Education Girls
High bride price and low intellectual capabilities Girls are a source of instant wealth, therefore, are retained at home for bride price. Research confirms that parents value most of their young girls like gold, coffee and other commodities to be traded at the immediate market value. They are only few and scarce that their value has soared recently. This is even worse around Ialibu area and some parts of Central Province. Some young girls can cost around K20 000. Women are used as the medium to achieve human prosperity.
They facilitate for the channelling of wealth like pigs, shell money, pearls, food, modern money and other goods from one person or tribe to another. Poor families with many girls have the fate of becoming rich one day from the wealth that the girl would acquire through bride price payment. Thus, girls are reserved for marriage by their siblings. Some parents question the females’ intellectual capabilities and say they will not perform as well as the male students.
They say that males are naturally intelligent and can solicit solutions for academic problems quite easily than females. In the cultural arena, opinions and advice from women are not entertained by men in all forms of decision making. All decisions are based entirely on the men’s instincts as to what they think is right. Women are merely seen as trailers or followers. Investment in girls’ education lost to husbands at marriage Some parents say that their investment in their girls’ education will be lost to the girl’s husband at marriage.
In the parochial cultural system, most parents’ fear that their resources spent on their daughter’s education will be shifted to the husband at marriage as she will be subject to the husband. The woman is equivalent to any asset the man may have, with no human value. Her value and worth is measured by the number of pigs she rears and the number of children she bears. There is no guarantee for her to go back and share the benefits of her education with her parents. Therefore, parents restrict their girls from attending school as their investment will be wasted.
Moreover, parents do all the arrangements for their daughters’ marriage and this could happen while the girl is still at school. They can withdraw their daughter from school at any time, sometimes, without her knowledge. Whether or not the girl is doing well academically, she has to comply as it is embedded in the cultural and tribal jurisdictions and she will be coerced to marry. Girls, as pillars of local economy Girls are the backbone of the local economy. Therefore, parents retain them at home. Culturally, some societies perceive women as a utility asset to undertake all household chores.
They fear that educated women will not listen to the dictates of men. They view education as an instrument that alienates women from their environment and makes them less submissive to the dictates of men. The continuation of men holding high positions in the traditional hierarchy is fading away as monetary value and those who work for money become more important because they gain respect in the society, irrespective of whether they are men or women. Men’s continuation of dominance in the society is facing a new threat by educated girls.
Girls must be stopped from going to school and the existing cultural phenomena are potentially capable of barring girls from going to schools. Distance and tribal fights Parents fear for their girls’ safety and stop them from walking long distances to schools when there is a tribal fight. Most tribal fights are caused by land disputes, rape and payback killings and are fought on all frontiers without any truce to limit and control the scope of fighting. In such conditions, girls become vulnerable to being abused and injured when walking long distances to schools as some of the schools are situated in enemy territory.
Walking through valleys, climbing gorges and mountains, crossing fast flowing rivers or walking along bush tracks to reach their schools places them at the mercy of enemy clans. The only alternative is to leave school because their continued safety is not guaranteed. There is dire need for awareness to be carried out on the importance of equality and participation in education. Various stakeholders must fund a continuous intensive awareness program until people are fully aware on what to do to eradicate under-representation of girls in schools.
Moreover, the educated elites must inform their parents not to stop girls from going to school. Parents must be told that girls are not commodities to be traded as currently, this is what is happening. Faith-based organisations should be supported to carry out awareness through their services and activities so that their congregations are informed of the disadvantages of denying girls their rights to education. Finally, it is everyone’s responsibility to carry out awareness by asking, pleading and informing parents to send their girls to school.
There is a general perception in India that women in tribal societies face fewer restrictions than other women. For example, the National Commission for Women was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1990 to safeguard the rights and legal entitlements of women, through Sarva Sikshya Aviyan, up gradation of Primary Schools under SSA, New Residential Girl’s High Schools/Educational Complexes, and Teaching in Tribal Language, Bicycles of ST Girls, and Scholarships to tribal women and Micro Projects etc.
These reviews are the regions which raised the question to further study on this matter: A seminar on the tribal education in India (1967) organized by National Council of Educational Research and Training analysed the various aspects of tribal education like the educational facilities available, coverage, wastage and stagnation, basic problems of tribal education methods and voluntary agencies in the education of tribal people and utilization of financial assistance.
The Seminar made recommendations regarding aims, objectives and policy of tribal education, teacher’s qualification, and medium of instruction, school facilities, text books and curriculum etc Educational attainment is a key component of children’s success as adults in multiple spheres – including the labor market and later childrearing. A child’s educational attainment is strongly influenced by characteristics of his/her parents, such as their own educational attainments, economic resources, and expectations.
Attitudes and preferences regarding children’s educational attainment are important determinants of parents’ childrearing behavior. While much demographic research has focused on fertility preferences such as desired number of sons and daughters, less work has addressed “quality” preferences for boys and girls once they are born A range of basic socio-demographic factors shape parents’ attitudes toward the education of boys and girls in developing settings, including parents’ education, wealth, age, urban experience, and their own parents’ education.
School attendance is likely to decrease children’s availability to contribute to family enterprises, potentially creating a serious tension, especially for families that could benefit from the short-run income provided by working children or that could suffer from the direct costs of educating children (Tan 1983; Chekki 1974). In environments where males have more job opportunities and higher wages, an attitude favoring higher levels of education for boys than to girls could reflect parental strategies regarding investments in the future.
If so, parents with lower levels of economic security may express attitudes favoring more education for boys than girls, or less certainty regarding these attitudes. Increasingly, however, expansions of the industrial and service sectors replace household and farm labor with paid wage labor for women and men. Accompanying these changes are increased access to educational opportunity, decreases in desired family sizes, and the promotion of more egalitarian views toward raising boys and girls.
Ideas of investing in the “ideal” child spread, and childrearing is viewed as a rewarding and fulfilling undertaking in and of itself rather than as an economic investment or an inevitability. Together, these changes might influence parents’ attitudes toward the educational worth of boys and girls. In South Asia, however, economics and modernization alone do not capture the full dynamic of parents’ attitudes toward children’s education.
With South Asia’s primarily agrarian and patriarchal systems, these attitudes also reflect gender roles created by family structure, including the different nature of sons’ and daughters’ ties to natal family. The region’s patrilineal and patrilocal kinship systems generate differential standards and expectations for girls and boys. Traditionally, a girl leaves her family upon marriage to join her husband’s family, and so her worth as a child is primarily in her labor contribution to the household (Das Gupta, Zhenghua, Bohua, Zhenming, Chung, and Hwa-Ok 2003).
As an adult, her worth is as a source of children and labor for her husband and his family. In India, this trend is particularly true in the North, where women’s autonomy is more constrained, than in the South, where women have more freedom to maintain ties to their birth families (Das Gupta et al 2003). In Punjab, Pakistan, the most populous province of Pakistan, the situation mirrors aspects of both north and south India. As in north India, women in Punjab have limited inheritance rights, little access to economic resources, and few opportunities to work (Sathar and Kazi 2000).
But as in south India, kin marriage and close natal family ties ensure that women are not cut off from their birth families to the same extent as in north India (Jejeebhoy and Sathar 2001). Along with region, religion further influences gender roles as Muslim marriage patterns in north India and Pakistan are less alienating from natal kin than Hindu marriages (Mandelbaum 1986). In relation to women, men in South Asia are relatively freer to pursue employment and benefit their families as adults. In this analysis of parents’ attitudes toward boys’ and girls’ educational attainment, autonomy, natal family ties, and religion are all considered.
