Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Box 5.4 References to human rights in Nepal’s School Sector Development Plan
(SSDP), 2016-2023
The Constitution of Nepal (2015) guarantees the fundamental right to education
and lays down the directive principles of the federal state and the provinces
on education (p. 16, SSDP). Reflecting this guarantee, Nepal’s SSDP states:
‘Every citizen shall have the right to free and compulsory basic education, and
free education up to the secondary level’ (p. 17). The SSDP and the Ministry
of Education have a policy of supporting mother tongue-based multilingual
education up to grade 3 (SSDP, p. 41).
Curricular engagement with the concept of human rights is far from a matter of
common knowledge or expertise. The Indian NCF and several related position
papers provide evidence of in-depth understanding of the challenge of using
critical pedagogy to deal with violations of human rights, such as those involving
equality and social justice, that are structurally embedded in culture. As
manifested in a relatively low weightage on the sub-categories of democracy and
civil liberties in the coding data (see Appendix II-4), documents from South Asian
countries feature rather limited references to the wider, democratic context of
human rights. A paucity of references to the sub-categories under ‘culture of
peace‘ such as peace building, conflict resolution, non-violence, and awareness
of forms of abuse also suggests that the inclusion of human rights among lists
of policy priorities is often somewhat tokenistic or symbolic (see Appendix II-6).
Amongst the eight South Asian countries surveyed for this study, the coding
data show that Afghanistan places the highest weightage on the concept of
peace, covering all sub-categories. This is understandable given the unending
violence suffered by the country. Other countries that place a relatively high
emphasis on this concept are India, Bhutan and Bangladesh. On the other hand,
Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and especially Iran put low emphasis on peace in
policy and curricular documents. In Sri Lanka, where violent internal strife was
long endemic, education ought to be seen as a major site for reflecting on and
engaging with children’s experience of violent conflict. This can also be said of
Nepal, where human rights figure quite highly among policy priorities. However,
acknowledgement of the context and ethos in which human rights need to be
addressed seem absent from policy, and especially from curriculum guidelines
(where one might expect the context to be more fully elaborated). This reminds
us the limits of what education, on its own, can achieve when the larger context
is shaped by social and political factors that militate against the realisation of
peace, sustainability and tolerance.
To conclude, official conceptions of the social purpose of education are
dominated in South Asia by the goal of human resource development. Some
other aims are accorded varying levels of importance, but in official discourse
they often derive legitimacy from their supposed contribution to the attainment
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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