National 3 (Spotlight Weekly)

For the Children by the Children

The “Education for All” global Campaign aims at maximum involvement of children in the awareness-raising program

By THAKUR AMGAI

Children : Respect our right

“Mr. Prime minister! You had promised education for all by the year 2000. Why has it not been fulfilled after four years of the due date?”

This was a question posed to Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa by the children of Pashupati Secondary School of Panchthar district. More than 200 hundred students of the school had signed the letter in which there were queries addressed to the prime minister.

In another letter to the prime minister, the students from Udayapur, the home district of Education Minister Hari Bahadur Basnet, have written how could the (prime minister’s) promise fail? “Try harder to attain the goal,” goes their suggestion.

The students have also clearly expressed the impact the conflict has on their education. Conflict has left a terrible imprint of fear and terror in the education sector. The atmosphere of teaching-learning is not conducive. Both the students and the teachers are under tremendous pressure. The Maoists often intimidate them in different ways.

They write, “The teachers here are terrorized by extortion drive (by the Maoists). The students are continuously living amid fear of abduction and involuntary recruitment by the Maoist militia. The parents are afraid of sending their children to school fearing violent activities.”

Udayapur is just an example. Almost all the rural areas of the country face similar situation. There are cases where teachers are subjected to physical assault if not worse – the murder. Due to this, many teachers have already resigned from their posts and many have taken asylum at the district headquarters and the capital deserting the classrooms.

The letters were written as a part of awareness raising program organized on the occasion of “Education For All” global campaign week 2004. The campaign week was observed all over the world from 19-24 April.

Along with these two, letters from many schools from more than 20 districts reached the capital by the end of the Campaign week.

On occasion of the campaign week, the Ministry of Education has announced various programs to uplift the education performance, which is to be implemented from this session.

Various programs were organized by various organizations working in the education sector. Most of the programs were aimed at school going children who are deprived of privilege to go to the school.

This program of Education for All (EFA) has been introduced after the Basic and Primary Education Program (BPEP).

Among the reforms that the ministry of education has brought out include giving financial assistance to various target groups, which are underprivileged; increasing the scholarship amounts provided to 250 schools that have been handed over to the community; providing financial aid to the schools which do not have even one teacher in primary schools.

The ministry also plans to encourage schools with lower pass rates to perform better. It will give assistance to 25 schools of rural area that give better results in SLC.

This time the maximum involvement of the students themselves is in focus. Under the mapping program, children go around the village and draw map of the village indicating the homes from which children do not go to school. The program is aimed at collecting realistic data of the children that are out of school. The data obtained will be different from the government data but more realistic. In addition, this will also provide information about the reasons behind children not going to school. The result obtained from this program will be informed to the politicians in the “Politicians go back to school program”.

Students from Janata Primary School, Dadeldhura, show their village in a map, clearly identifying the number of children going and not going to school from each house. It spots exact places and names of the children who are not going to school.

Aatma Ram Neupane, a representative of Children Participatory Forum of Concern Nepal, claims there are 2.7 million child labors still in Nepal and unless the problem is viewed from their perspective, the EFA can never succeed. “To address their problems means various things. The first and the important thing is to introduce flexible hours in schooling. As the daytime of child laborers is spent in work, they cannot attend normal school. So, they need to have flexible hours,” he said. At present, less than 500 students are benefiting from the flexible hours in the capital, in which the five-year primary school curriculum is condensed into a three-year form.

Keshab Banskota, who had run out of his village in Dhading district due to the Maoist conflict, had started to work in a cement factory when officials from the Concern Nepal found him, and brought him to their school.

However, some analysts say that the EFA is old wine in new bottle. There is nothing new in the program. Laba Kumar Tripathy, spokesperson of the Ministry of Education, however countered it as, “Many of the structures of the Ministry have been improved. We now have very qualified and trained manpower.”