A school of their own

The Story of A School of Our Own begins with a tourist/child sponsor’s trip to Nepal where she is thrust by her interactions into an investigation of the children and their education within a country tied down by tradition and fraught with poverty and political turmoil. There is a factor in the Nepali society very similar and yet very different from the race and underclass issue here in the United States. Nepali society is run under an informal but powerful contract of designated power structure called the caste system. The Caste system comes from the Hindu religion, which has survived in Nepal for thousands of years, providing the primary mold for self-understanding and ones position within society. One’s caste designates and inherent inferiority or superiority that stays with him/her throughout ones’ life. So no matter how successful one is as a lower caste, they do not belong there. The Peace Corps teacher was keen to understand that oppressed voices are harder to access. Behaviorally too, it is a challenge, I have met amazingly kind Brahmin people who believe in the caste system strongly. Just some ethnographic notes that Silverman reminded me of in regards to the observers’ access to the inside of the space she/he is studying.

The narrator discovers that public school is failing Nepali children due to lack of funding, while private schools are only available to the few people who have the money to send their children there. The impoverished lives of many parents demands the use of children in labor to even survive, so sending a child to school is a huge commitment, much larger than we (who have had the privilege to attend school) cannot imagine. And from this condition emerged the Maoists mobilizing the majority “have-nots” against the “haves” and the elitist government. And like many radical social movements, things went wrong: They became militant and inhumane, forcing people to participate in their strikes and movement under duress and violently attacking private schools. Children six and over were forced to join with the threat, “join our ranks if you want a future.” There is a great depth to the forces that shape the lives and learning of these Nepali children that overlap upon each in myriad of ways and cant be reduced to what is right and what is wrong.

Of these children, a select few fortunate ones have ended up in Ingo’s Shauli Bazaar School. Separated from the forces that act upon other Nepali children with an unforgiving weight, the students at Shauli Bazaar seem genuinely happy to be there. The rules at the school are simple yet profound. They are: one, no class/caste/or tribes are recognized, two, no one is allowed to insult the intelligence of anyone else, and three, there is absolutely no physical abuse. The children do not wear uniforms and feel no negative pressure from teachers. Ingo’s goal is to separate these children from their immediate economic pressures and unhappiness, and ultimately free them of the traditional power structures that oppress them into their position to create democratically inclined individuals. We have spoken of very specific factors of schooling such as standardized tests, but this movie takes our narrow view and expands its borders so that we can see that this kind of discussion is too narrow for the long term needs of Nepali children. They struggle to believe they need an education and convince their parents they need it, and then there is money that is needed for school fees. Leave pedagogy, all the obstacles to even reach the point of going to school are large enough to stop many Nepali children. And yet, there is the same belief that education is to create a “full person, a thinking, a feeling person,” rather than just a skilled person who fits in a compartment of society to reminiscent of the cog-in-the-machine in Foucault’s Crime and Punish. Then again, this school fits the accusations that Kozol made against Summerhill. This whole time, the school is a sanctuary, an island where students are free of social forces and then as the Maoists approach, Ingo moves his children to a safer location so they will not be caught up in the mess that Nepal is becoming. I understood that the children realized how fortunate they were to be at Shauli Bazaar, but I wondered to what extent can these “free” minds act within their greater society once outside of the premises of Ingo’s school.