THE SUNDAY POST ( a weekly magazine of the kathmandu post )

H E A D L I N E

If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all," Michelangelo, the 15th century Italian renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art said.

For Suyog Bhandari, the 2002 SLC topper, hard work and determination was root cause of his success. As he speaks he remembers Amartya Sen, 1998’s Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, whose views have influenced him.

"I have always listened to what my father used to say about Amartya Sen and I was determined and hard-working that is why I got this unexpected result," he says.

Careers are not made just by wishing and hoping. They are developed with hard work and enthusiasm. Bhandari held on to his parents’ belief and listened to what his father spoke about Amartya Sen. The idea behind ‘hard work’ has been a dominant workforce in the life of Suyog Bhandari of Shishu Niketan School in Pokhara, who topped the SLC board this year.

While many students miss the inspirations of their parents, this is a clear example of how a son clearly holds on to the inspirations, love and concerns shown by his father.

"Suyog’s accomplishments of a work like this certainly deserve praise," said Durga Thapa, Administrative Manager of Shishu Niketan School in Pokhara, which stunned the elite schools across the Kathmandu valley with his highest score. "We exerted enormous discipline on students and remain a bit isolated from rest of the hubbub made in the country that might have given an ideal environment for students to study," Thapa said.

Every school has a different teaching scheme to gauge progress. Nepal embraces confusing approaches to educating its children. In Nepal, low scores in School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examinations can bring real pain.

Children can be held back or denied a higher grade. But educators are not to lose out anything neither are they responsible towards poor results nor can be fired from their schools. In American schools, kids who fail their tests can face summer schools. Educators lose their pay, or are sometimes fired from the school. Sometimes the schools face state takeover if they fail to maintain test scores. But in Nepal, it is just the opposite. If a public school performs very badly, it will continue to do so unless the private people assume its management.

Examinations are diagnostic tools in Nepal; a single exam might keep a child away from graduating. Success in life is dependent on this examination, not on various qualities, including creativity, determination, ambition and luck. Exams have been the sole factor, determining the fate of the students. If they pass they are successful in life, if they fail they are doomed to failure in all aspects of life.

"The system in Nepal is imperfect," say Suyog Bhandari, 17. "What is lacking in Nepal is commitment and honesty at all levels," he said pointing out to the teachers who fail to be sincere in their duties. He also narrated an incident in Pokhara how teachers in one fine morning deserted a government school to attend party meeting.

In Nepal, there is no reward and punishment practice by which exodus of teachers can be controlled or their qualities can be tapped. Reformers have simply tried to improve the quality of schools not the quality of teaching and learning. Spending on primary education has reached to almost US $ 27 per student. The government is investing 14 percent of its national budget in education, nearly 55 percent of which is allocated towards basic and primary education. The donor countries under the BPEP project have alone invested US $ 106 million towards basic and primary education in Nepal. Yet, it seems that it will take many years for student in rural Nepal to be able to study under a tile-roofed Nepali home. And that the inside of a classroom will continue to be crammed unlike American business school.

The government schools have often overcrowded and understaffed classrooms in villages. Students do not know even how to flush the toilets, let alone the simplest mathematics.

Say SLC toppers Lagika Shakya and Suyog that the main culprit is lack of competition between private and public schools, lack of monitoring of the public schools by the government and the loss of accountability of teachers towards teaching and learning.

However, many skeptics are quick to point out that the main culprit is the government but it is not entirely so. According to Dr Bidhya Nath Koirala, blaming each other has been a culture in Nepal, which needs to be reformed, the sooner the better. He pointed out that there has been a lack of refresher training to teachers, lack of proper guidance to students and teachers about the new exams.

The New SLC 2002 had hammered hard on the rural masses and cutting back on the numbers of children passing their exams. The present generation had the worst luck. The SLC achievement scores released last week show that public schools scored ‘lowest’ victories in the SLC in which only 21.6 percent of the total 47,565 students were able to get through the ‘iron-gate’ while 74.88 percent of the students have solidly passed from the country’s private-boarding schools. Of the total of 47,565 students who were able to get through this year’s SLC examination, only 06.72 percent of the female students could make it to their higher education. The disparity between the public and the private is so marked that only 15.04 percent of male students have passed their tenth-grade in government schools, many in second and third division.

The male-female pass ratio show a marked disparity between the public and private schools and also within the private schools, let alone the region-wise disparity. In the public schools only 06.72 percent of female students passed their examinations while in the private, 27.71 percent got through their examinations.

While there are 25,781 public schools across the country, there are just about 8,000 private- boarding schools, which fared well in the examinations. The gap, educators say, has to do with the psychological pressure on kids of villages due to recent disturbances in the country. While they also attribute the cause to an exodus of teachers at village schools last year and the subsequent absence of teachers in the classrooms, School Board’s tough experiment last year to improve examinations systems has also been blamed for the poor results. The politicians need to look at this with sincere efforts, the academicians need to do more than just sharing the nightmare, and the government must put concentrated efforts at relaxing the hyper-stimulated severity of examinations and evaluation pattern. We must have an educational system that will produce creative workforce otherwise we will lose out.

Fashion an art in Air of Korea

In all cases, the dresses were like the women- - shy, bold, and also hard- working. From ‘fly-in-the-sky’ fantasy to exhausting reality- - they represent women of the world. They are different from one another in approach as well as selection of material but altogether, they make a universal image of beauty and bravery of womankind, writes R Manandhar

Could the pieces of clothes that beautify human beings, specially the fair sex, be themselves pieces of art? This could be an astonishing question to Nepali designers who hardly see significance of their creations without models having clothed in them. Neither can the audience think the beauty of fashion without models here.

To give a concrete answer, over two dozen veteran designers from the Republic of Korea have arrived here in the capital recently. They presented their best creations in the exhibition of fashion art, named ‘Air of Korea’ in a landmark phenomenon for both the artists and fashion designers.

All the art works, exhibited in the gallery of Nepal Art Council, are indeed installation works by contemporary artists. Their feelings and image of women, the wearers, are shown through the materials, their textures, colours and shades. Some are still obsessed with the orthodox dress materials and patterns like silk, polyster and flowers or ornamentation, while others are working with inflated plastic bags, wire, beads and collage.

Sometimes, they become purely traditional with soothing pink, like in the case of ‘Sweet Dreams’ by Choy Hyonsook and sometimes, their image turns out to be "shiny, commanding, luxury and no dark-side" like that of ‘Meet me There’ by Jin Kyungok. Park Mying Hee has even presented the women in the dress made out of the collage with the deconstructed body. Kim Min Ja, on the other hand, presents ‘Blossoms at Night’ with a black dress shining with veins and red blossoms kissing the dress from around. Yoo Yong Sun has presented women in joys of life, so she has objectified women in flowers in ‘Full Bloom’. And Geum Key Sook search her own identity in cobweb of wire with beads knitted in them. All the designers have similarly expressed themselves in the dresses they have designed.

In all cases, the dresses were like the women- - shy, bold, and also hard-working. From ‘fly-in-the-sky’ fantasy to exhausting reality- - they represent women of the world. They are different from one another in approach as well as selection of material but altogether, they make a universal image of beauty and bravery of womankind.

Kim Meegnee, the president of Korea Fashion and Culture Association, said that dresses are not only a thing to cover the human body. "The fashion art is an outgrowth from a combination of two human aspirations of fashion and art," she said. For her, they are means for expressing oneself and creating beauty for something new.

The artists are professors, associate professors and lecturers of colleges and departments of textile arts, etc. Their thorough knowledge of wearers’ choices, nature and significance of dress materials as well as the world trend can bring nothing but bests of their creations.

And most of them have also participated in various international art-to-wear exhibitions. All along the route to civilization, we have done millions of experiments with the bodies and the soothing materials to cover them. It was indeed a worldwide exercise and perhaps, the never-ending desire of the people is to present themselves in the most beautiful attire. The result of the quest is the designs, patterns and fashion.

The Korean Ambassador to Nepal Ryoo, See Ta is no less influenced by the fashion art. He says, "Fashion art has many things in common, with other areas of arts, such as sculpture, architecture and so on".

The exhibition was made possible in Kathmandu by Embassy of the Republic of Korea Kathmandu and the Korea Fashion and Culture Association as one of their programmes to exchange the cultures.

Fashion designing and shows have become almost a common thing, at least in the capital of Nepal. But few of them have tried to exhibit them in the form of art pieces. The exhibition indirectly signals Nepali artists how far they have to go to call themselves contemporary and what they have learned from their visits to foreign art galleries and at least by visiting exhibitions of foreign artists.