The Third Eye:
An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives from Nepal

The Still Birth of Local Epistemologies

Even though Nepal is only the size of the state of Iowa, it is a society where ethnic and linguistic minorities form the majority, with more than 90 languages and perhaps as many ethnic groups that have their own rich cultural traditions and epistemological resources. Because the very system of formal education in Nepal was instituted by an extremely nationalistic autocratic regime in the 1950s that used that mass education as a means of “loyalty to the nation and the royal crown,” there is a well-established tendency in this society, even today, to define literacy and learning (or culture for that matter) from a “national” perspective. Prem Phyak is critical of such a nationalistic view of literacy and education. He distances himself, especially while talking about his initial literacy experiences, from the official literacy practice of school-based reading and writing, which was instituted without regard for the linguistic and cultural differences and resources of local communities across the country. (full video in the DALN)

Prem appears to tell his story without the aid of a script. He covers the entire range of his educational experience, from kindergarten to his current position as a scholar who has returned after a graduate degree in education from London. For this reason, he selects specific anecdotes, observations, and ideas and makes loose connections when moving from one point to another. This loose structure is akin to orally told stories, which the multimodal form captures quite effectively. From the video, we are also able to see the gestures and hear the pauses and fillers that greatly reinforce especially the complex points that the narrator tries to make.

Prem begins his narrative with a remark on the importance of knowledge that one acquires in one’s immediate community and culture: “I was born in the Limbu [ethnic] community [in the eastern part of Nepal] where there was no light of education when I started formal education. But my community was rich in its indigenous knowledge and [cultural] heritage.” He also tells us how important his “community literacy” was in terms of his ability to communicate and to understand and participate in the social/cultural life of the community, “avoiding a narrowly definition of [his] literate activities in terms of school-based practices” (Selfe et al., 2010, p. 16). Therefore, when Prem first went to school he had to leave behind his home language; he says that even though he managed to succeed by developing his skills in his second language, Nepali, he suggests his great talents in the Limbu language and the socio-cultural competence that he had acquired from being a part of that community had no use or connection in school.

This issue of having to leave behind one’s family language and cultural knowledge in order to become literate through the authorization mechanism of a nationally imposed education system is, unfortunately, playing an instrumental role in wiping out the ethnic languages of Nepal and also undermining the linguistic and cultural knowledge base of entire communities. At this time in Nepal, only English medium schools are believed to be providing “quality” education. As Prem’s story suggests, the destruction of ethnic languages and epistemologies has become a tragedy of national dimension.

As a scholar of language and literacy, Prem defines “literacy” not just as the “ability to read and write alphabetic texts” but as a process of gaining, creating, and sharing knowledge through multiple modes and means. Other scholars in this group also share this critical perspective on literacy, but Prem’s perspective is particularly striking because he does not only address the conceptual tension between “local” and “global” literacies but also introduces a third dimension, namely the actually local, ethnic literacy and epistemology. His narrative reminds us that although the institutionalization of formal education did not replace any unified local system of education or a specific epistemological culture or worldview—because such a thing never existed—it systematically depleted a complex ecology of language and learning that was based on people’s real lives, their occupations, cultures, and histories.

When Prem went to school, he “did not hear any piece of the [Limbu] language. No teachers used my native language in school, nor did my friends use it.” It must be noted that Prem did not and does not see the presence of multiple languages in this new learning environment as a problem: “it was not difficult to learn through the Nepali language because it was equally used in my community.” What he does lament is the fact that multiple languages could not exist, or be practiced and promoted, by the school system. As Phillipson (1992) argues, “linguicism [or the large-scale destruction of language diversity] has taken over from racism as a more subtle way of hierarchizing social groups in the contemporary world” (p. 241): language is a relatively non-political but extremely powerful tool for social control, because, especially within a logic that views education as the basis of “development” of third world communities, the dominant communities in any society can easily justify a shared medium that naturally, from the perspective of power groups, coincides with their home languages. The introduction of English as an external and putatively neutral medium does no better service to the local communities because it is even further removed from the real lives of those communities, only creating yet another form of social hierarchy.

When students can use the language(s) of their real lives for learning at school, education becomes much more effective, and literacy becomes not just the acquisition of reading and writing skills for its own sake but for doing learning. In real life, human beings have for eons learned and used multiple languages: the nationalistic dogma of a “shared” medium of learning, as we see in the case of Nepal, is nothing but an ethnocentric and/or class and power politics imposed on the “minorities” by the powerful. The extent to which a foreign medium affects the quality of learning is nowhere clearer than in private schools across Nepal today. The use of English as a shared medium on a global scale—while it may be justified as creating “better opportunities for learners in a globalized world” and so forth—turns out to be dangerous to the ultimate quality of education because it fundamentally confuses a foreign language as the means of learning with the end of learning itself. All across the country, especially since the public Nepalese medium schools caved in against the influx of “boarding” schools, which began to be widely accepted as the other name of “quality” education in the last two or so decades, one can see classrooms where students apparently half-understand what the teachers teach, which many of them apparently half-understand from the books in the first place. The use of local languages, now including Nepali itself, is severely penalized in most private schools, and as Awasthi and Gautam indicate in their stories, even the remaining public schools are now struggling for survival by trying to make English the medium as well as the raison d’être of education.

In his narrative, Prem positions himself as a scholar of language policy, critical linguistics, and ethnolinguistics. With reference to the use of the English language in Nepalese education, he, like Bal and Dhruba, is critical about the focus on correctness rather than content. He was aware that English could potentially increase opportunities for him, so after high school, being the first to do so in his community, he took the advice to study English. But he chose English more for a pragmatic motivation than for intellectual and epistemological reasons because he is in favor of making literacy relevant to the learner's life and interests, meaning that he is critical of an education that the learner doesn’t fully understand. In his own case, it was not until he went to study applied linguistics at the University of London, many years later, that he was fully engaged in the discipline of his choice. (image on right provided by Prem)

As a result of his study abroad, Prem has realized that good learning happens when learning can be shared through networking and new technologies: “networking through technology . . . through professional organization . . . and through writing your own ideas . . . are some of the ways of literacy practices.” Thus, with his narrative, Prem suggests that literacy and education should be both relevant and useful to the learner, as well as based on practices that are on par with social and technological developments of our times.

To draw on an analogy, Prendergast (2008) shows a similar paradox of “empowerment” through English language in post-communist Slovakia. She tells the story of a society where learning more English didn’t necessarily fulfill the dreams of its people, because larger political problems still determined opportunities and progress for the individual and the society at large. Prendergast critiques the ideal of opportunity thus: “What has been called the utopian (some would say ‘triumphalist’) view of English as a global language holds that all people who learn English will have equal access to the world’s information that it encodes” (p. 128). She exposes the naïve assumptions held by those who are optimist about English as a global language and language of “opportunity”: “That in short order English will have spread so widely, will be spoken with fluency by so many people, that there will be no more ‘native’ advantage in the English education industry or in business communication” (p. 146). But the fact remains that power structures will not stop creating hierarchies, unequal opportunities, and information asymmetry from which only a few benefit. Therefore, the idealization of English “seems like the idealization of communism and capitalism, stubborn on their hold on the imagination” (p. 148). The knowledge of English language and an English education, whatever the latter means, will not necessarily translate into power in the real world—as opposed to the conventional wisdom about knowledge as power. From the perspective of a teacher who values an ethical outlook and treatment of people, cultures, and ideas of different sorts, “The question in the end is not whether English will remain a world language, the knowledge of which will continue to make the wheels of global commerce spin: it may or may not. The critical question is and has always been what kind of world, its good or bad yet to be envisioned, will be shaping [English]” (p. 148). That is precisely the kind of ethical question that some of the literacy scholars in this exhibit are asking.

As I know from my professional conversations on the subject with Prem for years now, his critique of medium of learning as a potential obstacle to effective education comes from his study of theory and research like the above. It is on the basis of that intellectual interest and experience that Prem critiques how the medium of instruction being imposed upon the learner has, in the particular case of Nepal, diminished the effectiveness of learning, as well as destroyed indigenous literacies in local communities like his own. Prem does mention that since Nepali was a “link language” that his family used to speak besides Limbu, he did excel after some time in school. But he found it difficult to learn another language, English, which he did not learn or use outside school. Prem remembers the first experience of learning English, when he was in fourth grade, in a different way: “I had to learn English which was the most difficult subject for me.” Learning English involved learning single words through translation but without any context or application. In fact, he rarely learned how to pronounce the words properly until much later, and he did not write his own ideas in the language. The only positive experience that he remembers with regard to learning English in school was when he was first able to write the names of his family members: “I still remember I was so happy when I was able to write my name in English, you know, for the first time.” This pride was the extent of his composition of meaningful discourse by using this new literacy.

In short, the fact that Prem is a highly successful scholar of English who has studied at the University of London and returned home to teach at the most prestigious public institution of higher education in the country has not altered the other fact that he, as well as other narrators in this collection, considers English as a mixed blessing, even for the few and privileged—not to mention those who fail year after year in “compulsory English.”