6.5 Education

Definition and functions: the institutional transmission of knowledge and credentials — manifest functions (skills, literacy, citizenship) and latent functions (Merton's pair — see Unit 1.4): sorting and stratification (who gets which certificate), network-formation, custodial care, and national integration (one curriculum, one imagined community). Durkheim's thesis: education is society socializing its next generation into itself — moral unity by pedagogy; the school, not just the family, makes the citizen. Nepal's institutional history (compressed timeline): gurukul/pathshala/gumba traditions → Rana-era grafts (Tri-Chandra College, 1918) → post-1951 expansion → the National Education System Plan (1971) — centralised, uniform, the state's great socialization project → the community/institutional (public/private) school split, deepening stratification → post-1990 and post-2006 reforms, girl-enrolment closure, literacy to about 76 per cent (2021 census) and near-universal basic enrolment — with quality and drop-out as the unfinished agenda; the current frontier: credential out-migration (record numbers of no-objection certificates for foreign study) and the "brain drain" debate; municipal management of schools since 2017 as federalism's education experiment. Stratification point (the critical paragraph): education is simultaneously Nepal's great equalizer (the Dalit or poor student who reaches law school) and its great sorter (private-school English and shadow tuition reproducing advantage) — the empirical literature calls the two faces "education and (re)production."