Recently the government announced a public holiday, the day after another public holiday, the week after schools had been closed for a month for more holidays. So we decided to stay open, much to the concern of one of our (government) school principals who was afraid he would get in trouble with the local education authorities. Still, it meant that we were probably the only government schools in Nepal open that day.

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One of our students told us that, as a Dalit (so-called ‘lower caste’), he still faces discrimination on a daily basis. When he goes to buy something at his local shop, he is not allowed to actually enter the building. If he buys something and then changes his mind, he cannot return it because he has touched it, so it is ‘unclean.’ He recently offered someone a lift in a van his father had hired for some work. The woman would only accept the lift if he got out and rode in the bad. The woman didn’t want to risk being touched by him. This is on the outskirts of the capital city… in 2017.

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We often visit students’ homes if they have missed a few days of school to find out what’s going on. This week we had to visit a principal’s home for the same reason. The good news is, it seems to have worked. Later in the week he locked the school gate at exactly 10am to lock out a couple of teachers who had been arriving late. Jolted by the embarrassment, everyone – principal and teachers –  are now arriving on time.

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We’re having a struggle convincing our Class 10 teachers to stop lecturing and start teaching. As we have repeatedly explained, talking is not teaching. We want them to give students some learning / discussion activity, or simply ask them to do some practice questions. However, the teachers reply that they have to finish the course before the second term exams, which have questions on the whole course. At one level I have some sympathy for them – they don’t want to be accused of not teaching something which came in the exam paper. But on so many other levels it is symptomatic of what is wrong in Nepali education: that it is inputs, not outputs that matter, that teacher talks leads to learning, that the question teachers ask themselves is, “have I taught the lesson?” not “have they learned the lesson?” There are other factors too – one teacher explained that Nepali teachers don’t feel as if they have done their job if they have not talked at students throughout the lesson. Teachers like to leave class with a saw throat – that’s their measure of a good lesson. The obvious solution would be for the external committee that set the second term exams to only set questions for two thirds of the course, but in Nepal the obvious solution is not always obvious.