Due to her importance in the life of a child, the influence of a mother lasts for a lifetime. A mother teaches the child everything they know. It is her job to raise virtuous and sensible children so that they can contribute to a healthier and better community. (The parent is the child’s first teacher) Influence of a mother; psychological perspective: The love of a mother towards her child is beautiful because of many reasons. A mother starts loving her child before her child has even seen the lights of this world i.e.
According to the United Nations women, “Women makeup, more than two-third of the world’s 769 million illiterate people.” When a man wants to go to school there is no problem but when a woman decides to go to school it becomes a big problem. For instance, in the book titled Nervous Condition, Jeremiah was determined to send his son, Nhamo, to school but when Tambu decided to go to school no one paid attention. This is a perfect example of what is going on in the society today, especially in Africa. Sending a girl to school is just as important as sending a boy to school. Women are vital in the society.
There are 250 to 400 different ethnic groups in the country. Each ethnic group has its own peculiar language, traditions, and norms beliefs. There are over five hundreds of indigenous languages spoken within the country, namely: Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo, Ibibio, Tiv, and English etc. (Olaniyan; 1985) British Colonialism in Africa created a pathway for missionaries to spread Christianity and the word of the Lord in hopes that the people would see the evils in slave trading. As a result, Nigeria became an attractive spot for Christian missionaries.
In Girl, it is clear that this era had high expectations for men rather than women. This story hints that women were expected to marry, have children, and stay at home to support their family. The mother states multiple times that her daughter is bent on becoming a slut. The mother is almost bullying her daughter into believing that if she does not follow her mother’s advice, she will become a slut and never amount to anything else. Today, expectations and roles of women are very different.
Nigeria. Year Women % Men % 2001 28.5 71.5 2002 28.7 71.3 2003 30.7 69.3 2004 29.5 70.5 Source: Fatile et al. (2011: 115). British Council, 2009. It can be observed in table 4 that gender inequality is a characteristic of the public service in Nigeria.
Ideals of ‘perfection’ regarding the female body and its representations have been a mainstay of modern western societies as early as the nineteenth century. (Brumberg, 1997) In the past, girls and young women were preoccupied with good looks and the ‘promise’ of their sexuality because it often meant the difference between being married and thus a social success, or a life of spinsterhood. In this historical context, female sexuality was linked to economic survival. Girls and young women are no longer constrained by the ‘marry-or-perish’ imperative of the nineteenth and early twentieth century but how you look and more importantly, how you depict yourself continue to be defining factor of social success. The shifting meanings of girlhood and female sexuality are historically and context specific (Jiwani, Steenbergen, and Mitchell, 2006) although female sexuality has always been constructed as either innocent and pure and in need of protection or something dangerous, unpredictable, and therefore to be feared.
I would have always considered childhood throughout the centuries to be similar: a period of innocence, play and freedom. I imagined that children were treated like children and were protected. However, this was not always the case. Within a social constructionist framework, there is not a single absolute conception of childhood, but a multiple, relative and changeable one that varies between cultures and societies (The disablement and enablement of childhood Chi-Ming Lam a a Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning, Hong Kong Institute of Education, New Territories, Hong Kong). If we look into the past historical views of childhood on a basis of the work from Philippe Ariès (1962) in “Centuries of Childhood”, childhood as a distinct social category was absent.
Child development is an area of significant interest to professionals who deal with children on a daily basis. It is through child development theorists and their theories that we begin to form an understanding of how children develop emotionally and socially to become fully grown adults in society with a moral and emotional compass/. Teachers need to study child development in order to provide developmentally appropriate educational experiences for children. Health professionals also need to understand this area to support children in their physical, social, emotional and cognitive journey to becoming functioning adults in society. Childhood is a concept that is affected by social context and also by history.
Education as means of empowerment of women can bring about a positive outlook. It is therefore, important for the socioeconomic and political progress. Education profoundly makes difference in the lives of women. As women empowerment is a global issue, various discussions on women’s political right are taken as the main agenda of many formal and informal campaigns worldwide. In 1985 the concept of women empowerment was introduced at the international women conference at Nairobi.
Literature Review The issues of access to education especially for girls is a complex situation as In India there is a strong preference for sons over daughter s that lead to discrimination against daughters and research on education has shown that girls are at a disadvantage compared to boys and are less likely to attend school (Kingdon 2005), and even if they go they are more likely to discontinue at an earlier age to contribute to household duties or due to financial constraints in family that cannot support their education .Though there are numerous research on gender disparity none of them address the role of context that shape this persistent educational disparity . Girls are often taken out of schools to contribute to household responsibilities and in the case of millions of landless labourers’ families who migrate in search of work for more than 8 months in a year find it easier to leave behind boys who can continue going to school and take girls along as they are worried about the safety concerns of their daughters and also another issue regarding access to education for girls in the rural areas is that parents are not willing to send their daughters beyond their own villages for studies . Research has also shown that the mothers’ education plays an important role in schooling of their daughters and this lead to lower discrimination against the girl child. Communities play an important role in understanding social life in India as social networks are closely knit