Education and the Chakra of Democracy

By Sonam Wangchuk - Education Advisor

February 2008

Human resource is the most important resource of a nation. So they say, but one look at the state of the government schools in most of South Asia shows that the schools, where the future of these countries is being shaped, are in dismal shape themselves.

A common pattern in all these countries is the wide gap between the types of schools the elite and the common people send their children to. In all these countries, those running the education system—ministers, bureaucrats, officers, and even teachers—don’t send their own children in the schools they run. With their own children safely away in private schools they have no stake in the government schools. So they are not disturbed when classrooms fall apart or when schools have to go without a teacher for months. For them, the school system is little more than a source of employment for themselves and their wives. Those with influence have no stake in the system, while those with a stake have no influence.

In stark contrast to this, in many developed countries, especially the ones that have the most progressive public school systems, even prime ministers send their children to the same government schools as the common people. Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Finland and Sweden are good examples of this. This is the ideal situation: those with voice and influence have a stake in the system. But even where that is not the case, it is possible for the voiceless to acquire a voice and hence influence.

This is what we discovered in Ladakh, a remote mountainous region in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India. The 300,000 people in this trans-Himalayan mountain desert are an ethnic and linguistic minority, and the region remains cut off from the rest of the world for the six long winter months. Until 15 years ago, officers from Kashmir and Jammu considered Ladakh the most backward region, and Ladakhis an inferior race.

In terms of education, only 5% of the students appearing in SLC used to pass. In other words 95% of the students were sent back home with a ‘REJECTED’ stamp after spending ten precious years of their lives in school. Then in the mid-nineties, two important things happened. One was that the Ladakhi people’s movement for autonomy and local democracy finally resulted in the formation of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council in 1995, on the pattern of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council.

At the same time a local youth organization SECMOL along with some other organisations started an educational reform movement called Operation New Hope (ONH). Launched with a strategy to make the most of the newly acquired democracy, the movement resulted in a u-turn in the education scenario. Within just seven years the SLC results rose from 5% to 55%, and J&K State started looking up to Ladakh as a shining example of educational success. For the first time in history, J&K State even adopted policies inspired by hitherto backward Ladakh.

I would like to share the basic philosophy of the movement here, since it relates closely to the present educational and democratic situation in Nepal. The movement was based on the realisation that the root cause of failure or success of education system—or for that matter any system in a democracy—is the people themselves and the priorities they set, rather than instruments like funds, teachers, officers, buildings, etc.

We can see this principle in the graphic illustration, which we used in Ladakh to explain this idea to the common people. It was developed in the style of a traditional Ladakhi/Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting called the bhav chakra the wheel of life, showing the law of cyclic existence. This modern adaptation shows the state of the education system through a vicious cycle and a virtuous cycle. It could be called theloktantra chakra or the wheel of democracy.

Can you see the crying child in the vicious cycle thangka (fig.1)? This signifies the mass failure of the students. Normally for this failure, people tend to randomly blame the teachers, officers or leaders. They almost always miss themselves and their own role. They forget that in a democracy the people’s priorities prevail, so if the people do not demand better education, naturally the politicians will not provide it, especially when their own children are not even in the government schools.

So what then are the people’s priorities? The thangkacaptures this by showing that the people are running after electricity, subsidized rice, and handouts of money from the government. Since education is not on the public agenda, the leaders only promise subsidies and handouts. And when the politicians do not prioritise education, the bureaucrats don’t either, and therefore the teachers don’t feel accountable or excited about their jobs. And when that happens, of course, the children fail. And when children fail en mass, the people further respond by pulling their own children out of the government schools to put them in private schools if they can afford it. And when the people with resources and influence don’t have their own children in the government schools… the vicious cycle continues. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

With such illustrations we found that even the simplest villagers could see that if they were to break this cycle of failure, then it had to start with the people themselves. Therefore it’s the people’s priorities that must change—from subsidies and handouts to quality education. The second chakra shows this scenario (fig.2). Here the child is celebrating educational success—not because all the teachers changed one fine morning or the officers suddenly decided to be efficient. All these also surely and slowly happened, but it was because the people changed their priority: to make a far-sighted investment in education rather than fall for the usual lollypops of subsidies and projects that leaders are so happy to distribute. Now when the people demand education, the leaders have to carry out their wishes, and when leaders prioritise education, the bureaucrats are compelled to … And the virtuous cycle of democracy starts working—this is the beauty of democracy.

This is what happened in Ladakh. Based on this principle, SECMOL and several organizations worked on a large scale to raise the awareness and influence of the community—of common women and men, young and old. Because of this, in 1996 the newly formed Hill Council (local parliament) declared education its top priority in development and became a partner in the ONH school reform movement by adopting it as its official education policy. I don’t think this was done because the leaders in Ladakh were very different from politicians elsewhere, but because it was the mood of the people that made them see sense. And because of this there were effective teacher trainings, supervision and accountability. And because of this teachers’ attendance and teaching style improved, and schools that used to close for weeks at the drop of a hat started running properly. Good teachers were rewarded and bad ones were made answerable. And because of all this, the students’ results started improving. With these improvements, some local village leaders and even a member of the Hill Council also started bringing their own children into the government schools. Still Ladakh’s government schools have a long way to go, but of late, people are talking about demanding that at least all elected representatives should enrol their children in the government school system by 2010.

Without this change on the demand side, no amount of donor money or government packages and programmes on the delivery side would have borne any significant result. This demand-driven strategy has made the process irreversible—so much so, that when some resentful government officers started opposing SECMOL, the main NGO working on school reform, the leaders still had to keep education as their top priority and continue on the path of reform. It was all because of the power of the people, who usually are not even aware of it.

Left to themselves, our leaders in South Asia would keep saying that they have other urgent priorities like defence, roads, airports, electricity, and so on that come before education.

To me, a developing nation that gives less than top priority to education is like a man looking for his keys in a dark room and saying ‘No, no! I have no time to switch on the lights—I am in a hurry, I have many urgent things to do’.