Of the 72,110 teachers who are serving in 23,000 primary schools across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), currently 45,525 are men and 26,585 women. But the KP government has approved a proposal under which only women will be hired on teaching vacancies at public sector primary schools across the province from now onwards.
The proposal has been defended and cemented with many irrational arguments. Some of these include (a) mostly women teach at the primary level in all developed countries, (b) Psychologically, children feel more comfortable with a woman teacher than with a male teacher, (c) women make better teachers than men, (d) women are more caring and loving towards children, and (e) children’s interest in school increases when they have women teachers.
It is true that more than 80 percent of school teachers in technologically advanced countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada, are women. In fact, a similar trend is visible in most countries in the Americas, Europe, and much of Asia and the South Pacific.
But I urge the policy makers in KP to bear in mind that the predominance of women in school teaching has been a highly contested and debated issue over the last 100 years at least in the West. Therefore, the simple fact that most school teachers in the West are women in itself may not serve as the basis for the introduction of the policy in KP schools. Those preaching benefits of feminising school teaching in KP should know the historical context in which more women than men had taken up school teaching as a profession. It was against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution in the West that professions carrying more prestige, salary, and power were set aside for men, leaving school teaching and nursing as the only options available to educated women. There was and is still an ideological link between women’s domestic role and their career as school teacher, making the profession socially acceptable for educated middle class women. Taking care of younger children in school is traditionally seen as an ‘extension of motherhood’. Similarly, the hegemonic traditions and culture of a society oblige women to accept positions in teaching with work hours between breakfast and lunch — the time when their children will also be in school.
Thus, from a feminist point of view, the KP government’s policy of restricting primary school teaching jobs for women only may push the latter to a lower social status and keep them in low-paying jobs in the public domain. Rather than single-mindedly celebrating the policy, feminists in the KP should see it with a critical lens.
I deem it pertinent to mention here that the absence of men in school teaching profession has created many crises in the West. For instance, in all developed countries, girls are out-performing boys in education. Academics, policy makers and government officials have been pondering on this ‘boys’ crises’. Many research studies have revealed that boys’ underperformance and girls’ out-performance in education is due to the absence of male teachers in schools. These studies argue that boys do not have role models in schools. The UCAS CEO Mary Curnock Cook, on the basis of research in the UK, has claimed that boys learn better when they have a male role-model in the classroom. Cook also argued that the imbalance (85 percent females and 15 percent males) in school teaching does have a negative effect on educational standards.
It was against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution that professions carrying more prestige, salary, and power were set aside for men — leaving school teaching and nursing as the only options available to educated women
Keeping these studies in mind, governments in the West have now started projects and introduced incentives to motivate men to join schools teaching. Despite the clear failure of feminisation of school teaching in the West, what logic and rational the KP government sees in the acceptance of this proposal? We should learn from West’s experience and create a more gender-balanced team of school teachers.
As a sociologist of education, I believe the KP government has been deceived by its imported consultants who have been enjoying stays at five star hotels for the last many months. If the plan to restrict school teaching at primary level to women is implemented, the KP government will soon be hiring foreign consultants and spending millions of rupees on commissioning proposals to motivate men to re-join school teaching, as is happening in the West.
The restriction of school teaching at primary level to women is not a wise decision. The KP government must take into account many ground realities before implementing this plan. It needs to answer questions like (a) Do we have enough qualified and trained women, especially in rural areas, to teach in schools? Are women trained in the new curriculum? Is our socio-cultural context similar to that of the West that we can use it’s policies as a model for our society? I am not saying that women are less competent than men. Rather, I am arguing that we should recruit and appoint good teachers at our schools and there should be a gender balance in teaching staff in line with the socio-cultural context of KP. We should appoint more and more qualified females in school but we should also keep male school teachers. To reiterate, we should look into our context and make policies that help meet our needs, instead of borrowing models from the UK or USA. Our social context is different from theirs. Our policy should be based on indigenous research in which key stakeholders should of district education officers.
The writer is the Chairman of Sociology Department at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. He is an expert on Gender and Education