A Woman’s Right in Education:
Between the Gloomy Reality and the Reverberating Speeches
(Translated)

It appears that the year 2030 will be full of prospective radical changes according to the vision of the United Nations and its different organisations. That is because it represents the year in which it has promised to accomplish the following UN vision: “Changing our World: 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” that was launched in September of last year. It includes within it the elimination of poverty in all of its forms and the realisation of equality between the genders. It consists of 17 targets including ‘good education’.

“Today, with the launch of the special education framework until the year 2030, governments across the world have agreed upon the manner of how to embody the promise of change in reality”. With these words, the Director General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Irina Bokova, opened the meeting held on the sidelines of the thirty-eighth session of the General Conference of UNESCO, last November.

There is no question that humanity today truly needs that, which will save it from the clutches of ignorance and being made ignorant. That is because there are millions of children deprived of education in different parts of the world due to poverty, wars and failed government policies. That is in accordance to UN reports that have been issued over recent years. That is in the case where one in every three children, outside of school, lives in a state that has been impacted by conflict. And in 35 countries which are classified as being the countries most effected by violence, 65 million children between the ages of 3 and 15 are in danger of losing the opportunity to education. According to evidences quoted in the world report for monitoring education for all in July 2015, the probability of adolescent girls leaving school within regions impacted by conflict, in the secondary school level, is increasing by 90% in comparison to girls like them in other countries.

In spite of the publication of many statistics and many warnings about the spread or increase of children being deprived of education, calls to reform the education systems and to expend increased efforts for the sake of making basic education available as a minimum to those deprived young girls and boys in the regions of conflict and the remote areas suffering from poverty, in spite of that, these calls nevertheless remain like a mill that does not produce anything. No education systems have improved and no impoverished have been able to educate their sons and daughters. Rather, wars have increased and the deprivation of young girls and boys from their right of education has increased in many regions as a result of the wars which have be fed and launched by the major colonialist powers. The poor have increased in poverty and there is nothing apart from the reverberations of slogans about the rights of women and the child in respect to education.

That is because capitalism with all of its organisations do not produce anything apart from ignorance and destruction. For example, here we have Anthony Lake, Director of UNICEF, expressing in the article: “A Lost Generation of Children deprived of Education”, “In spite of the numbers of children affected by conflicts having reached unprecedented levels, the funding for education is in an emergency situation and remains extremely low. So, in the year 2013 less than 2% of aid that had been provided for emergency situations was specified for education and learning opportunities.” And the people are most aware of that reality!

However, what is pathetic is that the UN does not despair! So, the fact that it has been decades since the appearance of the capitalist ideology whilst thousands of girls are deprived of education, it has not been sufficient to show them that their policies are failures and do not accomplish a quarter of the goals that are laid out at every new meeting whilst their value is not equal to the ink it is written in. Thousands of studies from educational experts, rights organisations and education professionals about the necessity of girls’ education and about what women’s education will accomplishment in terms of economic flourishing and development. However, talk is one thing, whilst action is another altogether. Every vision related to the education of the woman springs from the crucible of the materialist viewpoint and the failure of the theorists in respect to their propositions called: ‘Thinking outside the box’. That is because all of their solutions are derived from the empty of futile theories of complete equality between the two genders as if equality is an Aladdin’s lamp which just requires a single wipe for all women of the world to be saved from poverty, the deprivation of fundamental basic rights, marginalisation and degradation that they have been suffering from for more than a century of time.

The World Bank and the different UN organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF amongst others, undertake annual periodical studies about the number of women deprived of education and they hold meetings, draft laws, regulations and legislations for the sake of providing the woman her right to education. However, all of the talk revolves around reiterations about the obligation of women’s’ education and not about the way of how to provide opportunities for education. Man has reached the moon and yet there are still meetings discussing the woman’s right to education and if a decision is not issued for a new step in respect to a travelling distance of 100 miles, an opinion becomes just like another and odes not depart from the meeting’s documentation.

This is their own speech that condemns them: “On the 1st of January 2006, the year awoke to the decline that had passed. That is because the millennium development goal remained: Equality between the two genders in respect to primary and secondary education by the end of 2005 without being achieved. What is depressing, is that this deadline represented a realistic goal that was possible to be accomplished. The tragedy of this failure lies in the unimaginable number of children, most of whom are girls, who have been left to an unclear future” from the 2005 UNICEF report about the achievements of gender and education prospects, gap report [First part], New York, UNICEF, p4. The report of the programme: “Progress for the sake of the Children” presents a comparative analysis for the whole region, making clear that the greatest achievements in respect to annual rate increases in school participation, within the last twenty years, were accomplished in the Middle East and North Africa, by a 1.4 increase for boys and 1.2 increase for girls.

Capitalism makes a big deal of the material value; indeed, it is virtually the only value in this ideology that regulates the minds of its adherents. That is because most of its societal interactions are undertaken upon the basis of the benefit and the interest that can be attained and even the charity associations have come into being for the purpose of offsetting the material burden from the state.

In this way, the viewpoint of benefit dominates over this ideology and those who are responsible for it. Education is nothing other than a party of this system and the way it is viewed is influenced by the benefit viewpoint. The eagerness of the capitalists in respect to the woman and her education comes from the necessity of her contributing to the (State’s) national income! That is where: “Studies undertaken by the World Bank have found, in sum, that one extra year of primary education higher than the middle raises the individual’s final wage rate by a proportion of 5-15% where the returns are higher, in general, for the girls than the boys. And that an additional year of secondary education to the highest of the middle raises the individual’s final wage rate by a proportion of 15-25%, which is higher for girls than boys.” Similarly, the policy studies report of the World Bank mentioned in respect to the equality between the two genders and development, that “The increased number of women who have attained secondary education increases the individual income rate”. [T. Paul Schultz. “Why Governments Should Invest More to Educate Girls”, World Development Vol. 30. 2002]. Subsequently the issue of the woman’s education in Islam and Islam’s marginalisation of the woman and its oppression of her are thrown into the equation. That is done by exploiting some erroneous beliefs and practises that the Muslims practise.

That is despite the absence of the Khilafah "Caliphate" State that applies Islam in the reality. That is whilst the despicable reality that the woman lives under capitalism is ignored, in the case where hundreds of girls are deprived of education. Just as the neglect of the regimes in respect to their people and the absence of infrastructure and sufficient funding is ignored, whilst they cast the spotlight upon child marriages and polygyny as a base to attack Islam from.

All of the efforts spent to provide more opportunities for the education of women around the world does nothing except pour condemnation upon the West and expose its flaws and the disgrace of the capitalists who are wasting time theorizing whilst at every moment there are thousands of women losing new opportunities to attain a good education.

That is due to the futile policies implemented by the Western states and established upon demonising the other and imposing the western viewpoint. Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the Minister of Higher Education and Research in France said at the opening of the session last November: “The conviction that will guide our policy is only represented in that the faces of inequality are not an inevitable matter. As for the responsibility placed upon our shoulders then that is to strive so that the background of the female student does not pose an obstacle before the horizons of their education and future opportunities”. She also raised the importance of education for the purpose of realising global citizenship, pointing to the fundamental role of schools to combat extremism and strengthening the particular values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination. That is at a time when their countries target the Muslim women and impose upon them the choice of the right of education or holding on to the main symbols of the Islamic Aqeedah!

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Bayan Jamal