The Importance of Girls’ Education

August 6, 2017

YARP Greetings from Isabelle!

In my previous blog post I wrote about education, particularly education for the disabled children. Now, I want to focus on girls’ education. United States, where I live, seems more advanced towards female education, but other places, like South Sudan don’t provide good quality education for girls. In my opinion, girls are people too, they deserve quality education.

For example, in South Sudan, there is a total of 307 girls and 326 boys that attend the Tangal Basic School. There are 200 girls in the first grade, but in third grade there are less girls, and in fifth grade, even less. Now, in eighth grade, there are only two girls left, Tabita and Arruima who are both seventeen. Normally, girls their age are already married, and are forced to drop out of school.

I am pleased that education is slowly finding its way across the world, but the fact that the higher the grade the fewer girls in some countries is disappointing, as well as the fact that girls have to start a family at such a young age. In Armenia, it is the boys who sometimes drop out the school early in order to go and work for their families.

I have always had some questions about why females and males are treated somewhat differently. My mother took my sister and I to meet with an expert in issues on gender in Armenia, Ms. Nvart Manasian. I asked Ms. Manasian a few questions. Through all the information she provided us with, I was able to come up with a conclusion. Ms. Manasyan explained that before humans had evolved, and you could call males and females physically equal, when we had to hunt for food, is when we started to separate through gender.  When women had a baby on their shoulder they couldn’t fight as well as the males, or hunt as successfully either. Men got to eat what they hunted, and didn’t share for the sake of survival. In prehistoric times, I’m pretty sure everyone only thought for themselves, only made sure they would survive. Women, on the other hand, became mothers, and would sacrifice themselves for their child. Not being able to hunt, women lived off of berries, and grew less muscular and strong as the men, who got the good proteins from the meat. Now, both men and women have meat, but women’s history has made them smaller, and physically weaker than men.

Soon, as humans evolved, men started ruling and creating kingdoms. Women weren’t able to fight for the throne because they were too physically weak. Soon, men were the ones who went to war, and then became heros. Men were the ones who became scribes, and wrote down history. But they focused on their own gender, there were probably many women scientists who couldn’t get their voices heard. Take Nellie Bly, for example, a female journalist in the US in the 19th century. She had to work hard to get her articles published in the newspaper. Now, in places like South Sudan, families favor males over females, and send their boys to school instead of their girls. The girls grow up, get married, have children, at a young age and have to take school out of their schedule. The end result is they can’t get into good colleges, and they don’t get good jobs, and they are more likely to be poor.

I think that if more young girls were like Tabita and Arrumia, there would be more girls in school. If more girls were brave enough to stand up for their rights, like Nellie Bly did, the number of female heroes would be equivalent to the number of the male ones there are now. If women are more educated, the society becomes a better place, because women know how to properly take care of their families. It helps businesses become bigger since women in places like South Sudan can work too.