4th graders in Nepal learn how to make bombs

[The Straight Story]

Nepal's Maoist rebel schools employ explosive approach in teaching young

Fourth-graders in Nepal wouldn't have to study math if the country's communist rebels took control. But they would learn to make bombs and grow vegetables.

Nepal's Maoist rebels, fighting a decade-old insurgency against the monarchy, now have influence in nearly every district of this country of 27 million people, and citizens increasingly are wondering how their life would change if the rebels actually took power.

So a group of Nepalese teachers made a low-profile visit recently to three "model schools" run by the Maoists in the western districts of Rolpa, Salyan and Jajarkot, the rebel heartland where they launched their struggle in 1996.

The rebels say the schools provide the ideal communist education.

Learning bombs, not math

During the visit, the teachers got a peak into what the future could hold for Nepal's estimated 10 million children under age 14, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

"The stress was on military education: What is a bomb? How to blast it. How to carry out attacks. This was the main part of the curriculum in the fourth and fifth classes," said Babu Ram Adhikari, general-secretary of the Nepal National Teachers' Association, Nepal's largest with 72,000 members.

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Our world is soooooo fucked.

[FloridaPat]

1. They should just give them war game programs like they do in

the US.

[hopein08]

2. My sister has a Nepalese friend who is a graduate student in math in Ohio

Her family is apparently well to do in Kathmandu and have told her that she should just stay in the US and now come back because they are worried about how close the Maoists are getting to the capital.

But that's a weird coincidence about the math thing.