Homework for Friday 17th - Persuasive and storytelling pieces.

This article is trying to persuade the reader that women rights are just as significant in 3rd world countries, as they are in the rest of the world.

The benefits of educating women

Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to education.” The fact that almost half the women in sub-Saharan Africa are illiterate shows that these women are clearly not being delivered the human rights they deserve. Educating women is just as important as educating men; indeed educating women provides additional benefits.

It has been proved that women who receive an education enjoy improved health benefits. For example, they have better maternal health because they are more likely to have children when they are older due to marrying later, more likely to space out their pregnancies and have 2.2 fewer children, and more likely to seek health care assistance when needed. Such benefits to the mother also reduce the number of deaths that occur during pregnancy and after childbirth. Additionally, children who have an educated mother have a 50% higher chance of reaching their sixth birthday (www.un.org) and are more likely to develop healthily, thus reducing child mortality rates (www.womendeliver.org).

Being educated also helps to reduce the spread of preventable diseases—such as HIV, malaria and many other others—because women have increased health awareness (www.un.org). According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website, less than 30% of women in sub-Saharan Africa understand what HIV is. Bearing in mind that there are 23.5 million people living with HIV in this region, this level of ignorance about the virus is highly dangerous. The website also states that 58% of all people in the world who have HIV are African women.

Educating more women also helps to reduce the poverty cycle in Africa because fewer children are born and so there are fewer children to feed, receive medical treatment and educate. In turn, this inevitably helps to slow down the population growth. According to The UN, “one extra year of schooling increases a person’s earnings by up to 10%.” The UN also states that “171 million people could be lifted out of poverty if all students in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills” (www.un.org). Girls who complete their schooling are more likely to find better jobs and be able to increase their incomes. Educating women also promotes gender equality, which is much needed because, as Oprah Winfrey states on her website (www.oprah.com), “education is empowerment.” Another, and perhaps less-realised, benefit to educating African women is the impact on the environment. Through their education, women learn about the important, immediate environmental concerns that affect their local and regional areas. They learn ways to reduce environmental damage, which in turn can help to reduce the rate of desertification affecting dry areas of African countries.

 

Barriers to educating more women

Malala Yousafzai, co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, says this about the importance of educating women:  “We cannot succeed when half of us are held back.”

Despite the importance of educating women in Africa, there are still too many girls and women who are not gaining access to education. This is due in part to the common practice of marrying young girls off to older men. There are 14.1 million child brides—girls under the age of 18—in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of these girls are likely to spend their married lives being beaten, being threatened, having lots of children at too young an age, and being denied an education due to dropping out of school. Sexual violence—both within family homes and within schools—is also a reason why some girls do not attend school.

The cost of sending children to school is another barrier to girls receiving an education. School fees often make it difficult for families to afford to send their children to school. While some families understand the importance the education, many families are forced to choose between educating a son and educating a daughter; inevitably, due to some cultural preferences, girls are less likely to receive the opportunity.  

  

SOS Africa has empowered African girls through education since 2004…

Dr. Matt Crowcombe co-founded SOS Africa during his gap year placement at a school in South Africa during 2003. Explaining his motivation for setting up the charity, Matt remembers feeling “overwhelmed by the poor standard of 'free education' provided to children from the local townships. We started small by funding the education and care of a local child and the project grew from there. We now provide a high standard of education and care to 39 children from two different areas of South Africa.” He believes that “there is certainly not enough awareness about the importance of providing a high standard of education to women in Africa. This is vital to ensure that men and women have equal opportunities in the work place. All of the SOS Africa children are educated to understand the importance of protecting and promoting the rights of every individual irrespective of race or gender.”

The importance of educating women in Africa is surely best demonstrated by asking a young African woman who has been empowered by education: “I'd say better education has definitely changed my life and future prospects in such a way that I want to change the world into a better place and help people that live in poverty. That is my ultimate dream; to find my dream job is not just about making lots and lots of money but trying to utilize education as a tool to change lives.” (Mavis Made, Matric Student and SOS Africa’s oldest child).

This is an extract from  Arnold Lucius Gesell, the famous psychologist paediatrician whose pioneering research on the process of human development from birth through adolescence made a lasting mark on the scientific investigation of child development.

 Arnold Lucius Gesell Facts

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Arnold Lucius Gesell (1880-1961) was an American psychologist and pediatrician whose pioneering research on the process of human development from birth through adolescence made a lasting mark on the scientific investigation of child development.
Arnold Lucius Gesell was born on June 21, 1880, in Alma, Wisconsin. His parents highly valued education, and early in his life, Gesell decided he wanted to become a teacher. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1903 and then became a high school teacher and principal before entering graduate school at Clark University, where he received a Ph.D. degree in 1906. Gesell believed that in order to do research in child development, he also needed medical knowledge, so he studied medicine at Yale, receiving an M.D. in 1915. Early in his career he taught psychology and child hygiene at the Los Angeles State Normal School.
Gesell joined the faculty at Yale as assistant professor of education in 1911 and established and directed the Yale Clinic of Child Development from 1911 to 1948. The Yale Clinic became the focal United States center for the study of child behavior in its time. From 1948 until his death, Gesell served as director of the famous Gesell Institute of Child Development in New Haven, Connecticut, which continued the work begun in the Yale Clinic. Gesell died in New Haven on May 29, 1961.
Gesell was one of the first to attempt a quantitative study of child development. Louise Bates Ames, one of his co-workers, described his work as "painstaking" and "controlled." Developing his own methods of observation and measurement, Gesell had children, including infants, of different ages respond to different stimulus objects such as cubes and pellets and bells while he observed their behavior and responses. After 1926 he used the motion picture camera as the main means of observing children, filming about 12,000 children.
Gesell's initial work focussed on retarded children, but he believed that it was necessary to understand normal infant and child development in order to understand nonnormality. He also studied Down's syndrome, cretinism, and cerebral palsy.
Gesell's pioneer work on infant mental development led him to conclude that the mental development of children appears to follow certain regularities comparable to the kind of regularities in physical development. He documented patterns and similarities in children's mental development and claimed that individuals go through an identifiable sequence of stages. Gesell's work is often cited as supporting a belief in predetermined natural stages of mental development in the later heated controversy over nature versus nurture in educational readiness.
Some of the data Gesell obtained were integrated into schedules which could be used to calculate the Gesell Development Quotient, or DQ. For a while the DQ was widely used as a measure of the intelligence of young children.
Later researchers raised questions about some of Gesell's findings. The DQ is no longer used, and some say Gesell's conclusions were based on a limited number of cases and a restricted sample of all white, middle-class children in one New England city. Others believe he made too little allowance for individual variations in growth and for cultural influences on child behavior.
There is no question, however, about Gesell's pervasive influence on American psychology and education and on child-rearing practices. Gesell sometimes spoke directly to parents, advocating "discerning guidance" rather than rigidity with rules or, on the other hand, overpermissiveness. He also considered questions such as the psychological factors in adoption and the effect of premature birth on mental development. His books gave norms for behavior at successive stages of development. Three books widely read by parents in the 1940s and 1950s were: Infant and Child in the Culture of Today (with Francis L. Ilg, 1940), The Child from Five to Ten (with Frances L. Ilg, 1946), and Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen (with Frances L. Ilg and Louise Bates Ames, 1956).