Articles
The Significance and Challenges of Primary Education in Structuring Gender Equality Teachers' Role in Promoting Girls' Education in Developing Countries
2001 Volume 10 Issue 1 Pages 35-54
Details
2001 Volume 10 Issue 1 Pages 35-54
This article aims to analyze the significance and challenges of primary education in developing countries from a gender perspective. In doing so, it pays special attention to the role of primary school teachers for structuring gender equality by expanding the girls' school enrollment and improving the quality of teaching with gender consideration.
The second section after the introductory section begins with a brief review of historical and theoretical background of how the approaches to education in development have evolved since the 1960s, and why the importance of girls' education has become recognized by the development society as a central issue.
The costs, barriers and effects of girls' education are examined on the basis of earlier studies in the field. It further presents the effects of girls' education from economic and socio-cultural perspectives and a conceptual framework of different types of female empowerment—thinking, skills and knowledge, social and economic—, to be brought by education.
The case study of Guatemala, where the Japanese government has been actively assisting in primary education for achieving gender equality, is presented in the third chapter. By analyzing the national statistics, it considers the current situation and problems in promoting girls' education. In the latter part of the section, it examines, on the basis of the outcome of a questionnaire survey, the levels and tendency of gender awareness of teachers in primary schools where the Japan-assisted pilot projects for promoting girls' education have been implemented. The main component of such projects is teacher training with various topics, such as gender equality, multilingual-cultural education, participatory learning method, self-esteem, civic education, etc.
Finally, in consideration of the framework and analyses presented in the previous sections, it tries to extract the challenges of primary education in structuring gender equality and comes up with a set of recommendations for possible action with special attention given to “teachers training”.
