7 - Ethnicity, Education and Employment

Summary

One day, as I entered the staffroom, the air was particularly tense in there. The daughter of one of the teachers, who studied in Grade IX in JSB, had received a low grade in her termly test results. The mother was particularly concerned about her daughter's future, her SLC results and her employment prospects. She often wondered if she should have enrolled her in a different school before she started her high school. This topic had often escalated into very heated discussion between teachers with young children on one side and Nepal Bhasa teachers on the other. There were visible tensions amongst the teachers even as they negotiated their roles as both parents and teachers. After a long discussion, one of the Nepal Bhasa teachers exclaimed in frustration:

See what has happened to Nepal Bhasa! People are too concerned about employment. We cannot let employment dictate our language use. We speak our mother tongue not because we want good job, but because it is our language. If we are proud of it and use it more, we can always create a new market for it.

This reference to creation of new market for Nepal Bhasa, while it did not convince everyone, did provide the much-needed optimism for the future. The emerging employment opportunities in minority languages in places such as FM radio stations, language teaching, NGOs and so on were seen as small but important arenas where this linguistic capital was commercially viable economic capital. It also reimagined the competence in mother tongue as distinctive employable skills in these new markets.

In JSB and JKHSS, the issue of employment was often one of the most common issues of discussion. The teachers often argued, debated and disagreed on one of the very common questions: What is the need of learning mother tongue if it does not help in getting employment? In the primary school level, one of the strong justifications for the use of mother tongue continues to remain the pedagogical importance of using first-language-first for quality education. However, as the students moved to higher grades and as they became more fluent in Nepali, both the schools were presented with visible tensions between different languages, primarily due to their respective roles in the employment market. This was especially evident in the context of JSB.