APPENDIX W-- A NOTE ON GIRLS' EDUCATION IN RURAL AREAS, PREPARED BY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
It is an unfortunate fact that for various reasons, the education of girls has not made as much progress in rural India as is necessary and desirable. In recent years, there has no doubt been a great impetus to women's education throughout the country, but the rural areas are still largely unaffected by this movement. Since it is the rural areas where the greatest leeway has to be made up, there is a risk that accelerated progress in urban areas may further increase the existing gap between towns and villages.
It is obvious that continued illiteracy of a large section of the people not only slows down the rate of the country's progress but also produces an unbalanced social structure. The villages are as a whole, not so advanced as the towns, and the difference is even greater in respect of the education of women and girls. Yet as an English educationist has pointed out, the education of girls is in a sense even more important than the education of boys. To educate a boy is to educate an individual but to educate a girl is to educate a, family. For all these reasons, it is necessary to examine why girls' education has not made the desired progress in rural areas and suggest methods to overcome them.
One of the main reasons why girls' education has not progressed in rural areas is the lack of women teachers. A large number of village schools are single-teacher schools, and in a vast, majority of cases the teacher is a man. In the existing social conditions in rural areas, village parents are somewhat reluctant to send their girls to schools where the teachers as well as a majority of the pupils belong to the other sex. In addition, the teachers are often comparatively young men while village girls who attend school are on the whole somewhat older than school girls in towns. Besides, their closer contact with nature tends to make them somewhat more forward and mature. These also weigh with the parents and add to their reluc- tance to send their girls to schools staffed exclusively by men.
The first step for accelerating the progress of women's education in rural areas must therefore be to create conditions in which village parents would be no longer reluctant to send their girls to schools. One way of doing this, which has been attempted at times, is to start separate girls' schools. Apart from educational reasons, the financial cost of such duplication would be so great as to render this as almost impracticable proposition. In fact, to insist on separate schools for girls would often mean the denial of educational opportu- nities to them.
The best solution would of course be to see that there was a fair, if not equal, proportion of women among the teachers in rural schools. Where it is a single-teacher school, there are great ad- vantages in insisting that the teacher should be a woman. It is generally admitted that women make better teachers for young
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children of both sexes. The lack of an adequate number of women teachers and various other social factors would however rule out, at least for the present, the possibility of single-teacher schools run by women in the villages.
If the number of children justifies the appointment of two teachers, the ideal solution would be to have a married couple in a two-teacher school. This ideal would however be difficult to fulfil. In the social strata from which a Primary school teacher is drawn, the wife of the teacher would only rarely have sufficient education to serve as a teacher. It would also be difficult to make provision for two-teacher schools with one of the teachers a woman, unrelated to the other teacher. In view of these difficulties, the following measures are suggested as a first step towards the solution of the problem.
We cannot at present have husband and wife as teachers in a school, but there is nothing to prevent the wife of the school teacher from serving as a sort of school mother. She would be in general charge of the girl pupils and thus create confidence both in the parents and in the girl pupils themselves. She could also be of some assistance to her husband in keeping the girls and young boys occupied and perhaps give them some training in sewing, laundry and gardening. Her very presence on the school premises would act as a necessary spur to draw the girl population to the school. It would also act as an incentive for the older women of the village to come to the school and thus help in creating the nucleus of a Social education centre.
The main difficulty in giving effect to this suggestion is the lack of accommodation in the village. A teacher is often reluctant to bring his wife to the village where he works as he is not sure of finding accommodation even for himself. Efforts must, therefore, be made to attach, wherever possible, a room and a small verandah to the school building and place it at the disposal of the teacher. Since the teacher is in any case expected to look after the school properties and be responsible for the school house, it is necessary to ensure that he can live on the school premises. It would make it easier for him to do so if his wife could live with him. She could thus, in addition to being the school mother, also be a kind of caretaker of the school. For these services, she should be paid a small remuneration of about Rs. 10 a month.
Such an arrangement would have another advantage. Reference has already been made to the fact that the presence of a woman in the school would encourage girls and adult women to come to the school. In addition, this would ensure for more regular class work. At present, when the teacher lives away from the school, or even away from the village, his attendance is not always as regular as is necessary. Village roads are proverbially bad, and one sharp shower often turns them into a quagmire. It may not always be officially recognised out it actually happens that the teacher often stays away from school during rainy days. If the teacher and his wife lived on the premises, this could not happen.
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A reference has already been made to the dearth of women teachers. Apart from the fact that the number of educated women is small, there is the additional factor that a large proportion of the educated women soon get engrossed in their duties in the family. This applies not only to the teaching profession but even more to professional services like medicine and nursing. Of the women who take a medical degree, only a fraction take up medical practice as a career. One of the main reasons for the loss of educated women personnel is the methods of recruitment to various services. In most types of Government service, the maximum age for recruitment is 25 A majority of educated young women marry before reaching this age and due to family, domestic and other allied reasons and the consequent responsibilities, are often lost to the profession.
It is, therefore, suggested that in the case of women, the age of recruitment need not be the same as for men. If older women who have already established their homes for a number of years and whose children no longer require the constant care which is due to infants, are enabled to take up the profession of teaching, one of the main causes for the dearth of women teachers would disappear. In fact, it has even been suggested that for women teachers, the recruitment should start only after their children are six or seven years old. If these suggestions were carried out, the minimum age for recruitment would have been about 25 for them.
Obviously, it would be unfair and perhaps against the spirit of the Constitution to prevent younger women who wish to take up a career from doing so. There is, however, no reason why the maximum should not be considerably raised for women. If they are allowed to enter the profession up to the age of 40 or even 45, a larger number of women teachers will be available, as by that time their children will have passed the stage of requiring their mothers' actual physical presence all the time in the home. Also women who are married, more mature and experienced may be able to run single-teacher schools in villages with greater competence than young women.
The Board may consider these two suggestions, namely the proposal to raise the maximum age of recruitment for women from the present level to about 40 or 45 and the creation of a post like the school- mother-cum-school-caretaker to which the wife of a teacher could be appointed. If these two suggestions are accepted, one of the main obstacles to a larger inflow of girls into schools in rural areas may perhaps be overcome.
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