Purpose of Education in the promotion of Gender Parity and its Legal Aspect
Introduction
Before going towards the topic, we must discuss what education is. Education is the process of learning skills and the acquisition of knowledge; it's the art of appreciating life. It brings the inherent change in the way of personal thinking and increases the capacity to do things. Now we should discuss the purpose of education in our life; it's used to strengthen the mind so that a person can easily learn and deal with all the challenges he faces throughout life. Its purpose is to teach us value and gives the chance to person to ask questions about what exists in reality and contribute to the growth of human society. And it also led to an increase in economic development and prosperity, and economic empowerment. A person who is educated has a choice to choose a profession which he likes.
Rationale
The rationale behind education is to improve the learning environment at our school and home and make it challenging and engaging. It has complete power to control human behavior and help to improve their lifestyle. Here I will give a brief analysis of what is the purpose of education. And how in various ways affect human behavior and make them independent in their life. There is a special position given to education in our life because it provides a different kind of knowledge in different kinds of skills and helps in developing the mental status.
Research Question
With the help of this research paper, there is a description regarding the purpose of education in the promotion of gender parity. In this, I am going to tell how gender parity in terms of education has become a big issue. And what all are the obligation and duties dose the society has towards women to increase the number of women in terms of men in any field. And what are the steps taken by society and the government to promote gender parity and also deals woth the legal aspect of it?
Discussion
As we have already discussed in the introduction of how the education helps to strengthen our minds so that we can easily deal with the challenges. Now beyond the challenge, we must ensure that all the children have the opportunity to go and attend the school, but how the schooling of boys is different from the girl and this means of the gender of equality in terms of quality of learning and what are the educational outcomes.
First, we have to concern the inequality, which is gender-based, that limits the girls like their schooling opportunities. In the past, we have domestic ideologies that insisted on women in their profession so that they could provide stability, morality, and harmony to society. Like, girls are not allowed to go to school, and there are not allowed to educate, because there was a gender-based assumption that girls role in future is to live life like wives and mother so that they can pay complete attention to family, otherwise, if they go to school and become educated then they will not follow this norm and pay less attention to their family. Earlier, men use education as an advanced superior over women. But they all forget that in the developing world, lack of education of women can cause a decrease in family income, reduces health, put girls and women at risk of trafficking and exploitation, and this can also limit the economic advancement of the whole world. Despite overwhelming economic and social evidence of the high benefits to female education, most societies continue to invest in female education at a lower rate than male education. Even as school completion requirements rise, with gender differences in basic education closing dramatically, discrimination against females in secondary and higher education remains a problem. Girls in secondary and higher education are disproportionately drawn from higher-income and social groupings, which affects gendered patterns of access.
Education for women and girls is the only most effective way to improve their standard and way of living life, and this can lead to an increase in the standard of families and bring economic development for the poor communities worldwide. Otherwise, in the United States, in the past, women were not being permitted freedom of choice when they desire to graduate, but now this situation has changed. Gender Parity Index which is a socio-economic index designed to measure the relative access to education of male and female. Gender parity also measures the average income as the same indicator among men. The report released by the Gender Parity Index it's easy to measure how the status of women changes over time, and by this researcher get a sense of whether we are progressing or regressing. And in current global literacy rate of males is 90% than female 82.7%, and in our country, India's literacy rate of males is 82.14% and female 65.46%. By seeing this, we can understand that women are less literate than men. Gender parity is included in the Indian Constitution's Directive Principles, Fundamental Duties, Preamble, and Fundamental Rights. The Indian Constitution not only guarantees women equal rights, but it also empowers the government to implement effective anti-inequity measures in their favour. Our laws, growth strategies, plans, and initiatives have all been designed to assist women. In our constitution, we can find that it provide gender equality. This is considered as a most important privilege granted to every person in society, and it is also addressed in Articles 14, 15, 16, and 17 of India's constitution to emphasize the significant issues of gender inequality. This is their higher right, as it is critical that they have quick access to the court in order to exercise their equality rights.
When we see The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 introduced Article 21-A into the Indian Constitution, making it a Fundamental Right to offer free and compulsory education to all children aged six to fourteen years in such a way as the State may specify by legislation. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act of 2009 establishes the right of children to free and compulsory education. This means that every child has a right to a full-time primary education of adequate and equitable quality in a formal school that meets certain key norms and criteria, as defined by the consequential legislation envisioned in Article 21-A.
But we all know that earlier woman was rarely send to the college, and they are only limited to schools, this led to decrease in the ratio of men and women in terms of employment in the industrial and private sector because education links women with a job. Therefore, higher education is important for women. By this, they get more knowledge, and this led to an increase in their employment. By this, there will be a decrease in the income gap between men and women; otherwise, women earn less in each category of education. When we make girls educated, then their education capabilities increase, and this impacts the formation of other valued capabilities in girls' lives because education is so central in the distribution of personal, social, economic, and political goods in society and educational matters.
In recent years, India is said to have made significant progress for both boys and girls at all levels of schooling. Many studies and analyses have found that between 1991 and 2001, there was a considerable increase in literacy levels, notably in the reduction of female illiteracy, based on data from the national Census. The gender difference in literacy has also shrunk throughout that period, albeit according to the 2001 Census, there was still a 22 percentage point deficit between the genders, compared to a 25 percentage point disparity 10 years before. Since Independence, the recent decade has had the biggest decadal growth in literacy (12.6 percentage points), with rates rising from 2.2 percent to 64.8 percent. For the first time, female literacy has grown faster than male literacy, increasing by roughly 15 percentage points (from 39 to 54 percent) in comparison to male literacy (64-75 percent ). Over the fifty years after independence, the percentage of the population that is literate has risen dramatically (Census of India, 2001). While just 25% of males and 8% of females were literate in 1951 (GOI, 1997b), these percentages had risen to 76 percent and 54 percent, respectively, in 2001. In addition to this massive rise in the educated population, the absolute number of illiterates decreased significantly between 1991 and 2001 as compared to the previous decade of 1981-1991. Education is an important role in preventing teen pregnancy. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), females with a higher degree of education are less likely to become pregnant before they reach the age of 17. According to UNESCO, each extra year of education a girl receives reduces her odds of becoming pregnant as a teenager by 10%. Girls who do not become pregnant are able to complete their schooling or enter the workforce, offering them better job chances. Increasing access to birth control, in addition to increased work possibilities, has the potential to lower mortality rates among India's female population. Complications related to pregnancy and delivery are the second leading cause of mortality among 15 to 19-year-olds. Furthermore, evidence demonstrates that offering high-quality education to girls lowers newborn mortality rates.
Education for SC and ST girls
Enrolment of SC and ST children increased in 2004-05, according to data from the Government of India. At both the primary and upper primary levels, it has grown. At all levels, however, the gender divide persists, with more boys than girls from SC and ST groups. During the recent decade, there has been significant growth in the number of both boys and girls. In primary school in 2004-2005, about 25 million SC students attended, compared to 15 million in 1990-1991. Similarly, there were about 14 million ST children in elementary school in 2004-2005, compared to about 8 million in 1990-1991. The GER of SC and ST children has improved as a result of this increase in enrolment at the primary level, whereas the GER at the upper primary level has decreased somewhat between 2003 and 2005. Although the GER for SC and ST boys and girls had crossed 100 by 2004-2005 at the primary level, it is still significantly lower at the upper primary level.
With the help of education, we can easily promote gender parity because education has an important effect on women’s employment, and it acts as the service provider which plays a significant role. And other ways to promote the gender parity is to make our surrounding with the gender-equitable environment, and promote gender equality at our home so that we can treat boys and girl equally like in food, sports, and education. And we should educate all the children and talk to them about gender issues with an age-appropriate lens. In India, our government has taken many steps towards gender parity, like launching schemes in which girl students can get a scholarship so that they can get literate if they income issues. By this, we can know what the purpose of education for gender parity is.
Conclusion
By this, we can tell that there should be compulsory schooling because it’s a crucial site to reproduce and transform the social norms and culture, which helps in identity formation, which identity count for them. And they also gain through formal education, which shapes their standard and is of intrinsic worth in their personal development. When we compare the global parity index report of the current year with last year, we will able to know that in recent year there is the promotion in the ratio of women to men, and this can only be possible when we educate the women and make them capable of building themselves in this society and current status it can be possible that we would be able to make gender ratio equal. Hence by this, we can know why education is so important in women’s life and how it helps to promote gender parity.
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By – Archit Rohit (2nd Year, WBNUJS)