Drawing on critical ethnography of language policy (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007), this presentation analyzes policy documents and interviews with policymakers and school administrators to uncover the “hidden agendas” (Shohamy, 2006) behind the development of English-medium education (EME) policy in Nepal’s public schools. The framework of the “politics of distraction” (Farley et al., 2021; Hattie, 2015) is applied to examine how elite policymakers propose certain educational reforms that may seem necessary for addressing policy issues, but ultimately serve as a means to divert attention from the root causes, structural forces, and historical/contextual factors that perpetuate inequalities and injustice within the education system.

The analysis reveals that policymakers view the EME policy as a solution to the crisis in public schools by enhancing their competitiveness with private English-medium schools. However, this approach is identified as a politics of distraction, as it diverts attention from broader issues such as implicit privatization, funding cuts, and accountability deficits. By prioritizing dominant medium-of-instruction policies, policymakers perpetuate inequalities, reinforce the status quo, and violate the linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994) of ethnic and indigenous children. By framing EME as a public policy doctrine and suggesting that the crisis can be resolved through school privatization, which in turn promotes commodified languages like English and the national dominant language Nepali over local/Indigenous languages, policymakers largely disregard inequalities, structural conditions, and reinforce the existing state of affairs. This research underscores the need to examine the rationales and purposes behind promoting EME in mainstream schools in multilingual contexts.

The main takeaway for the audience is the imperative to thoroughly examine the underlying rationales and purposes driving the implementation of medium of instruction policies in mainstream schools in multilingual societies, mainly involving the exploration of policymakers’ (a less explored stakeholder) ideologies.