‘Spoiled Sons' and ‘Sincere Daughters': Schooling, Security, and Empowerment

Following international conferences in the 1990s, research and governance institutions joined in the call for education for all as basic to human development (Jeffery 2005; UNESCO 2000). In West Bengal specifically, recent policy initiatives and reports such as The Pratichi Education Report (Rana, Rafique, and Sengupta 2002) have contributed to the institutional push to increase primary school enrollment in general and female enrollment in particular, especially in rural areas. In January 2002, some scholars and policymakers came to Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, to reaffirm their belief and trust in the value of education in giving a sense of future security and in bringing empowerment to girls in particular. ¹ The authors of the report on the conference claim that the ‘workshop reached a consensus quickly that primary education advances human security’, citing some of the ‘enormous benefits of primary education — knowledge, information, skills, modernisation, socialisation, and the opening of young minds to “new worlds”’ (Commission on Human Security 2002: 1).