Problems Of The Semi-Educated

By Sunil KC

THE anxiety of passing the SLC examinations is over, but for about 135,000 students who have seen off their school life, finding a seat in the colleges could be a bigger worry.

These students will compete for about 80,000 seats available in the campuses and higher secondary schools. Tribhuvan University which last year took in about 25,000 students in its campuses at the intermediate level, called proficiency certificate level, is in no position to increase its capacity. Rather it may cut down on its seats under its policy of phasing out that level from its campuses.

That leaves the private campuses and the higher secondary schools as the mainstay for providing after-school education. Last year 504 higher secondary schools had catered to about 42,500 students. This year the government has given permission to 127 more schools to run higher secondary classes. So, altogether only about 80,000 students may find seats in the campuses and higher secondary schools. So, that leaves a whooping 50,000 students who have passed the SLC from entering college.

What will they do? The government seems less worried. Officials believe some of them will go abroad for higher education and some may leave education altogether bringing about a balance in the supply and demand. But educationists and sociologists see serious problems looming over the country’s education sector. Soon the country will have to confront the situation when tens of thousands of young people with nothing more than a high school certificate enter the job market.

The situation could be worse with a similar number who have failed the high school examinations also seeking jobs. If one takes into account the number of young people, who are either high school dropouts or with only a high school certificate, piling up year after year, the number may already have reached millions.

Even many who have passed the SLC may face the dilemma of not finding seats in the campuses or not being able to study the subjects they prefer. And those with good marks may find it very difficult to finance their education. Almost all the private campuses and the higher secondary schools charge exorbitantly. For example, students seeking admission to many private campuses and higher secondary schools have to pay not less than Rs. 20,000 only to get admitted for arts, humanities and commerce with the tuition fee costing about Rs. 2,000 a month. Studying science costs even more. While the campuses under Tribhuvan University may be dirt cheap in comparison to the private ones, the standard of education in the government campuses is dwindling. Many students think it is virtually useless to study in TU’s campuses if one wants to build up a career.

The country’s education sector is in a sort of dilemma producing a glut of unqualified manpower, in the form of high school failures, on one hand and lack of seats coupled with a heavy financial burden on those who are qualified to attain higher education on the other. Although polytechnics and schools providing practical education are slowly coming up, their numbers are too few to cater to the need of the demand. Moreover, they too are very expensive, much beyond the reach of the common mass.

So, the onus lies both on the government as well as the private sector to find a way to fulfill the aspirations of millions. The country spends about seven per cent of its annual budget on education, but the budget has very little for those who are failures.

What the government needs to do is regulate higher education in the private sector to make it accessible to more people. By leaving higher education to the private sector, it can use the resources to provide training to the hundreds of thousands of students who fail to go beyond high school.

Jotting Idle And Otherwise

By MRJ

AS A WORLD WAR II buff, yours faithfully was attracted like a moth to a flame to a news item in the Los Angeles Times, provocatively entitled: Who Won World War II?

NORMANDY LANDING: Most in the West and those who are fed Western propaganda naturally believe— specially around the anniversary of the famous Normandy L Landing — that WW II was won on the 6th of June, 1944 on the beaches of Normandy, France. Benjamin Schwarz, however, has some other interesting information/theories to dish out on that and other WW II myths.

For starters, he reminds readers that although most in America today believe that the US entered the war in 1941 primarily to get rid of Hitler, it was the anti-Japanese dimension of the US war which was the real reason it went to war in the first place. "Nazi Germany declared war on the United States in accord with its treaty with Japan: only then did the US declare that Germany was its enemy too."

Another timely reminder: "Stopping the mass murder of the Jews didn’t figure in any way in either American war aims of conduct. Americans fought the war to end it so that they could go home, a point of view entirely reasonable and even courageous, but hardly high-minded." Touche.

Schwarz places his finger on another sensitive, but correct, spot when he debunks the popular American view that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was "The Man Who Defeated Hitler", as Time magazine once solemnly pronounced. If there is any one person to whom credit for that must go to, "it’s Soviet army Marshal G.K. Zhukov, or possibly Josef Stalin," he argues plausibly.

Also, consider this cutting insight that the main scene of the Nazis’ defeat "wasn’t Normandy or anywhere else Americans fought, but rather the Eastern Front, where the conflict was the most terrible war fought in history."

As Schwarz tells it: "It claimed 50 million Soviet civilian deaths and 29 million Soviet military casualties. "Also, more to the point, he suggests. "Americans should recall that about 88 per cent of all German casualties fell in the war with Russia.

To bolster that assessment, he goes on to recall that "until the Normandy invasion — from June 1941 to June 1944 — almost the whole of the Nazi war machine was concentrated in the East; and even two months after D-Day, well over half of the German army was still fighting the Soviets."

Finally, quoting military historians, Schwarz informs that the war’s turning point was actually two years before D-Day when, at Stalingrad, the Soviets eradicated 50 divisions from the Axis order of battle, or nearly one year before when, at the Battle of Kursh, the Red Army smashed the Wehrmacht’s strategic tank force. "And it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz and bore down on Hitler’s bunker." Quite educative, don’t you think?

RUSHDIE-BASHING: Salman Rushdie is very often in the news. Recently, when in India with his son Zafar, there was — understandably - quite a splash in the media which went into a tizzy about him.

Shobha De, the celebrated novelist noted for belting out racy stories about India socialities, had some acid — but very readable — comments in a recent Times of India column on some of Rushdie’s observations while on his India sojourn.

Calling him Snake Eyes — for his hooded eyes, "cosmetically snipped and tucked recently, but still sinister" — she begins: "Just when we thought old Snake Eyes had finally grown up and grown out of his old preoccupation (that gaping hole in his heart called India), he has fallen into the pit once more."

She then lashes out, thus: "Get a life, man. Aren’t you sick of India-bashing? One thing we have to concede though - nobody does it better than him. This time it was the crowds and cockroaches that bugged the writer. The corruption and the chaos, too. Okay. We can handle that.

"But my own take on the latest tirade is slightly different. Me thinks Salman’s outburst was triggered by the tepid press he received. And the low sales of his last book didn’t help either. Rushdie is raging. He’s also getting paid handsomely for doing it in print. But that’s his line of business.’

De argues that what Rushdie needs is a new punching bag. In her inimitable prose: "Salman has been at it for far too long. It’s time for him to find a new target. A fresh act. That isn’t going to be easy. India, after all, makes a very attractive dart board. Where else will Rushdie discover material as rich… as seductive? As controversial... as challenging? Do we really want to know what he really and truly feels about Equador?" Of course not, Shobha!

Now let’s move on to another theme, say about popular myth places Oxbridge and British public schools on which there is a raging debate today, including on issues such as the underprivileged being denied admission to Oxford.

While some hold that "the real class war is over fee-paying foreigners, not Britain’s own Brahmins", I believe the following statistics are interesting, per se:

"130 years after publicly-funded primary schools education for the masses became legislative reality, private school and Oxbridge—educated elites still run Britain. They account for 80 per cent of the highest army and judiciary ranks, just under half the diplomatic service, about 20 per cent of all senior civil service posts, 30 per cent of the members of the present parliament and 80 per cent of all national newspaper editors." Eye-opening, no?