Why are private schools the target of everyone's wrath? Every time anyone wants to make a political point around here, they force schools to shut. In effect, our way of taking revenge on political rivals is to punish our own children. Very few societies in the world have shown such consistently self-destructive behaviour.

Earlier this month, the five main political parties signed a declaration making schools Zones of Peace. When we asked the parties why it is that they are once more threatening an indefinite closure of schools throughout the land, they washed their hands off it. It's not us, they said, it's the student unions.

How convenient. It has become standard operating procedure for the vision-challenged party leadership to use their affiliated student unions to take aim at schools in order to create maximum social disruption with minimum effort. A few phone calls threatening violence usually does the trick.

The truth is that the student wings of parliamentary parties are competing with the Maoist student wing for the radical edge.

The unions have always been the street wing of political parties, either parliamentary or underground. They have now chosen the most vulnerable target: the one that can't fight back.

It is worth reminding ourselves that one of the main reasons for the rot in our school system is the mismanagement and corruption over the past 13 years by the mentors of the same student unions that are shutting down schools today. Successive elected governments abdicated their responsibility to provide affordable quality education even though the period saw the largest-ever infusion of foreign aid into the sector. So, private schools filled the vacuum. Without help from anyone, Nepali educationists created institutions of learning as good as anywhere else in the region.

The success of the private school system would expose the politicians' failure. So today, we have the parties using their present confrontation with the king to let their student wings paralyse the education system.

To be sure, there is something seriously wrong with an education system in which only 30 percent pass high school exams.

This week we had our annual reminder of just how low the quality of education in government schools has sunk. While many private schools have 100 percent first division rates, most government schools have a 100 percent failure rate. So, do we punish the private schools for being more successful?

Our system stigmatises the 70 percent of the 170,000 children who didn't make it through SLC this year as "failures". Cumulatively, over the past ten years alone there have been half-a-million young Nepalis who have been branded failures. Unless efforts are made to bring them into the job market in Nepal or abroad with skills training, this is going to be a socio-economic catastrophe. This is not the time to linger with long-term plans: the crisis is too serious and a solution is required urgently.

If the political parties, the government or the Maoists are seriously concerned about the future of this country, they should start putting their heads together to figure out what they are going to do to defuse this bomb. After all, it will be ticking no matter who rules.