Education & female empowerment

IF we trace the history of female education in United India we do not come across many initiatives in terms of modern education that could help women obtain a job.

On the other hand we see opposition to such educational initiatives on sociocultural pretexts.

One school of thought didn’t approve of any kind of education for girls. The other school of thought allowed only rudimentary religious education for girls. Modern education was considered to be injurious to women. In one of the most popular books written for women, Bahishti Zevar (Heavenly Ornament), which was part of the dowry for girls in most Muslim families in India, Ashraf Ali Thanvi suggested that “Only men need to do a job. Since men are responsible for the livelihood of women and since women need to observe purdah, job-related knowledge cannot be acquired by women. Thus this kind of education is useless for women and just a waste of time; rather it is hazardous for women.”

This denial of education had less to do with religious reasons and more so with the sociocultural milieu of United India where women were confined to the household. After partition in 1947 we saw the emergence in India and Pakistan of a number of institutions for women. In the Sharif Commission report of 1959 it was proposed that equal facilities be provided, “in terms of quantity and quality, for the education of boys and girls”. This proposal was not taken in its true spirit because most of the reform plans for the betterment of female education in Pakistan focused on numbers.

A number of donor-funded projects aimed simply at enhancing the literacy rate. This quantitative approach saw to it that end-of-project reports demonstrated the impact in terms of increased numbers. But the problem is much more deeply rooted and just enhancing numbers cannot address it. The current literacy rate suggests that there is still a large gap in the male and female literacy rates. The reasons for relatively low female literacy rate are diverse: poverty, lack of awareness, sociocultural taboos and location of schools in far-flung areas where the environment isn’t considered safe.

Quantitative expansion, which has been the focus of most funded projects, is important but enhanced numbers alone cannot tackle the gender disparity in our society. It is the qualitative aspect which needs to be addressed if we are really interested in bridging gender gaps. There has been an increase in the number of educational institutions for boys and girls. Some of them are qualitatively superior to others, and this difference has been further widened with the advent of private schools.

A large number of girls do have access to school but the question is, what is the quality of these educational institutions? Mansoor et al report that “In private schools, including junior schools, where the medium of instruction is English, boys are more likely to attend these private schools. Parents are reluctant to send their daughters to these schools because most of them are co-educational.”

Once they manage to enter a school, girls are exposed to gender-biased books. In the recent past there have been some attempts to purge the textbooks of sexist material. But more important perhaps is the class where the teacher’s every action and utterance constructs the curriculum. There is a common observation that in a co-ed class the boys tend to engage teachers aggressively in terms of participation.

Classrooms are important places where certain gender stereotypes are validated and perpetuated. Teachers’ discourse and actions may approve the gendered behaviour at conscious or unconscious levels. Education, which is supposed to broaden the intellectual horizons of children and lead them to emancipation, seems to fail in its fundamental objective.

The gender stereotypes which need to be challenged in schools are further strengthened in the dynamics of teaching and learning in a transmission mode. The current notion of education is generally to get a certificate or degree to be eligible to get a job in the market. The real function of education, i.e. to develop critical thinking skills and to bring about changes at the individual and societal levels, is either ignored or underestimated.

Challenging gender stereotypes in terms of roles, expectations and opportunities is crucial for girls as well as boys. For boys it is important to see that most of the gender stereotypes are based on myths and there is no scientific basis for male superiority. On the other hand girls, who are the target of these stereotypes, are influenced to the extent of ‘spontaneous consent’, as Gramsci would put it.

It is important for girls to shed the illusions of an artificially created world where they are helpless and can never improve their state of being. Education in its essence should aim at enhancing the choices and opportunities at the personal and public levels by challenging certain stereotypes regarding women in terms of their roles and expectations.

But what is actually happening on the ground? A large number of bright female students, after performing excellently in professional educational programmes, either do not take up jobs or have to quit their jobs because their husbands or in-laws do not approve of their presence in the workplace. This questions the very validity of education which has not been able to bring about any changes vis-à-vis the roles of men and women in society. It suggests that there is something lacking in the kind of education our schools are providing to the young. The missing aspect is the critical thinking that allows learners to raise questions, look for alternatives and transform their lives and ultimately their society.

As we emphasise the quantitative enhancement in the female literacy rate, we should be cognisant of the fact that education per se is not a source of empowerment for girls as it is not transforming their status in terms of their roles, expectations and opportunities. If we are interested in real change, we need to be concerned about the quality of education and plan to improve it in a systematic manner. n

The writer is director of the Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore School of Economics and author of Rethinking Education in Pakistan.

shahidksiddiqui@yahoo.com

The beginning of history

AS the last century drew to a close, it was the Soviet Union and not the United States that found itself dumped in the “dustbin of history”. Karl Marx, who coined this phrase to represent the end-state of capitalism, would not have been pleased.

An era of unchecked prosperity and world peace led by the US beckoned on the horizon. Against this backdrop, Francis Fukuyama penned The End of History and the Last Man. He argued that the world was witnessing “not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such.” Fukuyama went on to say that man’s ideological evolution had reached an end-point with the triumph of western liberal democracy.

Such pulpit oratory, as The Economist put it, was well suited to the spirit of the 1990s. It cracked as the dot-com bubble burst in the spring of 2000. And the devastation unleashed by 9/11 swept it out to sea.

Events would show that the new century represented not the end of history but its beginning. Henceforth, conflict and not cooperation would be the hallmark of the human condition.

At the cusp of the 20th century, South Asia was jolted by a series of nuclear explosions. Pakistan’s fateful decision to launch a ballistic missile on April 6, 1998 may have been the provocation India needed to come out of the nuclear closet.

It came out swinging in mid-May with five nuclear tests at Pokhran, less than a hundred miles from the border with Pakistan. In a couple of weeks, Pakistan gave a “fitting reply” by hitting a six.

As the world united in its disapproval of these tests, the prime ministers of both countries signed a declaration of peace in Lahore in February 1999. But behind the scenes, Pakistan’s army had already launched an incursion into Kargil. The ensuing military fiasco would precipitate a coup d’etat in Pakistan in October.The following year would be taken up by Gen Musharraf’s feeble attempts to acquire legitimacy. The man whom the world regarded as a pariah would turn into a hero when he dumped the Taliban under US pressure. Unfortunately, by refusing to make a similar U-turn in domestic policy, he sealed his fate.

The war in Afghanistan, which deposed the Taliban from Kabul, failed to bring about the much-awaited capture of Osama bin Laden. The ensuing civilian casualties fuelled widespread anti-Americanism in Pakistan.

On Dec 13, 2001 a small group of terrorists carried out a failed attack on the parliament building in New Delhi. This led to the mobilisation of a million troops along the India-Pakistan border. Western diplomatic pressure on the antagonists narrowly averted Armageddon. But the recalcitrant jihadis remained committed to wresting Kashmir from India. They would later morph into the Pakistani Taliban and wreak havoc at home through a chain of suicide bombings.

As the 20th century due to a close, America was celebrating one of the longest periods of economic growth under President Bill Clinton. The biggest worry was that a global computer malfunction might occur as the year 2000, or the Y2K problem as it was dubbed, had arrived. But this never happened.

Soon after a Republican president took office whose verbal impotence soon became the butt of all jokes. But George W. Bush found his voice after 9/11.

He would work to implement the Project for the New American Century which had been hammered into shape by the neoconservatives in the wake of his father’s defeat to Bill Clinton. The plan called for remaking the Middle East, and to ensure the smooth flow of oil to the West and the security of Israel.

Oil continued to be the engine of growth in the Middle East. But while economic growth was brisk — as it had been since the escalation in oil prices following the October 1973 war and the Iranian revolution — the distribution of income continued to worsen.

In the Arab world, population growth was rapid and unemployment levels, especially among the youth, were high. Political rights were non-existent and human rights only partly in evidence. Israel, a self-proclaimed democracy, continued to deny political freedoms to the Palestinians living in the territories it had occupied illegally in 1967.

The impact of 9/11 was felt hugely in the region, since the official American position, unchallenged by any Arab state, was that all the attackers were Arabs and 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia. The US began to withdraw its forces from that country, in a concession to terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. But it also geared up to invade Iraq, which the Bush administration said was a grave danger to world peace.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney toured the Arab capitals in the spring of 2002 but failed to garner any public support for the planned invasion. Nevertheless, the US went through with its plans the following year.

The regime of Saddam Hussain was deposed in three weeks but no weapons of mass destruction were found. The war fuelled the birth of an insurgency whose existence was first denied by the US, then conceded grudgingly with the proviso that it was “in its last throes.” Now, we are told, a temporary surge in American forces has vanquished it.

As the eighth year of the new century draws to a close, the US finds itself mired in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. While the causes are many, it is clear that the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have taken their toll.

The government which Washington installed in Baghdad wants the Americans to leave soon. And Washington may soon be inviting the Taliban to join the government in Kabul.

Pakistan’s economy was struggling even before the price of oil crossed a hundred dollars a barrel. Now it is in free fall. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded its sovereign rating twice this year, pushing it into junk territory.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Musharraf’s successor telegraphed his demand to the West: “Give me $100bn.” But this won’t be called aid, which is “proven to be bad for a country.” He will not spend the money, just use it to restore investor confidence “every time there is a bomb”.

Fukuyama was half right. Old history has ended. And a new one has begun.

The writer is the author of Musharraf’s Pakistan, Bush’s America and the Middle East.

faruqui@pacbell.net

If you can’t kill the fish

WE are fighting a war in the north of the country. And the nation is so busy arguing over whether we should fight it at all that no one seems to pay attention to an equally critical question: what sort of a war is this?

To begin with, this is not a conventional war that involves armies and states facing off, looking to capture territory and aiming to defeat the enemy. In such a war, the rules of engagement are clear and the civilians distinguishable from the combatants.

The conflict in northern Pakistan is also not a conventional insurgency, as many assume. Most well-known conventional insurgencies — such as those led by the likes of Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh — focused as much on winning ‘hearts and minds’ as on engaging and defeating the enemy. In Mao’s words, an insurgency will succeed only if the insurgents can move through society as fish through water.

This is not necessarily the relationship the Taliban enjoy with the people of the tribal areas and the North-West Frontier Province. In many cases, the militants have gained control through terrorising local people, not by winning them over. People have been flogged and beheaded in public, ostensibly to curb crime but also as part of a ‘shock and awe’ campaign.

What the Taliban are doing is not unique, though: this has been so in many conflicts around the world in the second half of the 20th century. For one, the conflict in the Balkans involved similar tactics as did the wars between Hutus and Tutsis in Central Africa and the guerrilla war in Columbia. All these conflicts have so many new but common features that some social scientists have labelled them ‘new wars’ to distinguish them from old-fashioned ones.

The militants’ relationship with people is not the only distinguishing feature of these new conflicts. A second distinctive characteristic is that the warring parties — or at least one of them — define their identity in terms different from those that the state uses to define it. Many, for instance, see the conflict in the tribal areas as involving Pakhtuns on both sides of the Durand Line. Many in the Awami National Party, for instance, believe that the Pakhtuns living both in Pakistan and Afghanistan are the victims in this conflict and they are suffering at the hands of all warring parties — the Pakistani military, the Taliban and the allied forces in Afghanistan. This is certainly not how the state in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or even the United States, sees the trouble in the tribal areas.

A third distinguishing characteristic is a relatively lesser focus on the economics of such conflicts. Sub-state fighters in these conflicts finance themselves not just through external assistance but also through crime. Robberies, kidnappings for ransom and drug trafficking have become common, and the militants extort protection money from ordinary citizens and legal businesses. Observers of the conflict in the tribal region will be able to testify that this is the situation in the region today.

The tribal areas, by virtue of their legal and economic isolation from the state, have always served as a hub of drug trafficking and arms smuggling besides acting as markets for stolen items and fields of operations for the timber mafia. All this affords a lucrative source of revenue for the militants operating in these areas. The Taliban either protect all these illegal businesses for a fee or they have joined hands with those running them. Even in this they are behaving like their Columbian counterparts who support themselves through the drugs trade. Another parallel can be drawn with the Bosnian Croats who, during the conflict in the Balkans, charged ‘customs duties’ for allowing humanitarian aid to pass through.

A necessary outcome of crime and conflict getting mixed up is that the militants and illegal businesses become interdependent. The fighters cannot sustain their war effort without the money they ‘earn’ from the illegal and informal economy in their area while illegal businesses flourish and thrive, secure in the knowledge that the state’s laws and regulations will never catch up with them because of the conflict. The climate of insecurity works to the advantage of both: peace does not suit either of them.

The need to highlight the distinguishing characteristics of these conflicts arises from the fact that there are no quick-fix solutions. The use of indiscriminate military force is certainly not one: this is perhaps the most important lesson that those fighting old-fashioned insurgencies (remember the Americans in Vietnam) have learnt the hard way. Those fighting the so-called new wars would do well to keep this in mind.

Another equally important lesson from these out-of-style insurgencies is that a dialogue has to take place between the warring parties at some stage. Some ‘terrorists’ or ‘mass murderers’ will have to be spoken to. London did it with the Irish Republican Army and Tel Aviv did it with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Yasser Arafat. To expect that Islamabad can be an exception to this rule is only unrealistic. If it has to happen anyway one may as well be prepared for it.

But while the use of force and dialogue has to go hand in hand, there can be no discounting the need for curbing the militants’ sources of revenue. In order to choke this essential supply of financial oxygen to the militants, the state needs to deal strictly with the informal and mostly illegal economy in the tribal areas. If the state had already extended its reach to these areas — along with its accompanying systems and infrastructure such as laws, enforcement agencies, and education and employment opportunities — the illegal business activity would not have been there as a ready source of money for the militants. In other words, militias would have also found it much more difficult to find willing recruits to their cause if unemployment in the tribal areas was not as high as it is now.

Enforcing the writ of the state and creating and giving jobs are, however, only one part of the solution. The rest comes from assuring local people that peace will provide them the economic dividends that the conflict has robbed them of. If they are made to believe this, they can also be expected to organise local resistance to the militias on their own.

More than anything else, Islamabad requires a commitment that is long term and development efforts that are not seen as aid or compensation. Apparently it was aware of this when the military first went into the tribal areas in 2003: it went in promising to construct roads, schools and other infrastructure and the Americans promised to provide financial help for all that. But soon the focus shifted from building schools and hospitals to using violence and dropping bombs.

Five years later, it is still not too late. To return to Mao’s remarks, if we have not been able to kill the fish, perhaps it is time to drain the water in which it swims.

Panic is not irrational By Nils Pratley

CALL it a crash, call it a rout, but please don’t describe Friday’s selling as irrational.

The frightening part is that so many of the pressures on the market could be explained. If you were a shareholder in an American bank, would you want to own your stock over a long weekend? You know that $400bn or so of losses from Lehman Brothers’ bonds are about to emerge, but you don’t know where. Your shareholding could be worthless on Tuesday.

If your bank emerges unscathed, you might pay a 10 per cent premium to buy back your investment next week, but that can seem a reasonable price to pay for a few nights of more restful sleep.

Equally, would any investor wish to put faith in a co-ordinated response to the crisis from the leaders of Group of Seven wealthy nations? Sure, the world’s major central banks managed to cut interest rates in a co-ordinated manner on Wednesday, but saving the global banking system in a day is a bigger job.

One G7 leader, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, even wondered about the possibility of suspending financial markets while the rules of international finance are rewritten. The idea itself is bizarre, but airing the thought in public was dangerous. Berlusconi was almost encouraging anybody thinking of getting out of the market to do so immediately.

It is also clear there are many market operators in the same position as Robert Tchenguiz, who was forced this week to sell his stakes in Sainsbury’s and Mitchells & Butlers when his backer, Icelandic bank Kaupthing, called in its loan. Most of these stressed investors are hedge funds. Their backers, the big banks, are cutting credit lines and their investors are asking to redeem their investments. It’s anybody’s guess how much further this process of liquidation has to run.

The biggest worry is perhaps the spectre of Japan, where the Nikkei stock average peaked at 39,000 in 1989 and now stands below 9,000. The parallels with Japanese experience are becoming alarming — a banking crisis followed by government-sponsored bailouts and deep interest rate cuts. The medicine saved Japan’s financial system, but destroyed returns for stock market investors for a generation.

A popular theory is that Japan waited too long to take its medicine. But, when a single meeting of the G7 is billed as a make-or-break moment for the financial system, it is hard to argue that the scale of today’s crisis was appreciated in time.

Investors have also learned the best short-term guide to the progress of this crisis is Libor — the rate at which banks lend to each other. This shows no sign of falling, despite the interest rate cuts and despite the government’s GBP500bn rescue plan. Banks continue to hoard cash. Until the rate falls, it is impossible to say that politicians’ efforts to unblock the system are succeeding, even if their diagnosis of the problem — lack of capital in the banking system — is correct.

But, you might ask, hasn’t anybody read their investment bibles recently? “Be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful,” said billionaire investor Warren Buffett. Buy at “the moments of maximum pessimism”, said Sir John Templeton.

Well, yes, it is possible that Friday could turn out to be the greatest buying opportunity since March 2003, when the FTSE 100 fell below 3300 before roaring back to 4400 by the end of the year. It is easy to imagine a big, bold response by the G7, such as a global agreement to guarantee inter-bank lending for three months, could restore confidence, force banks to resume lending and prompt a sharp stock market rebound. One can also see how sharp falls in prices of commodities such as oil and copper contain the seeds of recovery for the global economy. So, yes, disaster could be averted.

But we have also seen spirals of selling in the past. Last week’s has been as vicious as any in the past few decades: the FTSE 100 has lost 1,000 points — 21 per cent — in a week. The forces must blow themselves out eventually but, when serious voices are advocating the complete nationalisation of the West’s banking systems, comparisons with relatively recent crises such as 1987 or 1998 are redundant.

Not many people are reading Buffett and Templeton now. JK Galbraith’s The Great Crash, the classic analysis of 1929, is the text that’s flying off the shelves.

— The Guardian, London