Re: \'Parents mobilise\' (#146). As foreigners, we have the means to send our Nepali foster son to one of the best private schools-and one that runs without foreign funding. As Europeans we can testify that its educational standards are higher than those afforded to us in Germany and Austria when we went to school. We often envy the boy for the chance he has to be in such a good school and for being so happy with it.
Schools like this one are essential for the country, because they provide what most other public and private schools do not: better education. As the privileged upper classes of Nepal, its politicians, and even Maobadi leaders know very well, the only alternative is to send their offspring for appropriate education to boarding schools far and abroad. We feel strongly, however, that children during their formative years should stay close to their families, near their rich culture.
High and "unjustified" school fees are targets of the present agitation against private schools, but "expensive" is a relative term depending on your own values, and on what to compare. If one believes, as we do, that primary and secondary education should be free for all children, then any fee may be deemed expensive. But education costs money (high standards cost even more), and Nepal is not Europe (or Cuba, just to name another poor country) where all taxpayers together share the expenses for good public education. If the state does not provide it, parents will have to. Unfortunately, Nepal has hitherto failed to establish a well-suited educational system for all. And to claim, after decades and in spite of millions of aid funds, a literacy rate of 50 percent to be a success is a joke. What has been achieved from learning by rote is to be able to read a Sanscritised form of Nepali-that many of these 50 percent do not even speak in their homes. And where are the vocational schools, so important for the development of a country like this? Since the people of Nepal, its civic society and its private sector, have stepped in where successive governments failed, it is only natural that also the quality aspects of learning have gained importance. We deem it good for the country that at least some private schools have developed high and even international standards of education, although only a limited number of Nepal's children have yet access to them.
It is understandable that many who want the best for their children may find school fees expensive, if they can not afford them. Yet they have a choice: to evaluate carefully what quality education means for their children, to change their values and preferences if needed, and-for the long term-to help changing the system of governance for the better. But do not go the way of Pol Pot in Cambodia and destroy one of the pillars of development, which is quality education. Pay or fight for it with whatever you can, until all children of Nepal get the same chance!
Ludmilla Hungerhuber and Goetz Hagmueller,
Bhaktapur
