If you thought the prolonged closure of all the nation's schools is about education, you better think again.

'Education Republican Front', even the name gives it away. This is the hitherto unknown group that has forced nearly eight million students to stay home for the past week. Most people ask: how can they do that? Why don't the parents rise up? Why don't teachers defy the call?

Two reasons. First, there is a genuine crisis of commercialisation of the country's education system. This has pushed costs and put quality education out of reach of most Nepali families. This is a genuine grievance, and represents the failure of successive governments to regulate private education. Second, students, teachers, and parents are not defying the strike call because it comes with the direct threat of violence. Militant teachers and students padlocking schools have warned staff that those who remove locks can have their hands chopped off.

In an ironic twist, the Maoists have achieved a classless society, at least temporarily. If this long-term, nationwide closure of schools was really about improving education, the Maoists would have tried to upgrade the quality of government schools so we wouldn't need private ones.

Simply put, this is mass political action by the Maoist party to keep up the pressure on the governing alliance. It is a cynical use of children for political ends which has been condemned in the strongest terms this week by human rights groups and child rights activists. This outrage is bound to politically boomerang on the Maoists, but the culture of violence seems so ingrained in the comrades' psyche that they seem oblivious.

The Maoist affiliated teacher's union, its strong-arm student wing, the militant trade union, or the YCL, are all part of the Maoist attempt to assert power during their transition. Implicit in the modus operandi of all these groups is the threat of violence.

Pushpa Kamal Dahal and the YCL can't have it both ways. The chairman has to convince his militants in mufti at their central committee meeting this week to start behaving, otherwise they will undermine his own effort to project himself as a legitimate political entity. But if the threat of force continues, we can only conclude that Dahal can't face free elections.

In a recent tv interview, the Maoist leader presented a pragmatic face, trying to convince a skeptical interviewer that doctrines change with time. He sounded like he meant it. But can he convince his own young hotheads before it is too late?