Constructing Democracy

What does “A School of their Own” encapsulate? For, or to, whom does it belong? The Riverside school is comprised of Nepali students with Nepali teachers. It is directed towards children from lower castes, and acknowledging the gender disparity in most schools in Nepal, reserves at least 50% of its space for girls. The Riverside School, from what we can see from the film, is “a school for the people and by the people,” which attempts to institutionalize the humanism and democracy otherwise missing in the larger Nepali society. The school directs this humanism and democracy existing in the micro level at the school, towards an extension into the macro society by engaging with the principle that “[setting] them free and their minds get free.”

The school attempts to set “them” free in a variety of ways. The teachers themselves are set free. The school’s decision to hire exclusively Nepali teachers, transforms the site of the school into a place of redemption that extends into the past as well as the present (and future). Ingo, the school’s director, was conscious of the fact that most students in Nepal experience abuse at the hands of their teachers, and as the teacher who attended CAL arts commented, that experience of abuse in one’s youth cycles through and provides the impetus for a violent youth movement. One of the three explicitly laid out rules of the school, was that teachers were not allowed to abuse their students either physically or verbally (calling them stupid, or making reference to their caste). Ingo mentions that the teachers were eager and happy to teach in this environment. This provides them with the opportunity to engage with, and change the history and tones of their own lives, to alter the narrative of what it could mean to grow up in Nepal.

One of the other three rules of the school was that students do not have to wear uniforms. This could be read as a setting free of “the body” from the forces which otherwise attempt to “discipline” it. (Foucault)

The third overt rule of the school was that at any time, should a child feel as though they have been abused by a teacher, that their rights have been infringed upon, then they have the right to “overthrow” that teacher. This policy rings of Locke’s political pedagogy, the same principle that was written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

It is evident that the policies of the school attempt to enact a pedagogy that would cultivate a society within the school and a consciousness within the student that would in turn mirror a political movement instigating a democratic shift. If the school is inevitably a construction site for structures of power, than perhaps what the Riverside School is trying to build, is the foundation for a peaceful democratic movement in Nepal.

While we do not see most of the daily workings of the school—the documentary focuses on the schools relationship with the political tides of Nepal—I think the three rules laid out by Ingo, provide enough evidence to point to this type of conscious power construction.