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Reconceptualising girls’ education

Concern for girls’ education has grown over the years, leading to a considerable expansion of access. Today, more girls are enrolled in elementary classes than anyone could have imagined even a decade ago. However, the nature and quality of their experience at school are a different question altogether. To say the least, we know very little about it. Educational theory is not particularly helpful in suggesting how we should differentiate the quality of girls’ e xperience of education from that of boys, and whether we should make such a distinction.

Some may wonder why the experience of education should be conceptualised differently for girls. Can’t they be treated as children, like boys? These are legitimate questions and they are difficult to answer, partly because we have not given much thought to them but mainly because complex cultural issues come in our way when we start reflecting on the aims and educational experience of girls. These issues also involve the familiar problem of considering how a modern state should deal with aspects of culture which are rooted in conventions and beliefs. If educational policy is expected to pursue a child-centred approach, the state must confront the question surrounding the childhood of girls.

The main idea underlying child-centred educational practices is the recognition of children’s autonomy and agency. The child’s right to freedom and dignity, autonomy and privacy flows from it. Other human rights, such as the right to life, and equality and protection from exploitation and oppression are assumed in the concept of dignity when we apply it to children. Protection from aggression and violence, hunger, malnutrition and emotional stress is also inbuilt in the modern concept of childhood which is now globally accepted although it is practised with rather sharply varying degrees of commitment and social efficiency in different countries. Progressive, child-centred education would mean very little if the idea of rights were to be disregarded in pedagogic relations. These premises of pedagogic modernism can hardly be questioned in any serious debate on education. However, we do need to ask whether these premises have any meaning or substance when applied to the education of girls. As soon as we ask such a question and start examining the everyday reality of girls’ upbringing at home and learning at school, we are struck by the realisation that the principles of child-centred education — and the idea of child rights underpinning these principles — have little more than rhetorical value for girls. If socio-cultural realities of girls’ lives are taken into account, most of the discourse on child-centred education would have to be renamed as a boy-centred discourse. Let us see why.

In an important paper on gender and caste, renowned sociologist Leela Dubey has examined the meaning of ‘growing up’ for girls. Professor Dubey probes the intricate relation of caste and gender, and explains the attribution of impurity to the female gender. Menstruation and childbirth are regarded as natural causes of female impurity in the traditional socio-cultural order. To maintain caste purity, the girl reaching puberty is expected to be protected, ostensibly from undesired male attention but also from her own supposedly unbridled sexuality.

By presenting a complex set of facts and interpretation, Professor Dubey reveals for us the depressing picture of a social ethic which imposes a regime of vigilance on girls precisely at the age when boys are expected to break free of direct adult control in order to realise their own confident male self. Such is the irony of gender socialisation that childhood and youth acquire sharply contrasting meanings for boys and girls. This difference and the regime of vigilance for girls are not confined to any particular religious group. If we look at the social world through the eyes of Professor Dubey, we realise how mistaken it is to regard the educational experience of boys and girls as being essentially similar. Of course, we need to make certain distinctions between different socio-economic and religious settings. There is perhaps an element of awareness of gender issues in the more educated sections of society in certain regions, and it is true that urban spaces permit greater opportunity for personal autonomy to girls. However, the issues pertaining to the acculturation of girls in their journey towards womanhood are far too deep for superficial modernity to touch.

Every summer when we read in newspaper headlines, ‘girls ahead of boys in Class XII examinations’, we forget that fewer girls survive in the system long enough to reach the end of secondary education. The girls who resist social and pedagogic pressures to drop out take studies more seriously and protect themselves against distractions more effectively than boys. At the level of college or university too, girls do not take their educational opportunity for granted or lightly. For most of them, education is a privilege which they know will vanish after matrimony. For many, the right to use their education for gainful employment or to pursue further education depends on the permission of in-laws. Between their father’s home and in-laws, young women face a vast range of nuanced signals regarding the worth of their motivation and effort to get educated.

Several signals are sharply material, others carry a mixed feeling. Material signals have to do with the money invested on education and the impending reality of dowry. Mixed signals emanate from the tension between the promise of modern education and the traditional belief that the main purpose of female life is marriage and motherhood. Girls battle on, holding on to the secrets of their tolerance for every discouragement and insult. After all, education also means an institutional setting which offers a few hours of relief from the tight vigilance of home. It is another matter that the institutional space has its own risks and fears, many of which prove real. On the contrary, factors as diverse as cultural revivalism and new medical technology have brought about significant regression, even reversal, in social — read male — attitudes towards girls.

For one thing, a certain amount of hardening has occurred in male attitudes in response to the growth of expressiveness and agency resulting from education among girls. Not just parents, even brothers and teachers find articulate girls irritating. We must remember that while conscious efforts have been made through laws and policies to expand the sphere of rights and opportunities in the case of girls, no such deliberate effort has been made to redesign male perceptions and attitudes.

On the contrary, the media and cinema have relentlessly reinforced traditional perception of the female human as an object of consumption — for male pleasure and reproduction. Exploitation of the female body and body parts to expand the market of consumable goods is a vast cultural phenomenon. State media have set no shining standards either. Consider the Akashvani message for the laudable cause of delayed marriage. It says that girls’ bodies are not adequately developed before the age of eighteen. Apparently, even for state agencies and not just for society, girls have yet to become full human beings.

The only extenuating feature of this grim story is that educational and employment opportunities for girls have gradually improved over the last century. Studies done as recently as 20 years ago showed reluctance in many sections of society to educate girls even up to the primary stage. The enrolment scene has definitely changed. However, gender discrimination and toughness in the upbringing of girls have not diminished very much. And basic assumptions about the contribution women can be expected to make to society have not changed much. Matrimony continues to be regarded as the essential and overarching goal of girlhood. If a girl chooses to deride this goal, she is treated as an object of sympathy and faces obnoxious kinds of attention.

In the context of motherhood too, very little seems to have changed, either in the specific sphere of the mothering of sons, or in the general male perception of women’s role outside the family. What has changed greatly is girls’ self-perception. An unprecedented number of girls and young women perceive themselves today as rightful owners of an independent destiny. This perception imparts to many girls the illusion that they can succeed in life in whatever manner they want. When they proceed to pursue the success they want, they face the shock of negative responses from all around. Educated girls speak out, but soon discover that they are not being heard. It takes them a little while to realise that they are not being heard because the audience is not used to seeing girls speak their mind. About 70 years ago, poet-philosopher Mahadevi Verma delineated the shackles that surround India’s girls. Most of these shackles are still intact.

(Prof. Krishna Kumar is Director, National Council of Educational Research and Training.)

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