I had never imagined that a job I had once stumbled upon would ever become my career. But you cannot expect life to be always fair. There are times when things that you have never thought of even in your wildest imagination also happen in your life.

After passing my Master's, it never occurred to me that I was going to become a teacher. But I ended up being one. It was the only means for the educated unemployed like me to earn their keep in this glitzy and expensive capital city. And with teaching came attached a whole lot of hectic schedules that would leave me completely whacked out at the end of the day. I taught and was making money at least to sustain myself in Kathmandu. However, back then I never got satisfaction from my job, and every day I felt like leaving it.  

Whatever I have shared here, however, is not only my plight. There are thousands of others who, after completing their higher studies, are stuck in this limbo whether to hang on to teaching unabashedly at some lower level for a meagre remuneration or listen to your heart and leave the job for good. But you hardly could opt for the latter. Because getting a respectable position to match your education is very rare, and you have to feed yourself at least to keep surviving. So you have to stick to your job though you actually don't like it. And this gradually results in increasing frustration and discontent in you which, in the long run, might end in depression.

"Teaching is boring. I do it only out of compulsion." This is what one of my friends said upon being queried how he felt about teaching. These instances show how teaching is being trivialised just as a means to earn money. Gone is the ideal and sacred aura attached to the profession earlier. So now the profession lays bare sans the holy side of it. Besides, it is the students and the whole education sector which is at the receiving end. Our education sector is getting worse. Every year, the pass percentage of the students is coming down. Why?

The answer is obvious. The education sector as a whole has been affected by the plight of the country of not being able to provide a wide range of employment to the educated youths that the schools and colleges are churning out annually by the thousands. And it is important to note here that it is a bitter fact that this situation is not going to improve until the country can offer a variety of job opportunities for its educated youths. Until teachers adopt teaching out of their volition rather than compulsion just as a source to earn their keep, they are going to perform their tasks because they have to and not because they like to.