The list went up on the wall outside the headmaster's office in Falgun of my ninth year, and my name was on it, and there was a small crowd, and my father was sent for from the field. Two students from the district were going to Kathmandu on a full scholarship. I was one of them. Everyone in that corridor understood it as the best thing that had happened to the school in some years, and by every measure the school was assessed on, it was.
I want to describe what happened to my class afterwards, because I have never seen it written down and I have now met perhaps thirty people with the same story who each thought it was theirs alone.
My class had twenty-two students in it and one mathematics period a day with a teacher who had thirty-one other periods a week. What made that period function was not the teacher. It was that four or five of us had worked ahead, and the rest of the class checked their answers against ours, and the arguments about who was right were where the learning happened. That is not a metaphor. I can name the boy who used to fight me over problems at the back and who, by the end, was better than me at anything geometric.
I left in Baisakh. So did the other scholarship student, from a school two hours away, whose class was smaller than mine.
The following year my old class had eighteen students and no one working ahead. My friend at the back stopped being right about geometry because there was nobody to be right against. He finished school, which is more than most, and he now runs a shop in Besisahar and is by any account a competent and cheerful man, and when I visit he asks me about mathematics in a way that I find difficult to sit with.
Here is the claim, and I am aware of how it sounds coming from the person who took the scholarship. Merit selection in a thin system does not identify the students who will benefit most. It identifies the students whose removal does the most damage to the institution they are removed from. Those are the same students. That is the entire problem, and it is not a flaw in the selection — it is what selection is.
In a school with four sections and eight mathematics teachers, losing the top student costs the other students almost nothing; the teaching does not depend on them. In a school with one section and one overloaded teacher, the top student is load-bearing. So a scholarship programme designed to find talent wherever it is transfers exactly the load-bearing students out of exactly the schools that have no other structural support, every year, permanently, and calls the result an investment in rural education. It is an extraction from rural education. It is a very good deal for me personally and I have never once regretted going.
And it is not only the students, which is how I know the pattern is structural rather than something wrong with scholarship schemes in particular.
The mathematics teacher who had thirty-two periods a week was transferred to the district headquarters school in Baisakh of the year after I left. This was, correctly, understood as a promotion. He was the strongest teacher in a school of nine and the headquarters school had a vacancy, and the transfer system in Nepal does what transfer systems do everywhere: it moves the competent toward the centre, because the centre is where the desirable posts are and because being good at your job is what qualifies you to leave. Nobody in that chain acted badly. He had a family and the headquarters school is on a road.
So in eighteen months my old class lost its four strongest students and its only real mathematics teacher, by two entirely separate mechanisms that both work by identifying quality and relocating it. Neither mechanism has any awareness of the other. The scholarship board does not know about the transfer roster and the transfer roster does not know about the scholarship board, and the school experienced them as one event because from inside a school that is what they are.
That is the general shape and the scholarship is only the version I happen to have been. A thin institution exports whatever is load-bearing, continuously, through every channel that rewards merit, and every one of those channels is individually defensible.
The counterargument is the one my father made in the corridor and it has not weakened. What is the alternative — tell a fifteen-year-old to stay in a village school for the sake of the other seventeen? Nobody has the standing to say that to a child, least of all somebody who did not stay. Any scheme that kept high-performing students in place to prop up their classmates would be indefensible the moment you looked at a single student's life instead of a district's averages. I would refuse to administer it. I would have refused to accept it.
So I am not proposing that the scholarships stop. I am proposing that the accounting change, because at the moment there is no accounting at all. When the district reports on the programme it reports the two students who went. It does not report the eighteen who stayed, or their results the following year, or whether the class that produced a scholar produced another one within five years. Nobody has ever looked. Nobody would have to build anything to look; the results are already collected.
My guess, from thirty conversations and no data, is that a school which produces a scholar becomes less likely to produce another one for about six years, and that this is invisible because the programme's success is measured in scholars produced and the country is large enough that there is always another school.
I teach now. Last year a girl in my Kathmandu class, whose family is from Sindhupalchok, asked me whether she should apply for a boarding scholarship or stay where her cousins were. I said apply. I said it immediately and without hesitation and I would say it again, and then I went home and thought about the boy at the back who was better than me at anything geometric, and I have not resolved it, and I no longer expect to.
