Despite widespread ideals of free school education for all, private households fund an increasingly large share (39 %) of primary and secondary education globally. This is especially the case in low-income countries, where persistent underfunding of public education means that private investment continues to play an important role in access to and acquisition of formal education. Driven by an unwavering faith in formal education, families make huge financial sacrifices to send their children to school, often resulting in complex relationships involving loans, credit and debt. Decisions about what and whom to invest in are fraught with conflicting expectations of care, responsibility, duty and guilt, turning economic priorities into moral concerns. Nepal provides a unique empirical context for exploring such tensions due to historically institutionalised inequalities embedded in the caste system, extreme disparities in resource distribution and the late establishment of a rapidly expanding education system.
Extending the idea of ‘moral economies’ into a conceptual framework of moral economies of schooling, the project explores the relationship between economic investments, social relations and moral obligations in household financing of education in Nepal. Rooted in economic and educational anthropology it will examine the intertwining of economic, social and moral values ascribed to formal education
Fundamentally comparative in scope, the project is organised around four ethnographic sub-studies among populations with different collective educational histories, sources of income and social positions: 1) Former bonded labourers, Kamaiya, with a history of indebtedness 2) Gurkhas (Nepali soldiers that join the British or Indian army), whose economy relies heavily in remittances from transnational migration 3) the new elite in an urban ‘gated community’ with significant land and house ownership and 4) urban squatters (sukumbasi) who live on occupied public land claiming to be landless.
Grounded in everyday experiences, the project will extend educational locations as ethnographic sites to spaces where education financing is negotiated and put into practice: households and the networks in which they are embedded. It will be based on ethnographic fieldwork in al four location and consist of a range of methods: household survey, participant observation, in-depth interviews and the collection of materialities related to educational expenses.
The project will contribute with a) an anthropologically informed rethinking of the relationship between human economic behaviour and the moral imperatives of education; b) fine-grained ethnographic insights into the dynamics of everyday financing of schooling in contexts of historically entrenched inequalities; and c) enhanced understanding of the effects of the increasing privatisation of formal education on household economies in low-income countries.
