Education in Nepal

Education in village Nepal suffers from a range of difficulties, including:

• limited local education
• poor quality teaching
• poorly educated women

Limited local education

KSP’s hope is that, eventually, the children of Kangchenjunga will be educated locally. At present, students must leave their villages to advance beyond basic levels. Typically, they travel to Taplejung, Kathmandu, or Darjeeling, and too often - after sampling the amenities and excitement of big-city living - they choose not to return.

Being educated locally should encourage them to remain in their home villages to teach, provide healthcare services, or perhaps be employed as nature guides in the Kangchenjunga Conservation Area.

To help provide local education, KSP:

• built a school (and adjoining clinic) in Ghunsa in 1990 [more]
• built a school (and adjoining clinic) in Folay in 1994 [more].

Quality

The teachers often perform poorly or are simply absent. Usually, they are from Nepal’s lowland Terai, and are Hindu, so they are culturally distant from their Sherpa and Tibetan students. Consequently, few show much interest in the students' progress. Reports filed with the Education Officer in Taplejung documented widespread dissatisfaction with the teachers provided by the Nepalese Government to the schools built by KSP.

Unmotivated teachers, coupled with the traditional rote learning – which bores both teachers and students – and inadequate resources, means that education outcomes are poor.

One of KSP’s goals, therefore, is to train local people to become teachers, and to this end KSP:

• awards scholarships to promising students to help fund their education
• extended the scope of local education by initiating a pre-school program
   in 1997 for children aged 3 to 5. This program uses local village women
   as teachers [more].

Women are poorly educated

A reality of the Kangchenjunga region is that women are relatively poorly educated. They are twice as likely as men to have no education at all. Tibetan women fare particularly poorly. To help address this imbalance, KSP:

• built a girl’s dormitory in Lelep in 2004 [more].

Lelep is a few day’s walk from Ghunsa, and the dormitory enables girls from outlying villages to live within reach of secondary education.