Alternative Approaches to Education

When most people hear the word education, they picture a school: children enrolling at a set age, arriving at the same hour every morning, sitting exams at the end of the year and moving up one class at a time. This traditional school education has taught a great many people, but on its own it could never meet every need of every person and every community. For some families the nearest school is hours away on foot. Some young people must start earning early to help feed their families. Some are kept at home by the attitudes and customs around them. Many of these people want to learn, yet the fixed pattern of school has no room for them.

Leaving all of them out would hold back a large part of society. So people looked for ways of teaching that do not depend on the regular school routine, and put those ways into practice. These are called the alternative approaches to education.

These approaches are most useful to people who want to learn but have been shut out of school for geographical, social or economic reasons. Here is what each kind of reason can look like:

• Geographical reason: a teenage girl lives in a Himalayan village with no secondary school, and the nearest one is two days' walk away.
• Social reason: a girl stays at home because her family believes daughters should do housework rather than study.
• Economic reason: a teenage boy works for daily wages all day to support his family, so he can never be in class during school hours.

No single method of education can bring every citizen into the mainstream of education. That is why the alternative approaches matter: they were brought into use so that everyone gets a chance to learn. Their main features are these:

• A person can gain knowledge and skills at a time and place that suits them.
• The learner does not have to attend school every day.
• Education is arranged to fit the learner's available time.
• They are not tied to one pattern and can be run in many different ways.
• They help people who missed school to join the mainstream of education.

People who never had formal schooling can still be given knowledge and skills. One of the main ways of doing this is nonformal education.

Think of a thirty-five-year-old farmer who never had the chance to go to school. Now she walks to an evening literacy class in her ward. There she learns to write her own name, read the label on a medicine bottle and keep an account of the vegetables she sells. Nobody asks how old she is or which class she passed before letting her join. The class teaches exactly what she needs. That is nonformal education at work.

Nonformal education is regarded as a support to formal education. It does not take the place of school. It fills the gap that school leaves behind. Its main features are:

• It is built on what the learner is interested in, wants and needs.
• It supports formal education rather than competing with it.
• It is flexible about entry conditions such as age and earlier qualifications.
• It raises the learner's level of awareness.
• It develops knowledge, skills and ability.
• It helps the learner earn a living.

Nonformal education does not have a long history in Nepal. It began in a planned way in 2013 BS, in the form of adult education, meaning education arranged for grown-up learners. Today both government bodies and non-governmental organisations do important work in this field.

The Government of Nepal adopted the Nonformal Education Policy in 2063 BS. Since then, the following programmes have been run as nonformal education under that policy:

• Literacy programmes, which teach people who cannot read and write
• Basic adult education, basic education for grown-ups
• Women's literacy, literacy programmes especially for women
• Continuing education programmes, which keep people learning after they have become literate
• Nonformal primary education, primary-level education given outside the regular school pattern
• Income-generating programmes, which teach skills that help people earn

Open and distance education is also one of the alternative approaches to education. Its name joins two words, and each word carries a different idea.

The two fit together like this. Open education supplies the idea of who may study and on what conditions. Distance education supplies the way of putting that idea into practice. This is why open education is carried out with the help of the distance education system.

In open and distance education, learners are offered lessons through many media, arranged around their interests, their needs and the free time they have. The learner chooses a programme by deciding what to learn, how to learn it and when. Picture a health worker at a health post in Jumla who wants to study for a bachelor's degree without giving up her job. After duty she reads her study materials in the evening, listens to lessons on the radio or the internet, and attends a contact class now and then. Her teacher may be in Kathmandu, but her studies carry on.

It differs from the traditional system because it is flexible about the distance between learner and teacher, about when learning happens and about how teaching and learning take place. The table sets out the difference.

In distance education the learner and the teacher are far apart, and the teaching does not happen at the same moment for everyone. Even across that distance, teaching and learning can be completed through a range of media. The main ones are:

• Correspondence: lessons and answers exchanged by post
• Books: study material written so a learner can work through it alone
• Newspapers and magazines: learning material printed in periodicals
• Contact classes: sessions where learners meet a teacher from time to time
• Seminars: gatherings where learners discuss and exchange ideas
• Radio: spoken lessons that reach even remote villages
• Television: lessons with pictures and sound
• Internet: videos, study materials and online classes

In Nepal, distance education began in 2035 BS with Radio Teacher Education, in which, as the name says, teachers were educated through the radio. Over the years the country has run awareness programmes, teacher training, open schools and open and distance programmes at the level of higher education.

At school level, education based on the basic and secondary curricula has also been offered in this way. Tribhuvan University and other universities run programmes in some subjects that rest on open and distance learning. In 2073 BS an Open University, founded on open and distance education, was established. It now runs programmes from the bachelor's level up to the MPhil level.

Today radio, television and the internet are easy to find, but in the past there were no such electronic means for running these programmes. Teaching was done instead through correspondence, sent by post.

The learner receives study material by post and reads it at home. The learner writes answers to the questions set and posts them back. The teacher checks the answers and returns them with comments. Teacher and learner may never meet, yet the learning moves forward.

Correspondence education can be seen as the beginning of open and distance education. Many people, for one reason or another, could not get their education through formal channels. For them correspondence offered a simple way to learn, and so its importance kept growing. Because knowledge and skills can be gained this way too, it is counted as an alternative means of education.

The 'Correspondence College' that Pitman ran in England in the 1840s can be taken as the beginning of correspondence education. In Nepal, correspondence education has not been run in a systematic way. Even so, under Radio Teacher Education and the distance education run by Tribhuvan University, study materials were sent to learners by post.

The table brings together the main point of each approach and its key events in Nepal.