Nepal: Language, Schooling, and Inequalities for Ethnic Minority Children: An Ethnography of Medium of Instruction Policy in Nepal’s Public Schools

The selection of languages in education often evokes ideological and political deliberations because such processes are not politically neutral. Nepal, which has undergone rapid social, political, and economic overhauls over the last few decades, has struggled to institutionalize multilingual education policy effectively and is, instead, trapped in the perpetuation of “nationalist and neoliberal language policies.” This chapter addresses the politics of institutionalizing, negotiating, and resisting multilingual practices in English-medium schools and the ways such practices create unequal and unjust discursive experiences for different ethnic and socioeconomic minorities. In doing so, it reports on an ethnographic study on the implementation of an English-Medium Education (EME) program in a school located in an ethnic minority community. The findings revealed that the school created a condition for social class reproduction by introducing the EME policy through a privatization mechanism and language practices in the EME program reproduced dominant language ideologies. From the standpoint of Madheshi minority children, the chapter hence argues that the EME policy ideologies and practices create a condition for continued inequalities and injustice.