Girl Rising

Unlike their American counterparts, girls in developing nations are not valued for their potential to contribute to society beyond their abilities to bear children, labor tirelessly, and not complain about the cruelty of being born where their gender governs that civil and women’s rights mean practically nothing.  As portrayed by Girl Rising, educational opportunities for girls can be vehemently discouraged by some cultures, wholly overlooked as unnecessary in others while for some girls the prospects for education are dramatically difficult given economic conditions, presenting a life-and-death struggle for individual parents to provide.

Suma from Nepal and Ruksana from Pakistan were each featured in Girl Rising, but their individual stories were dissimilar.  Their similarity in Girl Rising was that both Suma and Ruksana were caught in developing nations, devoid of financial resources, where education for a girl was not a valued necessity as it is in the United States.  The sharpest contrast was that one girl, Suma, was born to a culture where girls were ‘chattel’ – items of property that could be sold for profit.  We talk about women in American culture being objectified by the media, but Suma was the ultimate example of being an object in her culture – a human being disregarded for her personal and intellectual capabilities – reduced to a role in society of nothing more than a commodity to be traded, put to work, and abused at the discretion of her Kamlari masters.  The other girl, Ruksana, was born into a family beleaguered by poverty, but resolute about educating their daughters.  Ruksana, whose family lived in a tent on the city sidewalk, was indulged with the purchase of art supplies as a method to recognize that her preoccupation with drawing was distracting her in school.  While the family lacked financial resources, they were persevering in their quest for their daughters’ education.

  Suma was bonded to three different masters, beginning when she was six years old.  She washed dishes, minded goats, and gathered firewood from 4am until late in the night.  She was teased and beaten; they called her the ‘unlucky girl.’  She ate nothing but scraps from her master’s plate, wore rags as her clothing, and slept on the goat house floor.  Poignant to her experiences while subsisting as a bonded laborer were her songs of despair, “My parents were unfair/They gave birth to a daughter.” Suma’s dogged determination to survive sustained her through these ordeals until she her plight was recognized – she was rescued from ignorance by a school teacher who boarded at her third master’s house.  He convinced Suma’s master to allow her to enroll in a night class where social workers taught girls to read and write.  Later, other social workers argued for Suma’s freedom – disputing that Kamlari was unlawful in Nepal.  After several tries, her master allowed Suma to return to her own family.  Then, she sang of being her own master now, “I’ve seen what change comes from/It’s a breath like a song/Others pick up the tune/And the melody touches the heart of one person and then another.”  These lyrics rejoiced in Suma’s power to do or be anything that she chose.  Yet, Suma did not stop there.  She gathered with other former slaves to convince additional masters to free other bonded girls.  Suma used her power and freedom to extricate more girls from the oppressions of the Kamlari system.

In direct contrast to the treatment Suma received from her parents, Ruksana’s  father devotedly believed in educating his daughters.  However, while in her classroom, Ruksana daydreamed and doodled on her notebook, rather than paying attention to her math lessons.  Her teacher, frustrated with Ruksana, demanded that she leave the school.  Surprisingly, Ruksana’s father greeted this news with compassion.  Rather than reinforce the need for her to pay attention in class, her father brought her to a craft store and purchased colorful markers and a sketch pad.  Now, Ruksana promised her father that she would attend to her schoolwork because he had made her so happy.  But their worries were not over.  Because of street violence, it was no longer safe for Ruksana to sleep in the family’s sidewalk tent.  Instead she was sent to a shelter only to return as police evicted families and tore down their tents.  With no home or place to live, Ruksana’s father reluctantly agreed with his wife that the family should return to their native village and give up their dreams of the girls’ education.  In a surprise turn of events, Ruksana’s mother, who had been adamantly wishing to return to the village, said that educating the girls was truly their most important goal and that the family must remain in the city.  They still did not have a home, but the girls continued at the school.

After viewing Girl Rising, I researched and learned that Nepal’s Kamlari system, which was abolished in 2000, had legitimately allowed the parents of girls to sell them into indentured servitude.  I knew indentured servitude was an arrangement that had allowed poor British youth to afford passage to the American colonies in return for a period of bonded labor; only to be replaced by the disgraceful forms of cheap African slave labor.  As a history student, I learned that slavery was abolished in 1865 with the 13^th Amendment.  So, it never occurred to me that there was slavery or indentured servitude in existence in the 20^th century.  Girl Rising provided more education on a topic I had no idea still existed.

I also know that educational reforms of the early 20^th century made public education free for citizens as it was paid for by taxes and became mandatory in America.  From a bit of research, I also learned that we have the early settlers of Massachusetts to thank for public school groundbreaking.  As early as 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a ruling to establish elementary education for all children, not just boys, and by 1817 Boston had established free public primary schools (Historical Timeline).  In 1785 the Continental Congress established “land grants” for public education, leading to the state public universities  – I read a Forbes report that as of 2012 the male-to-female ratio in public universities was 43.6% male to 56.4% female (Borzelleca). What is interesting is that religious training coupled with the need for discipline and obedience, primarily from immigrant and poor children, was the driving force behind the historical push for public education in the US (Cheek).  It was not until the landmark 1950s Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, that US schools became integrated, allowing girls and boys of all races to participate with equal access to education.

Any discussion of American education by a student at TCNJ would be incomplete without discussing the role of normal schools.   These were set-up to train professional teachers, which is how our own TCNJ, which was Trenton State Teachers College evolved from the original New Jersey State Normal School, demonstrating that opportunities for girls to be educated, and to grow to teach others, were possible because of the very institution that is now educating students in this class.  Looking into its history, it’s noteworthy that the first three women to attend the experimental normal school in Lexington, Massachusetts were accepted in 1839 (Cheek) while New Jersey State Normal School at Trenton opened in 1855.

However, one point about America’s education of girls must be noted here.  The American education system and our culture are sorely lacking today by not encouraging girls in math and science fields.   A recent study I read stated that, “Girls whose 6th grade teachers were biased were less likely to take advanced math and science classes in high school, likely contributing to lower numbers of women going into STEM fields after graduation” (Moeny).  This was the topic for my trendsetting project where I go into more detail.  

                                                    Works Cited

Borzelleca, Daniel. “The Male-Female Ratio in College.” Forbes Magazine. 16 February 2012.  
Web.  9 April 2015.  

Cheek, Karen.  “The Normal School.” N.d. Web. 9 April 2015. https://www3.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/normal.html

“Historical Timeline of Public Education in the US.” Race Forward. N.d. web. 9 April 2015.

Money, Jordan.  “Biased Teachers Dissuade Girls From STEM Courses, Study Says.”  Education Week.  3 March 2015 Web. 9 April 2015.