In December 1994, the Ramallah Friends Girls School was proud to host a workshop entitled Girls' Education: Realities of today and Challenges for Tomorrow. The guest list included a large number of Arab and foreign academicians, and staff from the Friends Schools.
The principal of the school, Mrs. Diana Abdel Nour, opened the session with a speech in which she highlighted the fact that the workshop was being held in the first school expressly for girls to have been established in Palestine as early as 1889. Since then, it has played a unique role in the education of girls in Palestinian society. Mrs. Abdel Nour stressed that the main goal of the workshop was to shed light on the question of girls' education and on the achievement of equality between the sexes. In conclusion, she expressed thanks to the OCSD and OXFAM (Canada) for their financial and spiritual support for the workshop.
The facilitator of the workshop, Eileen Kuttab (lecturer and coordinator of women's issues at Birzeit University) opened with general remarks on Palestinian education as a whole, and called for the realization of the slogan "equal opportunities in education for both sexes" through the development of a practical work plan aimed at giving women a real chance and substantive rights both in education and in work. Education, a necessary prerequisite for women's emancipation, should be sued as a tool to liberate women in order for them to be able to face the challenges of society.
The first paper was presented by Dr. Tafida Jirbawi, Professor of chemistry at Birzeit University. She emphasized that there is neither qualitative nor quantitative sexual equality in education. Although sexual discrimination is a world-wide phenomenon, the values and traditions of Palestinian society tend to reinforce inequality, producing a discrimination in favor of men. Dr. Jirbawi analyzed the content of our curricula, which have the tendency to marginalize the role of women.
As the result of an analytical study conducted by Dr. Jirbawi on several textbooks used in the elementary classes in Palestinian schools, (see our review of this study in Educational Network Newsletter No. 12/13), sexual discrimination was seen to run through the whole content of these texts. For example, the male is pictured as the head of the household, the provider and the doer. Women are seen as being emotional -- they are allowed to cry, but the men are not. This qualitative analysis showed that women were always portrayed as being either the mother or wife in the setting of the family home -- rarely are they portrayed outside the house.
In her quantitative analysis, Dr. Jirbawi focused on statistical comparisons between the number of male and female characters in titles, illustrations and the texts themselves. She found that women are give limited, secondary roles, with less variety than those of men. Thus, children from the age of six are exposed to this form of stereotyping and these habits of discrimination.
Dr. Suha Sabbagh, a visiting professor at Birzeit University and expert on the role of women in Palestinian society and gender in the Arabic novel, presented a paper entitled 'Role Conditioning and the Girl Student'. She first illustrated the effect of stereotyping on societal identity in general and on women's identity in particular, and the portrayal of woman as the 'other' against the positive image of man. Dr. Sabbagh stressed the need for a systematic approach to end this stereotyping through systematic abolishment of stereotypes in society, media, literature and curricula, in conjunction with legal developments, such as the application of the Women's Declaration of Principles (drafted by Palestinian women's organizations in 1993), the signing by the Palestinian authority of the UN Convention of Elimination of Discrimination against Women by the Palestinian authority, and constitutional safeguards for women's political, civil and socio-economic rights.
The final paper, 'Support Services for Girls,' was given by Dr. Cairo Arafat, Project Officer for Early Childhood Development and Psychosocial Health at UNICEF. Pointing our the many difficulties faced by the counseling service -- for example, that there are only five counselors per 150,000 pupils, meaning that students get less than a minute of counseling per month -- she called for a fundamental change in mentality, coupled with a behavioral change which will ultimately lead to equality between the sexes. In the development of an effective counseling program, it is important that both teacher and mother play an active role. Citing the example of children in the Gaza Strip who see their fathers for only eight to ten hours per week, she used this to stress further the importance of ensuring a gradual, and at the same time liberating, development of the mother's role.
The workshop ended with a lively discussion and a list of recommendations was prepared. This list was headed with the question "how can we reach those women who did not have the chance to complete their schooling, and what steps could be taken to develop their skills?" The recommendations ranged from a plea to address the high drop-out rate amongst village girls to broader issues such as calling for greater professionalization of the teachers' trade unions and encouraging parent-teacher associations to take a more active part in decision making.
Elaine Clark
Educational Network, POB 66, Ramallah, West Bank
tel: 02 995 6230/fax: 02 995 6231 e-mail: eclark@ednet.birzeit.edu