Teach for Nepal: A Critical Examination of Entrepreneurship Discourse in Education

• In Event: 21st Century Socialism & Education Panel #6: Capitalism, Neoliberalism and the rise of entrepreneurship discourses in Africa and Asia: A South-South Exchange

Proposal

In the last four decades, Nepal has undergone various iterations of neoliberal education reform that have led to the decentralization, privatization, and commercialization of education. Among the more recent iterations has included Teach for All, which replicates Teach for America’s corporate model of education reform, to recruit high achieving college graduates to teach disenfranchised students in government schools for two years. While many supporters have considered this model a panacea for educational challenges, Teach for All has also been condemned by educators around the world as “part of an ideologically driven and deliberate neoliberal attack on public education, teachers, teacher professionalism and working class or ‘other’ communities” (Price & McConney, 2013, p.98).

Using discourse analysis, this paper explores how Teach for Nepal, like any traveling reform or policy, has ‘touched down’ in an already inhabited educational and discursive space (Seddon & Levin, 2013) to take on the role of promoting and teaching the skills of entrepreneurship in public schools for the poor. Engaging illustrative examples from blog posts written by teaching fellows, online media reports and TFN’s publicly available texts, the paper examines the cultural politics of reinscribing the legibility of teachers and students as modern, entrepreneurial subjects. I show how the terms of entrepreneurship, concepts of profit, interest and investment and faith in market forces become constitutive of the promise of education itself, and taking entrepreneurial ‘risks’ becomes inscribed in material practices as an escape from the cycle of poverty.

Danner, H., Kerrettes-Makau, M., & Nebe, J. M. (2016). Youth Unemployment in Kenya: A Ticking Time Bomb. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=R0ShnQAACAAJ
Price, A., & McConney, A. (2013). Is “Teach for All” knocking on your door? Journal of Pedagogy, 4(1), 98–110.
Seddon, T., & Levin, J. S. (2013) Educators, Professionalism and Politics: Global transitions, national spaces. New York: Routledge.
United Nations. (2000, September). Millennium Development Goals and Beyond 2015. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
United Nations. (2015, September). Sustainable Development Goals. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/

Author

• Sahara Pradhan, University of Massachusetts Amherst