5 - Language, Education and Knowledge-Making

Summary

‘Nepali is a language of official papers (kagaj patra ko bhasa) and language of the educated (padhe lekheka le bolne bhasa)’, a village elder explained when I told him that I was keen to understand about Tharu-language education in his neighbourhood school. This popular acceptance of Nepali as ‘the language of the educated’ was not only common in this Tharu village of Kapilvastu but it was also the one that was largely endorsed by the state. Until 1981, the Census of Nepal defined ‘literate’ as someone who could read and write in Nepali only, the country's national language. This was in line with the NNEPC-1 framework that sought to promote Nepali language in the educational institutions. The idea of schooled literacy, both for the common person and for official purposes, was thus learning to read and write in Nepali and/or English. The language practices of educational institutions are thus bound up in production, distribution and legitimisation of the knowledge that is gained through schooling.

This chapter will discuss the contested process of knowledge-making in JSB and JKHSS through an analysis of school textbooks and classroom instruction events in these schools. Drawing on these ideas of legitimate knowledge, in the following section, I will discuss the ideas presented in mother tongue textbooks to illustrate the ways in which schools constructed ‘knowledge’ in minority language using the idea of ‘local’ to discursively shift the knowledge production process.

Knowledge-Making and School Education

The issue of knowledge construction in schools has remained one of the most contentious issues in the discussion around school education. Discussing ‘what it means to be educated’, Young (1971: 34) argues that academic curricula involve an assumption that ‘some areas of knowledge are more worthwhile than others’. Through this process of stratification of knowledge, educational institutions establish a relation between the patterns of dominant values and the distribution of rewards and power and the organisation of knowledge. On the similar line, scholars like Bernstein (1971) and Blum (1971) have drawn our attention to the ways in which knowledge is organised and assembled. As Bernstein (1971: 47) puts it in his influential essay, ‘how a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and principles of social control.’