Take the recent fee hike. Fee Determination and Monitoring Committee increased tuition fees at private schools by as much as 41 percent last week, in the presence of District Education Officer of Kathmandu. Colleagues in Republica say actual fees at private schools are much more than what is reported. Some charge as much as Rs 90, 000 for admission and as much as Rs 10, 000 for monthly tuition fees. “Why do you complain?” you may say, “Nobody forces you to enroll your children in expensive schools, if you cannot afford there are government schools.” But it’s like saying: You have no right to equal education, so take your child to a public school for a literacy course.
The fee hike with such a huge margin is unconstitutional. Education Regulations mandates the authorities to revise fees at least three months before the new academic session starts. This decision came just four days before the session started. The Supreme Court in May 2012 had directed the private schools to hike tuition fees only once in three years, not to charge admission fee every new session for already enrolled student and revise fees in line with inflation rate, which is seven percent. It is also against Private and Boarding School Directive 2012, which had asked private schools to treat their teachers at par with government teachers and imposed a ceiling on admission fees. Clearly, private schools have acted above the law.
Private schools cite teachers’ salary as the reason for fee hike. ‘We have done it to pay them in parity with government teachers,’ they say every time fees are increased. Only if it were so. Private school teachers (exceptions aside, few schools pay their teachers much more than government scale) are paid woefully low and are treated like commodity goods. They can be hired, fired or held as per the masters’ wish. No doubt, profit is the only motive here.
But this is not the first time private schools have raised fees exorbitantly. Student unions decry it but things get back to normal. There are structural and policy level shortcomings responsible for this. Some of them bear repeating.
New Education System Plan (1971) had nationalized all private and public schools. The problem started when in 1980 the government allowed private sector to share the burden. It began to get worse after the government in the mid-90s gave free rein to private sector to open schools in the name of economic liberalization. Today, as educationist Mana Prasad Wagley had told this scribe sometime back “private sector has virtually colonized country’s education sector.” Private schools have become stronger and they dictate terms to the government. Such is the situation now when we have around 9,000 private schools against around 29,000 public schools. Imagine the consequences when the former keeps increasing and the latter declines further! While private schools have become indomitable, government schools have become synonyms of corruption and non-performance.
The findings of the Office of the Auditor General’s report are shocking: Forty seven District Education Offices spent more than Rs 30 million on about 200,000 ghost students. They collected Rs 19.17 million in per capita funding on behalf of those “students” and Rs 10.88 million on textbooks for them. More than half of Rs 5 billion invested in school infrastructure was unaccounted for.
Decline in enrollment in public schools supports these findings. Enrolment in public schools has decreased by 317,084. About 1,000 schools have either been shut or merged in the last one year due to lack of students, about 1,000 more are expected to merge this year. There is a strange correlation here. Those behind irregularities in public schools are promoting private schools. It is for sure that none of the DEOs involved in the scam have their children in public schools.
Curbing such irregularities is not among government priority because government actors themselves are some of the active promoters of private schools which thrive when the public counterparts are left in a shambles. To quote Wagley again, “sitting and former education ministers” and “secretaries have their shares in private schools.” Influential ministers are directly or indirectly involved in private schools and colleges. This is the reason government actors, politicians and bureaucrats are happy about rot in public schools and excesses in the private. Now that we have private school owners like Gita Rana, Baburam Pokharel and Umesh Shrestha in the parliament, they will only look to institutionalize profit mongering in education. One of them could grab the post of education minister one day.
Public schools have slowly started to distract even the poorest of the poor. Enrollment rate in public schools has gown down in every place where private schools have penetrated. It is ages since politicians stopped sending their children to public schools. Today, even public school teachers, masons, electricians and wage laborers shun them.
If the rise of private schools and constant decline of the public ones continues, it will have serious socio-economic repercussions. Education becomes commodity goods that can be bought only by the filthy rich. Public schools will die. Of course, private schools will prosper, but what good will they be when they alienate larger public from quality education? Our public schools have become the centers to breed manual laborers for the Gulf and Malaysia. The gap between the two schooling will be so wide it will remind us of the pre-1950, when only the Ranas and handful of elites could afford education. It will be so now not because of the want of schools but because they are either too expensive or good for nothing.
We know what has gone wrong, who are responsible for it and what should be done. We need to free education from profit sector and make it a government responsibility. In a recent article to Republica, Kjell Tormod Pettersen, Kirsten Geelan and Asko Luukkainen (ambassadors of Norway, Denmark and Finland to Nepal) offer insights about how free education from primary level up to university contributed to socio-economic transformation and sustainable development in the Nordic countries (see “Nordic lessons,” April 14). There is no dearth of best solutions. But none of them will work here because those who are primarily responsible for failing public schools and putting education on sale are at the helm.
Be that as it may, there are even greater dangers. What is described as the “open loot” in the name of privatization of education is slowly being socially accepted. Private school operators justify it, those who can afford stay mum and those who cannot are powerless to alter the situation. Even opinion makers do not take it as an issue worth deliberating.
The biggest danger is that education will be beyond the access of the commoners and there won’t be a single person to raise voice against it. The biggest danger is that it will stop alarming us—like load-shedding, death of Nepali migrant workers in Qatar and government unaccountability to the people. Education will go out of hands of the larger public, and yet it will be considered absolutely normal.
mahabirpaudyal@gmail.com
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