INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC & TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2013 ISSN 2277-8616 Performance Of Community Schools In Nepal: A Macro Level Analysis Deepak Raj Parajuli, Tapash Das Abstract: Though Nepal has long history of education, formal and community accessed school was started after the establishment of the democracy in 1951 AD. Out of the total budget almost 17% is invested in the educational sector and more than 85% in community schools. But the educational performance of the community schools is very less in comparison to the private schools where only 15% of the students studying. After thorough review of secondary literature, analysis through macro perspective under the influence of critical pedagogy we found lack of physical and infrastructures, textbooks, centralized curriculum, monolingual instructional, lack of constructive and critical pedagogical strategies, poverty and social exclusion are the major factors contributing for the poor performance in community schools. Keywords: Community Schools, Macro Perspective, Critical Pedagogy ———————————————————— 1 INTRODUCTION Main objective of that school was to impart the education to the Education means raising knowledge or brings internal children of elite and advantaged groups of people. General potentialities and abilities of learners. In other words, public and community people have no access to education at Education means the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, that time. School was formally opened for public after the intelligence, conscience, wisdom and so forth (Rana, 2007). establishment of democracy in Nepal in 1951 AD (2007 BS). In Many people think education is the process that takes place in 1951-52, the adult literacy rate (age above15 +) of the country school, but it is not confined to schooling. People can acquire was just 5 per cent with about 10,000 students in just 300 education everywhere, in every moment of life without the schools and two colleges (CBS, 2003). After the introduction of bound of age. They can get education from every source such a complete Education Plan in 1971, the education sector began as schools, parents, society, colleagues, mass media, events, to enlarge. The National Education Sector Plan (NESP) of 1971, nature and so forth. More specifically, there are three types of financed by USAID, attempted to create a single unified system education formal, informal and non formal education (ibid.). of public education in order to empower district education offices However, we are only concerned with the formal education to run schools (Thapa, 2011). Same plan formed the Education provided by the schools. Formal education is most planned Act in Nepal, which still exists in the country with various form of education which is divided in general grades tied up amendments. After the people’s movement of 1990 established with the age level and teaching learning activities held with the a multiparty system in the country, after that system, education help of predetermined curriculum. Schools are the medium development was realized more successfully and more rapidly which transfers knowledge to the pupils in a formalized as the Net Enrollment Ratio (NER) for primary students in 1980 manner. Schools are the miniature society, where child learn was just around 16 percent, but by 2003 it had risen to 83.5 the process of socialization (Rana, 2007) which follows some percent (MOES, 2005a, as cited in Thapa, 2011). Though the policy, regulations and rules prepared by the state for the enrollment of the students in the school was increased rapidly welfare of the students and nation as a whole. but the quality was not satisfactory, thus the demand of private schools were widespread especially from well off families. By 1.1 Educational History of Nepal 1998, there was a significant growth in the private sector due to Traditionally, education system of Nepal was guided by Hindu the prevailing school liberalization policy (Carney & Bista, 2009, culture. In its very beginning it was home system. Slowly it was as cited in Thapa, 2011). Since that time the quality of public transferred to Gurukul seminary, where learned persons called school was further deteriorated and private sectors hold the as Guru were responsible for teaching and they decide strong power in the school system especially through excellent themselves what to teach and how to teach. Education was results in School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examination. formally established in Nepal after the establishment of first school in 1853 AD (Thapa, 2011). 1.2 School System in Nepal Within the education system of Nepal, there are two types of system imparting the formal type of education all over the country. They are public (government schools) and private schools. Or in other words Ministry of Education of Nepal categorizes public schools into two types: i) Aided community _____________________________ (public) schools, which receive regular government grant for teacher’s salary and for other administrative purposes; ii) Deepak Raj Parajuli is currently pursuing Master of Unaided community schools, which do not receive a regular Philosophy in Development Studies in School of government grants, but are financed with support from Education, Kathmandu University, Nepal. community, donations from other sources and school’s own PH+977-9851025709. E-mail: [email protected] resources (Thapa, 2011). That means public schools are run Tapash Das is currently pursuing Master degree program through the budget allocated by the government while private in Environment Education and Sustainable Development schools they have to arrange money by themselves for the in School of Education, Kathmandu University, Nepal. school opening and running. The structure of the present PH+977-9818502966. E-mail: [email protected] education system constitutes six sections as shown in the figure below: Pre-primary (below Grade 1); Primary (Grade 1 148 IJSTR©2013 www.ijstr.org INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC & TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2013 ISSN 2277-8616 to 5); Lower Secondary (Grade 6 to 8); Secondary (Grade 9 2. Objectives and Methods and 10); Higher Secondary (Grade 11 and 12); and Higher The major objective of this paper is to explore different factors Education (University level) (MOE, 2010). At present, there that are responsible for poor performance by public are 31,655 primary schools, 11,341 lower secondary schools, (community) schools in Nepal. This paper tried to find out the 6,928 secondary schools, and 2,512 higher secondary schools different factors which contributed for the failure of the in the country (MOE, 2010). community schools by analyzing the secondary literatures, personal analysis followed by the macro theory of sociology. Moreover this paper tried to blend the analysis and interpretation with the critical pedagogy as put forward by Paulo Freire and Pierre Bourdieu. We tried to relate the quality issues of community schools with the critical pedagogy. We tried to see if the quality of community school increased if we adopt the perspective as shown by critical pedagogy. Quality is measured by different people in different ways for instance government take exams to check whether their curriculum worked or not, parents see whether their children get good marks in exam and so forth. But in this paper we have limited ourselves only to the performance of students through community schools. 2.1 Theoretical Discussions For finding out the factors that are contributing for low quality of community school we employed macro perspective or macro theories. Different features that are responsible for the low performance of the community schools can be best Adopted from: www.ibe.unesco.org/.../Nepal/Nepal.htm explored through macro perspective. As large scale qualitative study offers a good deal of insights by macro phenomena or 1.3 Problems theories such as social mobility, community organizations and It has already been more than half decade that public schools political structure (Granovetter, 1973). It helps to analyses started imparting the education in the country. Public schools which forces are responsible for low performance of are criticized for not being able to provide quality education community school as one social institution. Macro-level study (Timsina, 2008). Though in percentage terms, public schools in Sociology is science of the whole society, its stability (static constitute around 80 percent of these schools and private aspects) and change (dynamical aspects). It analyses which schools only 20 percent (Thapa, 2011) but the quality or the forces are responsible for stability and change: religion, performance of the public schools are still unsatisfactory. Many economics, culture, institutions etc. Investigates the influences strategies, policies, plans have been changed for many times of the 'society' and culture, e.g. general system theory, still the public schools are considered to be ineffective schools. sociology of culture (Schillo, Fischer & Klein, n.d). We have Government is investing about 17% of total budget in tried to analyze the school system as one static system and education system (MOE, 2010) at present but the output is not the performance of the school which is influenced by various good as enough as compared to the private schools. As factors like parents, school management committee, teachers, compared to the private school, the public school could not socio economic condition of community people, examination