Nepali schools

My ideas about the documentary “A School of Their Own” are probably very controversial. First of all, I think that it is very hard to comment on a kind of culture that is completely different from what we were raised up in. The documentary was done from an American point of view. Although most of the people who talked on support of American ideas were locals, they did not get those ideas from their own context, environment or reality, they got them after being taught an American perspective. From an American point of view, democracy is always going to be the best form of government, as well as secularization, “freedom”, etc. The principal of one of the schools that they were documenting repeated quite a few times the word “outdated.” Personally, I felt it was so disrespectful and very ignorant to say that one of the greatest religions of the history of humanity such as Hinduism had almost no validity because it was 5000 years old and “outdated.” “Education” or outsider “educators” cannot pretend to change the history of a culture which is 5000 years old, just because it is not democratic. It cannot pretend to change it because women have a different status in Nepal than they have in America. They cannot pretend to change it because they believe that democracy is better than feudalism, or because they disagree with the cast system. I cannot say more because I know very little or almost nothing about Hinduism, and Nepali culture, history and traditions –and I doubt that all the people that talked in that documentary did either. But what I just said above is based on my belief in historical and traditional culture, because I can say that I have one, because my culture has a history of 5000 years old too, and although it has not remained the same it has evolved and maybe in a different way than the Nepali one. I said all of this because I don’t blindly believe in democracy -which was the worst kind of government after tyranny, according to Plato–and my culture and religion has a history and tradition which is more than 4500 years older than the American one, the one which proclaims to bring culture everywhere, where I cannot find any culture other than Protestantism, democracy, liberty and the pursuit of property, I mean, happiness.

Whit this comment I don’t intend to deny the obvious social problems of Nepal, but again, I don’t think that a denial of their own religion and set of beliefs is the best alternative. It is like taking away one’s identity to replace it for an American one. It was depressing for me to see the kids at the end of the movie comparing themselves or their reality with the American one, in which the later one was of course the point to achieve. I don’t think I can give an alternative to education because I think that is the job of the Nepalese themselves –just as we discussed the difference between traditional intellectuals and organic intellectuals. Another thing that we also talked about during last class was the difference between school, education, and system. I know that children labor is seen as a bad thing, but what if working in the fields, for instance, is also a way of learning, why does learning have to come only from books?