She watches her brother swing the heavy bag full of books onto his small shoulders. Every morning, her father walks him to somewhere called school — a place where he will learn to read and write. She is not permitted to join him because girls who go to school get out of hand. But what if her father was told sending his daughter to school would make her a good wife? For decades, activists have fought for women’s right to education by attempting to separate their familial role in society (i.e. of mother, daughter or wife) from their existence as individuals with immense intellectual prowess. She is not just a daughter; she can be a banker, an artist or an astronaut. She no longer needs to be a mother for she can be anything she likes. Consequently, the notion of an educated woman has come to stand in opposition to the very definition of a good wife. Many men are of the view that education decomposes the ‘very essence’ of a woman and hence see schools as places which deprive them of a wife and child. Thus, the simple and popular solution becomes: cut the education, control the women. Now to an individual hailing from the Western world this way of seeing educated women may seem utterly ridiculous. But in Pakistan it is a reality. The threat posed by the pen controls the lives of numerous young girls, keeping them outside the four walls of a school. The UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 states 74 percent of women in Pakistan have an average of less than six years of education. According to a report by the NGO Alif Alaan, 78 percent of girls in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are out of school. Governments repeatedly spend on educational institutes across our nation to no avail. For the fiscal year 2018-19, the Higher Education Commission’s development budget was raised from Rs 35.7 billion to Rs 46.7 billion. However, teachers in girls’ schools are continuously faced with empty classrooms. The research conducted by Alif Alaan identifies the main reason for this as lack of permission from parents. If a man firmly believes the sole purpose of his daughter’s life is to be a wife, enforcing the law and dragging her to school will never end well Overruling a parent’s wishes, Article 25A of the Constitution of Pakistan grants every child the right to education irrespective of their gender, declaring: “the State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years.” However, boys are able to exercise this right more often than girls. As per the Economic Survey of Pakistan 2017, women’s literacy rate is 48 percent while the male literacy rate stands at 70 percent. Subsequently, we are currently using only 22 percent of our female workforce according to the World Bank, for these days one cannot go very far without a degree. Thus, it is then no surprise that Pakistan ranked the lowest in the South Asian region in the Global Gender Gap Index 2017, while our neighbour India attained the 47th position. The bitter reality is that, more often than not, men hold the purse strings and hence control what their families do. Moreover, the concept of women only being wives, mothers and daughters has been deeply entrenched in patriarchal societies (like ours) from time immemorial; trying to dismantle these roles would be foolish. If a man firmly believes the sole purpose of his daughter’s life is to be a wife, enforcing the law and dragging her to school will never end well. As devious as it may be, the solution lies in marketing schools as places which make girls ‘good’ wives. Today, my grandmother is a retired doctor with a degree from Dow who paints very realistic portraits and makes complex mouth-watering South-Asian dishes. And an education gave her the opportunity to become this multifaceted person. When she was a young girl, during pre-partition days, learning skills such as stitching and cooking were part of her schooling. While such skills may be deemed feminine by men and offensive by feminists, they are in fact quite useful. As someone who lived alone for five years in the UK, I say this with great conviction. Making such skills part of the syllabus and then marketing education on their basis can change the way certain men see schools for girls. Education is a product and the appropriate advertising is needed to sell it to men who believe it is harmful for women. For example, when KFC first opened in 1930 it used to use the slogan “North America’s Hospitality Dish”. This was then changed to “We fix Sunday dinner seven nights a week” in an attempt to push up sales. However, the issue remained the same. The customers were dissuaded from returning when they discovered the chicken could not easily be eaten using a knife and fork. Then came the famous “finger lickin’ good” slogan and changed the way the fried chicken was received. Altering the way people perceive something compels them to change the way they react to it. Renowned advertising director, Bill Bernbach once said “Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make”. One can repeatedly argue with a father that education is his daughter’s basic human right and get nowhere. Alternatively, we can tell him what he wants to hear and watch him walk his daughter to school. The writer has a Masters in media with a distinction from the London School of Economics. She Tweets @mawish_m Published in Daily Times, September 28th 2018.