Inequality In Education Essay

Imagine your education ending when you were nine because your parents could not afford to keep sending you. Or that you had a brother that got to keep going to school while you stayed at home because you were a girl and your family didn’t think you needed to learn to read and write. Imagine not having any say in if you got to go to college, what you were going to study if you did get to go, or what career you were going to have. Imagine the government having complete control over what your life became. These are not things that children living in Burma need to imagine, they are part of their reality. Once a strong and educated population, the people of Burma now struggle to see the value of an education when its financial burden on a family …show more content…
Education in Burma is only required or obligatory for the first five years. After this short period of five years the majority of students drop out and begin working. Of those 50% that do attend school it is found that a majority of them are boys. The families that choose to pay the fees tend to send their sons to school and keep their daughters at home. This tendency for more Burmese families to keep their sons in schools results in a society where men are more educated than women, this creates severe inequality among genders in the Burmese society as these children enter adulthood.
Equality for women has been an issue for hundreds of years, with educational inequalities being one of the most difficult fights for women to win. Now, thankfully, in many countries it has been pushed to the opposite end of the spectrum, with more women being enrolled in secondary education than men. Still, places like Burma are still fighting the battle for equality for women, the fight that many countries had at least a hundred years prior. Mary Wollstonecraft talks about the issue of the inequality of women in education, and society in general, in her work entitled “On National Education”. She