The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

Literacy, Epistemology, and English Education

Dhruba Neupane, a former English teacher and currently a graduate student in English and Composition Studies in the US, offers a theoretically-based critique of the imposition of English as the medium and also the school-based and westernized mode of learning in Nepalese literacy education. Sitting against a computer screen on a desk behind him and looking into the camera, and apparently using a written script to help him integrate the theoretical substance to his personal narrative, Dhruba begins his story with an abstract statement. With reference to the social transition that was taking place in Nepal at the time of his childhood due to the increasing availability of formal schooling to a wider public, he says: “I grew up to cross a cultural border, and in a sense to see the dawn of a new worldview.”

Dhruba was born in a village that was “almost completely illiterate,” but he was lucky to be “raised and taught in [his] maternal home under the tutelage of [his] maternal uncle, a seasoned high school English teacher . . . [in] a nearby small town which boasted double the national rate of literacy, with a good chunk of its population holding college degrees and government or private jobs of high profile.” (full video in the DALN)

Dhruba tells us that he did not go to an English medium school. He started learning English in the fourth grade, like the narrators of all other stories being discussed here, and each year only one book, interestingly titled My English, was the only material from which Dhruba was taught. He remembers that he was unable to hold basic conversations in English even in high school, “let alone discuss topics requiring specialized vocabulary.” This is, again, indicative of the lack of relevance of what was taught. Dhruba states in unconditional terms that English was the most dangerous subject for most people in high school:

[A] trend of failure, incapability, helplessness, and a kind of paralysis characterized our speech and writing up until undergraduate classes. The fact that our speech and writings as a whole were at shambles speaks volume about some fundamental problems in our education system.

It is notable that Dhruba first acknowledges that English was a “liberating force” for him personally, but he suggests that it was not so for an estimate of 80% of his fellow students. Then he goes on to point out another serious problem with Nepal’s costly affair with English:

Theoretically, the fact that the knowledge of English language substituted the very need for good education created a magnificent confusion in the entire society, and it has increasingly done so particularly in the last two decades. English helped to create and increase a distance between education and knowledge, between knowing and being considered to know something; literacy began to not only mean the ability to read and write and to communicate but to adopt a foreign language and the new modes of learning in school.

Dhruba does not simply critique and reject the very idea of English as a means of empowerment and opportunities in a globalized world. There is a genuine place for English in his scheme of better literacy and education for Nepal: if “local knowledge and culture formed the foundation for the education system,” he argues, “English, then, could take its own important place as an international language, a language of opportunity in the world, and so on, but WITHOUT displacing anything that belonged more intimately and integrally to the local society and culture.”

Dhruba's position about the role of English in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) situations in the world is quite critical, but it also strikes a critical balance, as in the argument made by Seonagh McPherson (2006), a scholar who has worked for a long time as a volunteer teacher of English in Tibet and realized the dangers of imposing English in the name of “opportunities” and “empowerment.” McPherson calls the imposing of English STEALing—or “Surreptitiously Teach[ing] English as an Assimilationist Language” (p. 79) and in its place advances the idea of TELLing—or “Teach[ing] English as a Liberatory Language” (p. 86) through the use of local content. Dhruba suggests, like McPherson does, that scholars and teachers of literacy cannot justify the imposition of a foreign language and literacy in name of increasing material and social opportunities alone. McPherson poses the question “what dies inside the learner and the society?” when those entities seem to succeed within the mainstream English-dominated world but nonetheless destroy the local society's linguistic and cultural resources; he argues that the question of “what dies?” is something any educator “need[s] to suffer to hold in [his or her] awareness without wincing, without fighting or swooning in the dubious bliss of ignorance. The response we do not want to make is to bury our heads in the sand with the hopes that [such] questions will go away or prove mistaken” (pp. 80-81).

Dhruba emphasizes that his story is not just a personal story of success but a story of success that also hides tremendous amounts of failure for his society: “As for me, I must admit that I was to a great extent the product of that fluke—of having a good English teacher as my family member, mentor, and guide.” He implies that while literacy may be experienced by an individual in an individual way, educators must also consider the larger social and political implications of the kind of literacy and education that they promote. The awareness of the larger social story behind his own small success story makes Dhruba critical toward the establishment of formal education and in fact even toward scholars who run or participate in the establishment without critically assessing both advantages and disadvantages of English. With this critique, he suggests that the Nepalese society only saw symbolic stillbirths of its own many epistemological cultures with the dawn of “modern” education; he said  that Nepal never got to see the development of a more homegrown system of education or even the contribution of local resources to the 'modern' system. Dhruba does point out the fact that there are no real oppositions between the East and West: “Of course, I do not mean to imply that we live in mutually exclusive worldviews about learning,” referring to Eastern versus Western epistemological worldviews. But he argues that a society should respect local resources and build educational systems upon them rather than displace them: “I am critical about, for instance, the western notion of intelligence [which] assumes that while some ‘advanced’ communities rise to the top through superior intellect, the ‘losers’ remain uncivilized and uneducated,” further arguing that to displace the local by the global is to buy into that binary opposition or hierarchy. He suggests that multiple epistemologies can coexist and that such a coexistence can be more beneficial than monolithic epistemological worldviews and educational systems based on them. From a critical perspective like that of Dhruba, it is possible to see, indeed, that the supplantation of “traditional” forms of learning by a “modern” one is based on the assumption that there is an “advanced” model that everyone must adopt at the expense of alternative resources.

Dhruba also suggests that there are competing epistemological worldviews: “the concept of social mobility through individual ability and effort promoted by the ideology of individualism [for instance] is the at heart of western ideology which overlooks the power of other models of learning, especially community-based notions of learning, the use of local epistemological resources, and the development of learning from the ground up.” But he goes on to argue that it is when we do not value one against the other that the problem occurs: the real danger lies in oppositions resulting in hierarchies like the one suggested by “the truism that bulk of world’s knowledge comes from the West, the center, and flows towards the periphery is disheartening.” Such a position is akin to what Canagarajah (2005) discusses in Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice: “It is possible to develop a pluralistic mode of thinking where we celebrate different cultures and identities, and yet engage in projects common to our shared humanity.” In order to do this, it is not enough to subscribe the superficial notion of “diversity” or “multiculturalism” where the diversities are still in a hierarchical order. The creation of a pluralistic epistemological traditions involves actively “breaking away from the history of constructing a globalized totality with uniform knowledge and hierarchical community” and it also involves “building networks of multiple centers that develop diversity as a universal project and encourage an actively negotiated epistemological tradition” (p. 20).

Towards the end of his narrative, Dhruba clarifies his position regarding the necessity of respect for local epistemologies:

It is not necessary to forget your culture and language in order to learn English or to participate in the larger intellectual community of our globalized world today. English and the western model of education and literacy [based on them] may confer you the type of power that may often seem like the only important type of cultural capital. Yes, English is quite often the key to academic achievement and social mobility for people even in Nepal. However, as educators we would be extremely naïve and insensitive if we do not understand that English can be appropriated and contextualized so as to practice and promote our local epistemology in today’s globalized world.

He concludes his narrative by making a very strong and explicit connection between his personal story and the larger argument about epistemology that he makes throughout it: “If the disjunction between knowledge and learning, the confusion between the means and goals of education, and the irony of disregard for local knowledge continues, if the Nepalese society remains divided between the two worlds that I straddled, a few maternal uncles are not going to make much difference for this country.” It is one thing, as Dhruba’s success story suggests, for one individual or a certain group or class of people to reap the fruits of a particular set up of literacy education in a society, but it could be quite another for that society at large to benefit from that decision. What is most striking about Dhruba’s narrative is that he refuses to make his personal story just personal, and he also refuses to celebrate the good at the cost of the dangers of that good for the society in general.

In this multimodal story, we again see a whole range of visual cues that a textual version would miss. We see a young scholar, informally dressed and sitting against a computer that is powered on. We hear him speaking in an English that seems to be influenced by both British and American accents. The flow and tempo of the narrative also reflects the intense focus with which the narrator tells his story and delivers his critical thoughts on the subject. All these multimodal elements make it easier for us to follow the narrative’s meaning and structure.