Female Education Advantages

Education creates social benefits in a way that it can improve economic development on a whole. Better education can translate into sustained growth, which can bring a large and relatively quick reduction in poverty. Female education leads to improved health care for children, greater labor force participation by women and lower fertility rates. Education can also help combat diseases such as AIDS and HIV. Politically a well-educated population is more likely to have a healthy sustainable democracy. Socio-economic inequalities in a country can be counteracted by education. An increase in level of education had been seen to reduce crime. Education is thus very important to the economic performance and the international competitiveness of countries.

The major reason for private schools’ massive cost advantage over public schools is that they can pay market wages while government school teachers’ bureaucratically set salaries have large rents in them which teacher unions have fought hard to secure. Unfortunately the ASER 2005 report found a teacher absence rate of 25 per cent in government schools. Since workers’ productivity and earnings depend not only on years of education acquired, but also on what is learnt at school this is a huge factor in low attendance. While enrollment rates in India are positive it is important to look at current attendance rates. These are a more reliable indicator of schooling participation than enrolment rates, since large enrolment rates measured at the start of the school year can mask non-attendance and/or dropout later in the school

Households headed by an illiterate person are more likely to send a child into the labor force. Female headed households and households having higher per capita expenditures are less likely to have a child doing labor. Infant and child mortality levels are much lower for children with better-educated mothers. While evident that female education should be a focus, poor parents’ still perceive educating girls to be futile, since many families adhere to traditional gender roles and do not envisage daughters’ participation in the labor market. Though girls who are educated do participate in the female labor force and expand income-earning opportunities for many households. Lower fertility is also strongly linked to higher female education. Mothers’ education is also an important determinant of health care and sanitation in a household. This plays an intergenerational role for future education as if a household has better nutrition the children are more likely to succeed at school. Studies have shown that stunted children are less likely to enroll in schools and more likely to drop out as they are vulnerable to disease and less able to concentrate at