Gaurav Ojha
There can be little doubt that critical thinking skills are regarding as one of the most essential components of university education. Among different skill sets, the application of critical thinking also involves a process of examining our unjustified assumptions.
Beliefs that are taken for granted without providing significant evidence are known as assumptions. A critical thinker needs to examine her assumptions carefully because unexamined assumptions frequently result in inadequate conclusions, reactive thinking, and symptom-based solutions to issues that call for root cause study. Ironically, the universities and other educational institutions that are a part of Nepalese higher education have shied away from conducting analytical inquiries into their own unquestioned presumptions and unexamined beliefs.
Moreover, the failure to examine their own assumptions about scope, purpose, application, and significance of university education has resulted in reactive, inaccurate, desperate, evidence-less and trivial responses regarding the issues of student decline, dropout, disinterest, and utter politicization in Nepalese higher education.
Analyzing dominant epistemic beliefs in Nepalese universities
First and foremost, universities need to investigate their underlying epistemic beliefs that underpin their ideas concerning what knowledge is, how it can be acquired, and who gets to decide what knowledge is or isn’t. After all, the problem identification regarding the current crisis of relevancy and student decline eventually gets framed on the basis of predetermined beliefs universities in Nepal have internalized about what education is, including its scope, meaning, and functions. However, universities need to realize that their assumptions about education can mismatch with what 21st-century learners expect and anticipate from university education.
Moreover, due to this divergence, Nepalese students after their school-level education are least interested in continuing their education in Nepal. Hence universities in Nepal need to critically evaluate their epistemic beliefs that limit the scope of education within the narrow frame of academia, professors, autocratic systems, experts, specializations, classrooms, lecturing, attendance, evaluations, exams, grades, degrees, and classroom activities.
Universities in Nepal cannot limit themselves to self-referential practices within the boundaries of their closed systems; instead, they must develop out-of-the-box solutions to address the relevancy dilemma linked to student decline, dropout rates, and indifference. They need to assess inferences, trends, and evidence from a variety of sources to make a reasoned conclusion about the overall direction higher education in Nepal needs to take to uplift itself from a terminal decline. There is still a doubt whether a university in Nepal has marketing strategies, outreach programs, and intensive research to determine its target students, or is it even thinking about using an influencer to attract students.
Where is the difference between schooling and university education?
Basically, universities in Nepal are experimenting with curricula, adding new courses, implementing blended learning environments, and testing out emerging methods of student evaluation because they assume that students are drawn to international universities because they don’t have what these foreign universities already have devised in terms of choices, quality, combinations of specialization, efficiency, and technological support. However, this self-referential assumption again overlooks that underlying perception of students.
Nepalese students prefer studying in foreign universities because many believe that higher education in Nepal mirrors their school-level experience. The same old mindsets prevail: teacher-centered instruction, rigid classroom setups, lecture hours, mandatory attendance, authoritative figures, prescribed methods, fixed evaluation formats, outdated theories, harsh judgments, grading based on memorization, and a lack of intellectual freedom and critical questioning.
Knowledge & its Applications
Moreover, our institutions function under the guise that knowledge must be thoroughly understood, extensively described, and based on theory. Therefore, knowledge processing and sharing in Nepali institutions is severely restricted to instructions, presentations, note-taking, memorization, and drafting lengthy exam replies because of an overemphasis on lengthy lists of definitions, concepts, and theories.
For instance, in a ten-mark question where it is asked to define management and outline its functions, a student might just write, in one line, ‘Management is the art of getting things done through others’. Most educators, conveniently, would determine that this response demonstrates insufficient understanding. But knowledge can also be presented like shorts, reels, bits, tweets, and pieces in this fast-paced society. And again, two years of course can be merged and condensed into a semester with proper curriculum planning and modification. After all, there are so many recurrences in course content in every specialization.
Indeed, there are other sophisticated definitions and descriptions of management and its functions, and an exceptional student can fill the pages after pages in an exam with variety of definitions, references to scholars, examples, cases, and scenarios. But nothing of much would matter if that same student doesn’t know how to get a task completed through collaborative and coordinated efforts working with other people. Therefore, what matters is how much knowledge can be applied and put into performance.
Reconsider Educational Standards
The belief that education is the goal in itself has been maintained in Nepalese society by cultural conditioning, the school-level education system, cultural values, and parental expectations. But, in this hyper-connected age of instant knowledge, post-truths and pragmatism, this view has been progressively weakening. Therefore, in order to draw and retain students, universities also need to rethink their teaching ideals, standards of knowledge, evaluation procedures, and learning protocols. Here, referring to a small number of exceptional students with government service jobs and graduates who are studying in ranked international universities won’t be sufficient to determine the relevancy of Nepalese universities. To overcome relevancy crisis, the majority of students in Nepal’s university system must believe that their academic institution is aware and adoptive to their expectations, concerns, and inspirations.
(Gaurav Ojha is a faculty member specializing in communication, critical thinking, management, and research at various educational institutions in the Kathmandu Valley. As part of his creative pursuits, Mr. Ojha regularly publishes opinion pieces, poems, and non-fiction articles covering a wide range of topics, including death, disease, social issues, humanism, and spirituality.)
