I can to preserve what we have got today and to improve upon it. But, willy-nilly, I would have had to consider the arguments made on behalf of the fallen Panchayat regime that it was more suitable for Nepal's development, if this regime had produced results it claimed it could and would. We had 30 years to give birth to a Nepali Lee Kuan Yew, for example, but we were infertile in this respect also. Frustrated by the events and trends of the last 10 years, we now quarrel sometimes about the suitability of the present constitutional order or democracy in general. With generation like mine to behave the way it has, however, this whole debate appears irrelevant. What does it matter, when our propensity is to squander away the positive elements of every regime and abuse it in whatever way we can in the interest of selfish ends of a few who are powerful? The answer to this question is the reason why I feel that it is better to consolidate what we have with us rather than to engage in romantic speculations of one kind or another.

a.. Even as we did not gain what we thought we were after in these 50 years, we lost quite a bit of what we had. The most important thing we have lost is a sense of personal accountability and collective responsibility towards our nation. It is as if it is not for us any more to try to develop our country, it is a job to be done by the foreigners, with foreign aid. We do not realize that foreign aid is inherently degrading, especially when we abuse it and our external partners cynically use our misconduct to explain away their own lapses in the professional front as well as ethical. The word accountability is overused today, but it has lost all its meaning where it matters, the conduct of those with power. Not just the public officials, the citizens, too, seem to have no sense of fairness, or what is right and what is wrong. It is all a question of who can get away with what. The mundane example of how we drive our cars, ride motorbikes, walk on the road or just the state of city roads, for that matter, may be symbolic of what is critically missing is something that falls in the realm of the sublime.

No society is perfect. Human weaknesses create problems everywhere, in every country. But I can't think of any society, with a right to call it "developing", being as insensitive, and as indifferent to the rights and aspirations of fellow citizens as ours at the present time. To give an example from a field closer to what today's ceremony is all about, I can't think of any society having a good future where parents and guardians use illegal, unethical methods to obtain good grades for their wards who might otherwise fail in their examinations. As we know, many in Nepal do that without realizing that with their conduct, their children may already have failed in life. Similarly, many educated people have no qualms about flaunting their unearned income or ill-gotten wealth, without giving a thought to what their children might learn from such behaviour in the most important school of their life, their home.

a.. The end result is that we have squandered from within us quite a bit of what a human person is all about. The people especially the educated ones, with power and position, have little sense of personal self-esteem, they have even less understanding of national honour. I have learned one thing from my work on rural self-reliance development, something that I call Swabalamban in Nepali. I have learned that, with a sense of self-respect and a proper appreciation of one's rightful place in the community, even the poorest of the poor can rise from the morass of age-old exploitation they find themselves trapped into. The poor and the so-called unaware, uneducated are doing it; but self respect and self confidence are becoming scarce among the privileged groups and ruling classes.When I look at the youth here in front of me or outside this campus, I think of the famous lines from Wordsworth: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven! Naturally, I feel envious. But looking at what we in my generation are leaving behind to the young to pick up and mend and move, I not only feel guilty but also feel sorry for them. Let us think about one thing. The young generation of today has no role model to emulate. Who is to be the hero of today's youth in this country? Can anything be worse for a young person than not to have a social leader one can look up to, draw inspiration from and emulate if possible? By a leader, I do not mean a famous person, your favourite or mine, that we might romanticize about. I mean a leader in terms of legacy left behind for the young to perpetuate and build on.

Obviously, I am not indicting the entire educated class. First, I cannot be insensitive about the plight of the people with college or university degrees, who do not even have a job, and thus share their desperate condition with the uneducated ones. Second, among those who have jobs, whether as civil servants, as medical doctors and nurses, or overseers and lawyers, substantial sections of them are trying hard to support their families and contribute in their respective spheres despite severe institutional constraints and personal problems.

As I conclude my remarks, let me emphasize that not all is lost, and the condition can be recouped by the new generation. When we look around the world, we see ourselves very much behind in almost every sphere of human life. But then, there is no country in the world that is free today of turmoil, contradictions, and a sense of uneasiness about the future. Even when it comes to specific issues and the question of social priorities, I am amazed to see and read the similarities between our situation and that of the only superpower today, the United States. In the campaign for the November election for Presidency in that country, the two major parties are required by their circumstances to focus on some of the same issues that exercise our mind here in this country. They are worried about the influence of big money in politics, so they pledge that they will do something about campaign financing. They say that the country has enjoyed great prosperity, but then the poor have not benefited from it. They say that they are appalled by the state of affairs and the standard of education in public schools. They say that health care is becoming inaccessible to a large number of poor families and elderly persons. And so on.

If a country like the US still has to struggle with these basic issues, maybe we, too, are not that behind in human terms, at least. This means that the youth, the real next generation of social, political and intellectual leaders, have a great opportunity to make amends for the sins of their immediate forebears, and give a new direction to our country. Let us wish them a big success.