Re-thinking the Goals of Education: Some Thoughts on Women’s Education and Women’s Development

This article examines the linkages between women’s education and women’s development as these have been understood and forged by feminists. The rhetoric of empowerment is examined to see what is included among its indices. The article explores questions about the goals of women’s education as understood by policy makers and educationists. These are examined in relation to the feminist commitment to women’s right to autonomy, to fulfilling their own potential as human beings, to thinking for themselves and to changing the structural conditions that obstruct their autonomy. I argue that education, unless conceptualised in the ways in which Jotiba Phule and Paulo Freire did—as a traitiya ratna, or a third eye that opens up a way of understanding the world, and as a pedagogy of the oppressed, respectively—is otherwise of little use to women, as it is for all those outside the field of power.