Education in Nepal, Part 3: Beyond the textbook
Education in Nepal, Part 3: Beyond the textbook
- Published
Nepal’s Gen Z pulled toppled their government in two days last year. What is their vision of education reform?
- Journalist
- Naushad Ali Husein
- Photographer
- Uma Bista
Arnab Chaudhary remembers the moment when the first bullet was fired on the Gen Z protesters on the streets of Kathmandu on September 8, 2025. The 27-year old lawyer who had beckoned people to the protest, remembers when they started being killed. They kept protesting.
Nepal’s Gen Z movement took off when the government banned social media, but the heart of the movement was the more basic problem of inequality. It was anger at the corruption and shamelessly opulent lifestyles of the “nepo kids” in a country with over 20% poverty rate and 20% youth unemployment.
“My friends who are from a political background, or rich background, they easily get access for their business, for their education, for scholarship to top universities in the world,” said Chaudhary.
His own family has some political pedigree, but they were never opulent. When he was in grade 8, his father was devoting considerable time and resources to a movement for the rights of his indigenous Tharu community, which had put his family under financial strain.
At the public school he attended at the time in Manpur, Dang, in western Nepal, students would show up to class and there would be no teacher. The vice principal, he says, was also hardly ever seen after signing off on the morning attendance. Meanwhile, the school had no drinking water, no sanitation, and the classrooms were inadequate.
He remembers pleading with his father to let him go to private school. Schools in Kathmandu, especially private schools, would give their students far better facilities. “There is a huge difference between schools for the rich and the poor,” says Chaudhary.
Basically, education – the very institution that is supposed to provide opportunities for equality and upliftment – had become a means to reinforce the inequalities of society, as he sees it. So the state of education was central to the problem that brought Gen Z to the streets in Nepal on September 8.
Nineteen people died that day. That night, Arnab’s friends stayed in a hideout as police cracked down on protesters. The next day, public fury boiled over, and went from a Gen Z protest about digital rights and corruption into a chaotic and violent national uprising. After 14 months in office, it took only 48 hours of protest for Nepal’s third-time Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to step down. Nepal was left without a government.
This story is the final article in a three-part series about Nepal’s schools, facing challenges that much of the developing world is grappling with. Parts 1 and 2 highlighted the systemic inequality in the system, and the struggle for relevance. This part will look at reforms, aspirations and solutions in the context of the Gen Z revolution. We speak to activists who were involved in the revolution to understand their aspirations.
Leadership gap
Gen Z activist Ishika Panta says that the power vacuum that followed the fall of the Oli government exposed a deficiency of leadership among young people. On the one hand, the world admired the fact that Nepal’s Gen Z revolution had no official leader. On the other, once the government fell, there was a need for people to step in to ensure order and work out how to transition to an interim government while protecting the constitution.
Panta says while young leaders and activists carried enormous responsibility, “We didn’t have a broad pipeline of people who had been trained in negotiation, mediation, public leadership, policy, or crisis decision-making.” This made them realise the need to focus on education, she says. “We can’t wait until a national crisis to discover who our leaders are.”
Panta says that schooling in Nepal, both public and private, remains focused on examinations. Young people are not being taught to think critically, or to have a problem-solving mindset, which is what they want. “Students want an education system that rewards their curiosity rather than rote learning. [...] The frustration among the Gen Z movement was also that our education is terrible right now, it's not updated.”
Panta is the founder of Project Abhaya, a women-led organisation that works to empower youths. She spoke to us from Jakarta, where she was conducting workshops with young people on public narratives. She feels her own leadership skills were acquired from her experiences outside the classroom at least as much as inside, but points to formative Catholic school experiences. “Value education classes built the foundation for me,” she says. “For discipline and communication [...] as well how to collectively and collaboratively work with others. [...] When I was a kid, I was surprised that the public school did not have value education classes. I used to wonder why.”
The most valuable learning coming from places outside ordinary school activities, has been a recurring theme in our reporting in Nepal. In the last article, we saw the impact that teaching football had on children, and the value of the education one student received when he stayed at home and helped his father in business. Another Gen Z leader, Muhammad Nayim Rain, from the border district of Janakpur, says that he, too, owes his leadership skills to a unique extra-curricular program at his school.
Most public schools have a youth club, but Rain, a third year student of law, said he was lucky that an NGO had initiated a program with their youth club in which they conducted sessions on topics like gender, the caste system, and preventing violence. The club would go out into the community to perform dramas about these and other social issues. Rain credits this club as the starting point for his leadership development and for his ability to speak out on social issues.
Rain praised Book-free Fridays, an initiative where students enjoy extra-curricular activities on Friday. “For example, have them play games on one Friday, organise a singing competition on another Friday, or a speech competition, and practice things that are used in daily life… students should have fun with it.”
The initiative was introduced by the mayor of Kathmandu, who would soon become the country’s Prime Minister.
Elevating the community level
35-year-old rapper Balendra Shah (popularly known as Balen) was elected in a landslide victory in March, under a new party and became Prime Minister with only two years of history in politics as mayor of Kathmandu.
Before the Gen Z revolution, Nepal had already been debating a long-awaited education bill – a topic that had become deeply divisive. After assuming office, Balen introduced his own 100-point agenda, which includes a few points on schools, including depoliticising educational institutions and scrapping early-grade exams.
Parents and administrators who we spoke to agreed about the need to depoliticise schools. They said that many schools remain undeveloped because of their political affiliations – especially when the said affiliations misalign with those in power at various levels of government. If a School Management Committee (SMC) chairman belongs to the same party as the local or central government, that school will receive resources. But if they belong to different parties, the school will struggle to extract those same resources.
But Arnab argues that simply banning political affiliations at the local community and school levels ignores the central government’s own complicity. “If the central government did not engage in the politics, the problem would not exist.”
He says this is an example of the central government’s tendency to “look down” on the community level. The allegation may seem unfair. Since 2001, the Nepal government has made efforts to decentralise the school system, recognising the fact that schools in Nepal have historically been established with support from local communities.
Partnering with the World Bank, the government transitioned public schools into “community schools”, whose management and supervision became the responsibility of School Management Committees comprising parents, teachers and village education committee members.
Community management was seen as a ‘cure all’ solution, but it created many of its own problems. Some experts claim it removed national regulatory oversight, and did not sufficiently empower local communities to take on the management of schools. Others argued that communities were not adequately trained or prepared to take over management.
For example, schools were empowered to assess teachers and make decisions about their hire and transfer. But teachers say their autonomy and independence have been curtailed, and discriminatory attitudes at the local level add to old forms of politics.
Arnab says that while powers have been divided between the central, provincial and local levels of government, the hierarchy remains. What he would like to see, he says, is the central government sitting down with schools in the community and solving problems together on even terms. This might create opportunities for schools to be more closely integrated with the communities they are in.
He recalls the primary school he attended, which was built by his parents and a group of their friends, in the traditional Nepalese way – communities would contribute considerable land and resources to found schools. “The poor people’s children used to go to that school, and parents used the extra land of the school for cultivation, and every year they used to give a share of that to the school. The school used to run from that and the poor families also used to run from that.”
Over the course of its modernisation and formalisation, this practice was discontinued due to misuse and misappropriation of school resources. But he points out that there was a certain value in the school being an institution for the entire community.
As a consultant for the previous government’s education bill, Chaudhary says he was working on a clause that would uplift the community by reimagining the school not only as education center, but as a community center whose resources everyone can access to learn and use. “It should be used as a place for cultural activities and discussions, and as a shelter during the time of the problems and natural disasters.”
An appetite for reform
Nepal’s educationalists have been demanding reforms for decades. There has long been a sense of fatalism and dissatisfaction in the school system. Critics have blamed the government for failing to invest enough in education. Nepal’s education expenditure has never exceeded 11% to 12% of its total budget, while the military and police get far larger shares. But there have been many champions of reform with a range of different opinions.
One of the most prominent among them is the education planner Dr Bidya Nath Koirala. Around 2012, he countered the fatalistic mood around education with the slogan, “Shikshak le chahema garna Sakchhan”, meaning if the teacher wants, they can make it happen.
He did criticise the government’s underinvestment in education, but his argument was that teachers must stop waiting for resources from the state, and become agents of change through their own creativity, resourcesfulness, and passion. He says that students who come to class, especially poor students, already have a wealth of life experience that they enter the classroom with. Teachers should build their own lesson plans to link to the “experiential wisdom” of students, rather than blindly following textbooks, he says.
Koirala is critical of the World Bank’s education programmes and proclaimed successes. “They [said] about 98% of the teachers are trained in this country, but there are a number of research reports in the last decade or so that say that the training is not transferred to the classroom. Then what is the use of the training?”
For his part, Koirala says, “I do believe that teachers do not need the training. Instead of training them, we need to challenge them.” In his workshops with teachers across the country, Koirala says he is often surprised by the methods teachers come up with when challenged. He says many teachers develop successful practices, and there should be a repository of best practices online where teachers can showcase these. Such a platform would inspire more teachers to improve their methods.
