Maoists in Nepal
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Janabadi education
Janabadi education
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Maoists' Janabadi education
Janabadi education is not a wholesale re-writing of history but rather omitting parts of history, especially those dealing with the monarchy. The stress is on scientific vocational education so that students "receive practical knowledge to enable them to make a living." In Rolpa and Rukum very few students had studied up to SLC. Most had dropped out in grades 5, 6, 7 or 8. For these young people, a scientific practical education was far out of reach due to the mobile nature of the insurgency.
The Maoists have big plans to impart Janabadi education, claiming to have established over 35 Janabadi schools throughout the base areas in 2005. They have also constructed one model Janabadi school each in the districts of the base area. The Thawang model school building in Rolpa district can house 40 children from grades 1 to 3. It is intended to be a boarding school where children of Maoists who were killed in encounters and the poor are given preference. The Janabadi curriculum had already been finalised and the books were being printed. The booklet looked like any school curriculum except that it emphasised Maoist philosophy and the "people's war" .
Maoists' new curriculum
The Maoist Regional Peoples' Education Division' for Rukum and Rolpa has issued its curriculum for Grades 1-3 in which students will be asked to recognise the portraits of Marx, Mao and CPN-Maoist leader Prachanda.

Students should be able to recognise the flags of the communist party, the people's council and fraternal people's organisations, to recite the full names of the party and people's government and remember the names, place and date of births and deaths of Marx, Lenin, Mao and the date and place of birth of Prachanda. In Grade 3, teachers are asked to make sure that students know the life story of Prachanda.

The students in the Maoist strongholds have to learn about the proletarian class struggle and its leadership and martyrs.

The Maoists want to implement the new curriculum all over the country.

August 2005
A class of their own
The Maoist Grade 1-3 curriculum includes military science
The night sky is patched with dark pre-monsoon clouds and the porch of a straw-thatched mud house glows with bluish LED lamps lighting a makeshift stage. As the audience sit on straw mats, a peculiar music breaks the silence- a fusion of madal and battery powered keyboards.

Performers take turns singing revolutionary songs and dances. Two of them ridicule King Gyanendra and former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. The performers are teachers who have just finished a training program on the Maoists' new curriculum for Grades 1-3 in this remote village on the border of Salyan and Rolpa.

"Education is not only rote reading like in the old regime, our teachers have to be trained," announces Bhesh Raj Bhusal (alias Dhruba) secretary of the Maoist-affiliated All Nepal Teachers' Association.

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