Education For Work

Raja Ram is a farmer learning to run a general store in a village in West Nepal. He had not been to school, but had learned some math from family and friends. He was now learning practical techniques from a local shopkeeper for measuring, calculating prices, counting out change and determining profit and loss.

When a customer entered, Raja Ram, using his head and fingers, rapidly totalled the order for two metres of cloth at 23 rupees and 50 paisa, and four containers of tobacco at 2 rupees and 25 paisa each. "…so 2 and 4 and 8 rupees and 4 suka are 1 rupee, so 9 rupees for the tobacco and 23 rupees and 9 rupees is 23  and  10 and 33 less one is 32 rupees and 50 paisa." Money changed hands and before long the customer was out of the shop.

Yan Bahadur is a tenth class student who is also learning to run a general store. Using pencil and paper and taking about 20 minutes time, he figured the price of a customer's cloth order in the following way. "You need one metre and 55 centimeters of cloth and the cloth is 14 rupees a metre, so…100 divided by 14 is the same as 155 divided by what? …100 divided by 14 is 7.1429 and, 7.1429 into 155 equals 21.699 rupees."

Though Yan Bahadur's answer was correct, the shopkeeper was unimpressed. He told Yan Bahadur, "Your methods are fine for school tests, but you took too much time. And what good is 21 point 699, or whatever, rupees! Look, 1 metre is 14 rupees and half a metre is 7 rupees, so 21 rupees and 1 centimetre is 14 paisa and therefore 5 centimetres is 70 paisa, so it is 21 rupees and 70 paisa for the cloth."

Both Raja Ram and Yan Bahadur were participants in a research project looking at how math learned at school and math learned at work, may transfer, running a general store. The study showed that most tenth class students had difficulty, as did Yan Bahadur, in efficiently dealing with the math they encountered in a variety of shop-keeping problems.

It is clear that mathematics as it is taught and learned in school does not facilitate learning the skills necessary for doing math in the shop. The experience of Yan Bahadur, also illustrates a crucial problem for Nepali education in general -a gap, or even a barrier, between learning at school and learning at work. Conventional wisdom suggests that increased education should eventually be reflected in increased employment and higher income. Indeed, school enrollment and the average education level of the Nepali populace have continued to increase, since the inception of national education in 1950s. However, a recent report on Nepali education and human resources indicates that the average income of rural Nepalis may actually be decreasing. Other factors, such as decreasing land productivity, increasing availability of ready-made goods and population growth, play a strong part in this relation between education and income. However, a bottom line exists for education's role, despite the complexity of the relationship. Education must be productively linked to work in Nepal's changing rural economy.

Inflated School Leaving Certificate failure rates, limited numbers of appropriate jobs for the few who obtain academic credentials and former students locked into traditional rural work roles, all contribute to the development of an educational system that serves its own ends rather than prepare students for work.

Changing the current educational focus and manpower planning could help give new direction and purpose to Nepali education, moving toward the creation of an education for work, at both the lower and higher academic levels. One such effort would be to de-emphasise the creation of new schools and redirect resources towards improving their quality instead. And "quality" is defined here in terms of the knowledge and skills needed to meet, as well as drive, the country's   manpower needs.

There is a plan to provide a new mathematics curriculum for the first through fourth class, in Nepal's primary schools. The math curriculum being considered has already been successfully tried in both rural Nicaragua and Thailand. Its quality is attested by the improved math test performance, of the participating Nicaraguan and Thai students. Assuming that this new curriculum improves Nepali students' formal math knowledge and skills, we still have to consider whether this will have any bearing on math outside the classroom. This has not yet been raised as an issue, but, as Yan Bahadur's math calculations in the general store illustrate, it is an issue that must be raised and examined.

In mathematics, at least, education for work does not mean a traditional vocational curriculum, similar to the one presently in force in Nepal. Nor does it simply mean the use of more word problems in the classroom. Education for work should not generate a nightmare vision of campus students attempting to do algebra on their fingers, but rather, should be a means of providing a variety of math skills, from formal mathematics and from workplace, along with the knowledge to pick and choose among them in an adaptive manner. Such instruction, when extended to other subjects, will go at least part of the way towards linking education and work in rural Nepal.

~King Beach was a Fulbright researcher in Nepal and is presently, a social scientist with the City University of New York Graduate Center.