The Making of School Education in Nepal: From Nation-Building to Development, Inequalities, and Aspirations

This essay reviews academic research on school education in Nepal, with a focus on how education has functioned as a site of nation-building, governance, inequality, and aspiration. It draws primarily on academic publications—monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles—mainly in English, and some Nepali-language publications. The review maps a growing body of critical research shaped by Nepal’s political changes, donor influence, and expanding academic networks, and identifies four major thematic strands: the historical use of schooling in state formation and cultural homogenization; the entanglement of education with development aid and decentralized governance; the reproduction and contestation of structural inequalities through education; and the role of schooling in shaping subjectivities, mobility, and future imaginaries. Rather than viewing education as a neutral good, this literature positions school education as a deeply political and socially embedded process. The review also reflects on the uneven terrain of educational scholarship, with some themes receiving more attention than others. This essay, therefore, calls for further empirically grounded and politically attuned research that attends to everyday practices and explores how education both shapes and is shaped by broader struggles over identity, power, and social change.