Levelling the playing fields in education: dare we hope?


Date: January 1, 1970
  • SHARE:

While girl?s access to education is seemingly becoming less of a problem in most countries, their retention and long-term success in education still present a challenge. What happens when the adult caregivers are too ill to care for the family needs or die, often living children to fend for themselves? What happens is that girls bear the brunt of these social ills and become more vulnerable to even further abuse and oppression from extended family members, the school and the community they live in? What happens is that the dream of equality drifts further away.

Ten years ago, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPFA) proclaimed that:
 
“The girl child of today is the woman of tomorrow. The skills, ideas and energy of the girl child are vital for full attainment of the goals of equality, development and peace. For the girl child to develop her full potential she needs to be nurtured in an enabling environment, where her spiritual, intellectual and material needs for survival, protection and development are met and her equal rights safeguarded.”
 
These are surely noble words. But they are also words whose meaning has become hollow and meaningless as women and girls particularly in poor and under-resourced communities continue to suffer inequalities, violence and oppression.
 
As the world’s focus shifts towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and governments have once again enthusiastically ratified and committed their countries to these, there is some renewed hope that the gender equality agenda will once again be taken seriously.  But is this hope misplaced?
 
In sub-Saharan Africa, in the context of extreme poverty and hunger, as well as the raging AIDS pandemic, there seems very little reason to believe that the MDGs will be achieved by 2015.  While many countries are showing good progress in terms of enrolling children in primary education, many, including some sub-Saharan African countries still lag behind, with fewer children, particularly girls accessing and completing their course of study.
 
The factors are predictable: poverty, scarce resources, gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS.
 
A decade ago governments committed their countries to advancing the goal of educational access and eliminating discrimination in education on the basis of gender, race, class, religion and other social identities; creating gender-sensitive educational systems; increasing enrolment and retention rates of girls; and promoting educational settings that eliminate all barriers that impede schooling for some girl children.
 
But this commitment seems not to have moved beyond rhetoric, policy formulation in a few countries, putting a few women in positions of power and admitting more girls in schools and in subjects traditionally kept for boys in some.
 
As mirrors of the larger community and national contexts, schools and other educational institutions expose girls and women to the same oppressions and inequalities they experience in larger society. While girl’s access to education is seemingly becoming less of a problem in most countries, their retention and long-term success in education still present a challenge.
 
Moreover, gender analysts suggest that for those who do succeed, their success cannot be attributed to true gender equality in schools. Thus, as has been suggested, simply counting the numbers of girls and boys in schools and using equal numbers as meaning gender equality is at best limited and simplistic. A better measure perhaps would rely on qualitative studies on the nature of power and girls’ and women’s access to resources, discrimination, exclusion from decision-making and denigrating portrayals.
 
So is gender (in) equality still a problem in Southern African states? And how do we know? Are we not told that more girls than ever are enrolled in school and more are registering for subjects that were traditionally the domain of boys?  Are these and other important strides sufficient measures of gender equality in education?
 
The answer lies in the qualitative measures of girls’ experience of the education system.  For example, considering gender-based violence as one measure of gender inequality, are schools in the region creating and maintaining safe and conducive spaces for girls (and boys) to learn? If newspaper and television headlines that depict gruesome violations of girl children in and around schools, as well as the plethora of research that describe schools and communities as unsafe and unequal spaces for girls to exist) are anything to go by, then we certainly do have a problem.
 
Unequal power relations and in the education system and limited or a lack of access to resources, tend to produce even more insidious acts of gender-based violence within the schooling system.
 
Claudia Mitchell has for example written about a photo-voice project conducted in Mbabane Swaziland, in which, when asked to take pictures of safe and unsafe spaces in and around their school, girls took photographs of dilapidated and unsanitary toilets. They explained that these were unsafe, lacked privacy (because the doors were broken), and were unhealthy. 
 
While the boys’ toilets in this and many other schools could be in a similar condition, for obvious reasons, their state tends to present particular, more complex problems for girls and women than they do for boys. The situation is exacerbated in communities plagued by high levels of unemployment and poverty, in which lack of access to resources in and around schools generally impacts more negatively on girls than on boys. 
 
What happens, for example, to girls’ attendance during their menstrual period when they lack access to proper, relatively inexpensive, but nevertheless unattainable resources such as sanitary pads? What happens, when the main breadwinner is suddenly unemployed because of retrenchments or illness, particularly in the context of high rates of HIV infection in Southern Africa?
 
What happens when the adult caregivers are too ill to care for the family needs or die, often living children to fend for themselves? What happens is that girls bear the brunt of these social ills and become more vulnerable to even further abuse and oppression from extended family members, the school and the community they live in. The dream of equality drifts further away.
 
 
Relebohile Moletsane is the Deputy Dean, Post-Graduate Studies and Research, Faculty of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.
 


Comment on Levelling the playing fields in education: dare we hope?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *