Lately, it seems that girls’ education is all over the news. Even lay people, people outside the world of people that think obsessively about development assistance and humanitarian aid, know that a girls’ life is healthier, happier, and brighter if she has at least a primary education and brighter still if she is able to complete secondary school. Educated mothers have healthier more educated children – the cycle of poverty and illiteracy can be broken. Healed families - led by economically, socially, and politically empowered women - can lift nations. Women spend money on their families; men spend money on themselves (which is just a polite way to say prostitutes and liquor). Education is a pathway to sustainable development for entire nations - homegrown, citizen initiated long-term change. And so the mantra goes: all you have to do is educate a girl…and she will do the rest. www.girleffect.org
In large part, I agree with all these things. I believe passionately that girls’ education is a key to larger, long-term social and economic development in any nation. I also believe education is a human right and gender equality should be something every nation aspires too, even as we realize that no nation has yet achieved it. But at the same time…it’s so much more complicated than it sounds. Call me Jekyll and Hyde but I have two sides when it comes to development advocacy: a) Development Practitioner Side: oppression, poverty, and human rights abuses are bad and people should know so they can do something! and b) Theoretical Academic Side: oppression, poverty, and human rights abuses are complex outcomes of intersecting inequalities that are the result of unique historical, economic, political, and cultural realities and it is wrong to essentialize people or problems by treating these challenges as simple. Development Practitioner Side applauds the work of campaigns like the Girl Effect and celebrity activists for using the power of money and visibility to raise awareness of real and substantial problems facing the world’s poor and marginalized = Girls do need more and better education opportunities! Theoretical Academic Side thinks that these campaigns are reductionist and oversimplify complex problems by proposing silver bullet solutions that result in short term projects instead of long term and integrated development initiatives = Giving a girl a cow is not the way to do it! Both sides are nerds, which side comes out really depends on the day. But ultimately, I am a blend – I both value and take interest in the space between theory and practice, or as Paulo Friere called it praxis – informed action. We have to take what we know from theory – that structural violence in the form of political oppression based on race, gender, and class exists – and what we know from practice – that you have to focus on solutions that will work in the specific context for the specific people that need it, even if that means ignoring the class implications in favor of focusing on the problem that girls of all economic classes are underrepresented in schools and the workplace.
So why does it matter then – girls education? Boys undoubtedly matter and are in need of attention too (that is a whole other discussion), by why all the fuss about girls? Why not just focus on improving education for everyone – if you take the egalitarian approach and just focus on improving the system, girls will be included by default. Improve the teachers, stamp out corruption in schools, make sure that the Ministry of Education is able to administer a decentralized system competently, improve curriculum and testing, make sure schools receive and use textbooks appropriately, and the demand for education will increase. Ensure quality education – and equality will follow. Parents will actually want to send their kids, all their kids, to school if the schools are seen as working. Right? I would say yes, all those things are vitally important but a focus on gender equality can be done alongside each and every one so that while you are improving the system, you are also acknowledging the historical disadvantage of girls and ensuring that it is taken into account as you move the education system forward. Girls cannot and should not have to wait the years if not decades it will take for countries to get their education system ducks in a row. If you train teachers, yet they still think girls are only capable of housework; if you revise the curriculum, but the lessons reinforce the legitimacy of male power and domination; if you stamp out corruption, but fail to also eliminate teachers and administrators that prey on young girl students for sex, the corruption you cannot see on ledgers and roll calls – have you made the system a place where parents will send their girls? Have you made the system one where girls will feel safe and be able to learn? Have you made a system that is truly offers and quality education to all?
One of the things I hear time and time again in my interviews with rural Liberians is that “education brings man business.” It is simply not safe for parents to send their girl children to school because school = pregnancy. This forces families to hold back their young girls because they are too small to walk by themselves and the thought of a 10 or 11 year old getting pregnant is abhorrent. This fear, combined with the lack of understanding of the importance of early childhood education, results in 13 year old Grade 1 students that ironically are more susceptible to drop out precisely because they are adolescents and have reached the age of man business (puberty). It forces families, even the ones who believe their girl child is capable of learning, to send her to the farm or to sell in the market where they can keep an eye on her because at least that has an obvious and immediate benefit to the family. Education is simply too large of a risk.
Until education a safe space that it is intended to be, inequality will thrive and girls will continue to be second class citizens that look longingly at the books or newspapers they will never be able to read, the better jobs that will never come their way, or the simple bookkeeping practices that can improve their business and make the lives of their families healthier and happier. So, yea, I think girls’ education matters. It is a big, complicated mess to accomplish but it truly cannot wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment