I have been reading Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (2009) as an audiobook. I have not yet seen the PBS series tie-in for the book, but I hope to one day. The book provides vivid accounts of women who experience gender-based violence and systematic disenfranchisement. They also show how efforts to challenge these patterns have worked while other efforts have fallen short of its goal. I am half-way through the book and wanted to reflect on a question that I had in response to what I was learning in class and in the book. For many women in the book the authors claim that education is the key to empowering women. They support this assertion with observations about how beatings and pregnancy are less likely to happen to women and girls who are attending school. One of the readings noted how often for NGOs and Government agencies the paradigms are invisible because they are so ingrained. This is not the first I have wondered if education is lauded too easily.
Everyday we hear about the benefits of higher education and rarely get opportunities to reflect on the way the people we often trust to study and report on the value of an education may not be as unbiased as we hope. One day I stumbled across one professor's rant on the state of higher education in the United States. While I can agree with many of his observations his action of defiance reveals they unquestioned aquiessence of the university as a self-interested institution.
I am not dismissing the value of all education nor am I dismissing it as a universal ameliorating force. It has fundamental value to society and it does bring about transformations in individual agency and identity. A focus too narrowly on education is very similar to the focus on technological solutions that Correa and Jolly admonish when discussing research on population that fail to acknowledge sex and sexuality as relevant facets (24). They also discuss it when describing how a desexualized response to the HIV/AIDS crisis "focuses on technological fixes rather than social change" (27). They go on to explain how sexuality is tied to a number of development goals and failures. I wonder if any GAD writers have argued that when the focus is on education, like a focus on inequality, then simply vanishes from the agenda. While there are a number of ways to address this bias towards interventions that require large capital investments and infrastructure changes like schools the job of scholars is to provide the theoretical groundwork.
Education has been purported to be this great equalizer that reduces inequalities and produces a more informed global citizenry. However, the rhetoric around education centers on economic benefits first, then social and political benefits of a collective. I’ve also read Half the Sky and found the book interesting, however, the authors (who were narrators and active characters within the book) discuss the difficulties of combating oppression and discrimination from an outsider’s perspective. Their actions in the book display this when they try to buy female sex workers out of sexual slavery because they felt uncomfortable about the situation. They expressed how difficult it is to put women back in their own life afterward, without really understanding what it takes to go back into a community that may ostracize an individual based on their past. These two researchers are proponents that education is essential to personal development, although I would tend to agree that education is important- the overemphasis of an institution that is not universal, equal in quality, or solely focused on non-economic gains is problematic. Education alongside political and social development (access to knowledge, advocacy, etc.) should be promoted as well. Political power and social awareness are crucial to personal development; some would argue that these concepts in some form or another are pre-conditions to a more informed global citizenry.
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