| The significance of female education is widely discussed under the overarching idea of "Education for All." It states that having an education is a human right and that girls' education is an important means to empower women, in particular. Despite the emphasis on female education, there is an area that has remained less explored; namely is the education of women at the grassroots level, and specifically the questions regarding the effect education has on women's life courses and what education means to them. My dissertation is a qualitative study based on fieldwork in a rural area of Bihar, India, where I stayed for six weeks. I observed various types of schools, including a pre-school, an elementary school, a secondary school, a residential school for girls from lower-caste and class backgrounds, an alternative school for married drop-outs, and an adult literacy center. While conducting observation, I interviewed school teachers, staff members and administrators of development organizations, and professionals of UNICEF. For the actual focus group interviews at the grassroots level, there were seventy-two women and girls from more than ten villages participating in the study. The participants were women between 15–30 years of age, who were originally from the villages or living in them at the time of the interviews. The purpose of this study is to reveal something of the local knowledge and values of education in transitional society. For it is crucial for educational developers to understand and incorporate the local knowledge and values of education in order to make education more democratic and empowering. This research found that the basic level of school education had drastically expanded in the area in the past ten years, and yet, educational access and attainment were stratified by caste, socioeconomic status, and gender. It was also revealed that school education per se was not empowering. There were cases where school education was reproducing existing hierarchical social and cultural relations. Generally, women appeared to conform to gender norms, but at the same time their narratives showed that both schooled and non-literate women had achieved acute awareness about uneven and oppressive gendered system. Women with little or no school education understood that they were deprived of a right to cultivate their abilities because of the lack of access to schooling. Contrary to the general perception of urban administrators that people at the grassroots level do not appreciate the importance of school education, non-literate women thought that school education played a critical role in enabling their children to enter the mainstream economic activities in neo-liberalized India. They were also concerned that the present school education system itself—with stratified school attendance and the insufficient quality of government schools—would reproduce poverty among their children's generation. |
