The Benefits of Education – Skills for Life
Posted on October 11, 2010 at 9:03 am
This is a guest post written by Keshet Bachan in response to a question submitted in the Ask a Question section of this website. The reader wrote asking about the efficacy of investing in community schools when in fact there is a dearth of employment opportunities in the same area and no where for youth to use their school taught skills.
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In order to address this question – I find the need to look at girls’ education as a development intervention more broadly. Let’s start from the ‘Killer Facts’ that make donors squirm in delight. The benefits, i.e. the impact of girl’s education have been well documented and these statistics can be broadly cut into two categories:
1. The impact of a girls education (years spent in school) on her surroundings (community, country, her future children, health)
- Children of women who have completed primary school are 40% less likely to die before age five (Plan, ‘Because I am a Girl: Girls in the Global Economy‘ 2009)
- A woman with any education is 50% more likely to have her child immunized (Plan, ‘Because I am a Girl: Girls in the Global Economy‘ 2009)
- In developing countries women with seven or more years of schooling have between two and three fewer children than women with fewer than three years of education. (Population Council (2005) Accelerating Girls Education: A Priority for Government, P. 7)
- Some studies have shown that investment in girls education raised the GDP of the entire country by 0.2% (Plan, ‘Because I am a Girl: Girls in the Global Economy‘ 2009)
2. The impact of girls education on a girls’ life
- Women with no education are five times more likely to lack basic information about HIV/AIDS (UNICEF, Gender Equality, Facts and Figures)
- When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children (Girl Effect, Your Move Report)
- Half of the girls who live in developing countries (excluding China) will be married by their 20th birthday. Increasing girls’ time in school is one of the best ways to foster later, chosen marriage. (UNICEF, Gender Equality, Facts and Figures)
- An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent (George Psacharopoulos and Harry Anthony Patrinos, “Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update,” Policy Research Working Paper 2881[Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002].)
We could go on and on but I think we get the idea. So why does girls education have a multiplier effect? Well, girls are future mothers. So the benefits of a girls’ education will be passed onto her children, thus effectively ending intergenerational poverty. This is a key argument that you will be hard pressed to counter, as indeed even in developed countries women are still the only ones bearing children (sorry boys, that’s just how it is). So if I were to use the fishing metaphor: ‘Teach a woman to fish, and she’ll teach her children, who will teach their children etc’.
The second part of the argument goes to the heart of education as an intervention. What does education offer? And this will also partly answer the question we first posed, why provide people with the ability to fish if there are no ponds in the area? Well, if you think back to your days at school you will recall that your time in a class room provided you with more than just basic literacy skills, numeracy skills and a fear of equilateral polygon’s (or is that just me?). It gave you a chance to meet your peers, unburden your teenage angst on willing ears, share news and ask for advice (especially on issues you didn’t want to discuss with your parents!), gossip, joke, dance, sing, laugh, dream and make promises to be best friends forever.
What school offers girls in particular is ‘resilience’. This is an almost indefinable set of skills and knowledge that will in essence allow her to navigate through life and successfully handle whatever challenges come her way be they economic deprivation, earthquakes, floods, ill health or bad dating choices. Whatever life throws at girls, and lets face it life throws more at girls (HIV/AIDS, early marriage, FGC, trafficking) than at boys, they will emerge on top.
So when we build a community school, giving girls and boys a chance to receive an education, we are doing more than just preparing them for the job market. We are building a community of healthy, informed, connected, resilient people who will use their inherent agency to make the most of whatever they have been given. And they will know enough of the world to stand up for themselves and demand more.
Then the jobs will come. And so will prosperity.
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Keshet Bachan has been the Project Coordinator of the ‘State of the World’s Girls’, Plan International’s global flagship report on girl’s empowerment for the past three years. Keshet holds an MA in Gender and Development from the London School of Economics and a BA in Government and Diplomacy from the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzelyia (Israel).
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I wonder to what extent it makes sense to measure use years-in-school as a proxy for education as if schools were “education units” factories with undifferentiated effects. I believe it is important to stress that *what* is taught (and not simply how much) matters quite a bit. Nobody would deny the importance of literacy, numeracy, etc., but there is much more variance in the impact of what is taught in the higher grades. I’m not convinced that all subjects have positive externalities and am quite certain of the contrary. To give a simple example, in developped countries, quite a bit of time is spent teaching the same misconceptions and fallacies that this website spends its time debunking. This might count as schooling but is in fact actively harmful. Schooling, after all, is but an “input”. What really matters is outputs, e.g. how much a child has learned, what they have learned, what impact it has on their lives and the lives of their community, etc.
A fundamental point is that the same institutions have different effects in different contexts. I suspect that schooling might not work the same way in a well-functioning market economy, where it prepares children for productive employment (or signals their ability to hold a job and be a productive worker) and in a more dysfunctional economy where formal, private sector employment opportunities are limited and gains from education are mostly channelled toward unproductive rent-seeking activities. Of course, this thought is not original and can be traced back to Doug North and is best expressed in Lant Pritchett’s ‘Where Has All the Education Gone?’. I don’t know if the literature has now uncovered previously undetected positive effects of education (defined as schooling) on growth, but my impression is that the bulk of studies still find negative to neutral effects on growth, hardly a convincing argument for more spending on schooling.
As for the untangible benefits of schooling, it strikes me as odd to think that school is the only or even the best environment to learn social skills. Does the author really believe that, without schools, people would not make friends, receive advice, meet their peers, etc? Also, for a not-unsignificant percentage of teenagers, going to school is a miserable experience. In fact, recent OECD studies have shown that fewer than 50% of students (and, in many countries, fewer than 20-30%) actually enjoy going to school.
As for resilience, I’d make the same point; there are many ways to acquire this and I see no reason to believe that schools are the best place for this.
You bring up some good points. I asked Keshet to focus on answering the question – What are the benefits and why would local people want to invest in education – and so that is what she focused on. As with all aid projects education is imperfect and quality is often more important than quantity.
None of these results are ‘impacts’, they are just correlations! A woman who goes to school for longer is likely to face other factors that result in improved mortality, reduced fertility, etc.
I found this to be a troublingly sexist post. The post throws out a lot of statistics regarding girls without making any comparisons to the other gender: What is the impact of boys’ education on infant mortality, immunizations, wages or GDP? Finally, the statement “life throws more at girls than at boys” is totally indefensible. Men live shorter lives, are far more likely to be victims of crime, to commit suicide, and to be injured at work. You mention AIDS, but there are just as many men with the disease as women.
If girls’ education is so great, it shouldn’t be necessary to stack the rhetorical deck. Just be honest and impartial and let the facts speak for themselves.
I wounder to know to what extent do you think should boys and girls receive the same education?
Valerie poses a great question- it’s a sad fact that women in this world receive less education than men worldwide and its a huge problem that needs to be adressed.