Early Life and Education
Born and raised in Nangi, a remote village in the mountainous Myagdi District of western Nepal, Pun spent his childhood grazing cattle and sheep, and attending a village school without paper, pencils, textbooks or qualified teachers. Traditionally, the local people had no education, and most men joined the British Gurkha army. Pun's life changed dramatically when his father, a retired Gurkha, took the remarkable step of moving the family to the southern plain of Nepal and investing their entire savings in his son's education. After finishing high school, Pun worked as a teacher for about 12 years in four schools, while supporting his brothers' and sisters' education. In 1989, after numerous applications to UK and US universities, he succeeded in gaining a partial scholarship to the University of Nebraska at Kearney, from which he graduated in 1996 with a Bachelor's Degree in Science Education. After graduation, he returned to his native village, twenty-four years after having left there as a child. It was in Nangi that he recognised the critical need for sustainable education, and began to formulate his goal of creating a high school to serve as a model for local educational and economic development. Pun founded the Himanchal High School with a special focus on computer education and other programmes with income-generating capacity. He then returned to the University of Nebraska for a Master's Degree in Educational Administration, which he completed in 2001.
Read more about this topic: Mahabir Pun
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Make me thy Loome: thy Grace the warfe therein,
My duties Woofe, and let thy word winde Quills.
The shuttle shoot. Cut off the ends my sins.
Thy Ordinances make my fulling mills,
My Life thy Web: and cloath me all my dayes
With this Gold-web of Glory to thy praise.”
—Edward Taylor (1645–1729)
“Do we honestly believe that hopeless kids growing up under the harsh new rules will turn out to be chaste, studious, responsible adults? On the contrary, by limiting welfare, job training, education and nutritious food, won’t we plant the seeds for another bumper crop of out-of-wedlock moms, deadbeat dads and worse?”
—Richard B. Stolley (20th century)