School as the agency of social reproduction: A case of medium of instruction policymaking for quasi-privatization in Nepal

This chapter demonstrates how a secondary public school in Nepal utilized its medium of instruction policy to perpetuate and/or renew educational inequalities and injustice for ethnolinguistic and class-minoritized students through the notions of power and agency in language planning and policy and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “social reproduction.” Drawing on data from a critical ethnography of language policy, this chapter documents how the school and its powerful human agents (e.g., some parents in the school committee, local political leaders, and school administrators) created the policy for two different media of instruction (Nepali and English) to serve two different groups of students in order to perpetuate class-based hierarchies in the educational landscape. While English as a medium of instruction (as an index of educational and cultural capital) was available to middle-class children, Nepali-medium instruction (a symbol of low-quality education in Nepal) was made available to poor children. Hence, this chapter argues that the school turned elite language ideologies (e.g., English as a superior language) into educational practices through its language policy mechanism, which in turn functioned to reproduce social and educational disadvantages and injustices for minority children. Copyright © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Paul Downes, Guofang Li, Lore Van Praag and Stephen Lamb; individual chapters, the contributors.