In September 2025, teenagers in school uniforms made the most powerful argument for civic education in Nepal. A leaderless generation, organised on phones and fueled by anger over corruption, joblessness and the exodus of friends for foreign labour, brought down a government in mere days. Six months later, they voted, peacefully concluding what they had started. In the March 2026 election, voters delivered a decisive mandate to a party founded only in 2022, produced the first single-party majority since 1999, and unseated three-decade veterans, including a former prime minister who lost his own constituency. 

This moment was both a vindication and an indictment. The vindication proved what students of democracy have long insisted: a republic rises or falls on the capacity of its citizens. Economists at Harvard have found that more educated societies are more likely to build democratic institutions and defend them against backsliding. Without Gen Z weighing competing claims and seeing through manipulation, the andolan would have remained a negotiated transaction. The indictment is that almost none of them learned the how of democracy in school. Fact-checking, debating, moral clarity, organising across caste, class and region were all self-taught, improvised on social media. 

The generation prepared itself. The new government must not waste this moment; rather, it must prepare the next generation of voters by making civic education a national priority.

Our neglect of civics is not unique. School systems almost everywhere have been retooled around a narrower purpose: test scores, employability and preparing workers for a global economy. That work matters in a country losing thousands of its young people to foreign labour every day. 

When young people are taught to solve equations but never to inquire deeply or engage with public issues, frustration has nowhere constructive to land. Nepal saw both sides during the Gen Z uprising: extraordinary courage and arson everyone now regrets. Anger is not the enemy of democracy; unchanneled anger is. The task ahead is to equip the next generation to identify corruption, inequality, a faltering economy and a warming climate, and to press for change peacefully. 

Healthier democracies do not leave citizenship to chance. In Scandinavian schools, democratic values, human rights and reasoned debate run through every subject, practised through community projects and student decision-making. These countries often excel in international civics assessments. Canada’s largest province requires every high-school student to pass a course in civics. In the United States, where democratic norms are under strain, a rare alliance of left and right has launched Educating for American Democracy to rebuild the subject so students investigate rather than memorise. That repair effort is itself a warning. Three decades ago, Robert Putnam cautioned that when civic life withers, democracy hollows out from within. 

Nepal does not need to adopt this wholesale. As Amartya Sen has argued, South Asia holds one of the world’s oldest traditions of public reasoning, and our assemblies of open debate long predate the word ‘democracy’ in our textbooks. A civic education built on that inheritance, drawing on the deliberative and duty-of-care strands of our Buddhist and Hindu traditions while reforming their social hierarchies, would feel familiar rather than foreign. 

The numbers leave little room for delay. Nepal ranks 107th of 180 countries on the global corruption index. More than 100,000 young people took no-objection certificates to study abroad in a single year; more than 2,000 leave daily for foreign employment. Those who stay grow up on social media, where algorithms largely write their civic education. The youth bulge is either a democratic dividend or a slow-burning fuse, and education largely decides which. 

Of course, civic education alone will not fix these issues. Corruption, inequality and out-migration will keep testing this democracy, and no curriculum can substitute for economic growth and honest institutions. Still, without citizens equipped to weigh evidence, tolerate disagreement and vote with knowledge, no other reform will hold. 

So, what should the government do? Start with the structure. Make civic education explicit, examinable and universal, from primary school to university, never confined to one textbook chapter. Teach government systems, but also how to manage one’s emotions, examine one’s assumptions, detect misinformation, disagree without contempt and engage in communities. The age of social media and AI demands these skills but also erodes them. Then, how it is taught. A student who has run a mock election, argued the losing side of a debate and sat on a student council with real responsibility has practised democracy, not merely studied it. Teachers must be equipped and trusted to carry those habits into every classroom. 

Additionally, build it inclusive by design, so that girls, Dalit, Madheshi and Janajati students, children with disabilities and young people in remote districts become co-authors of the republic rather than bystanders. And measure it honestly: We know far too little about what our citizens understand about their democracy. 

Last year, a generation taught almost no civics found the courage to demand a better country, then the discipline to express it at the ballot box. Imagine what it could do if we taught it deliberately. Nepal’s youths have shown what they are capable of. A school system worthy of that promise is the least we owe them and the difference between an awakening that establishes a lasting democracy and the one we long for.