Ismail Pirzada Emily Bearns
AP Language and Composition
3 November 2012
Fulfilling Our Potential
If you were to take a quick tour of numerous schools around the world, you might see a disturbing pattern in a few spots around the globe; a severe lack of girls in classrooms. Whether it be due to seeping misogyny, cultural bias, or just the mere fact that women are rendered unable to escape their responsibilities in the household, it is apparent that such a gap between the sexes causes more societal ills than almost any other factor in the developing world. The gap in male and female primary schooling around the world needs to be narrowed, to the point where both girls and boys can sit together in classroom without having the obstacles of poor funding, bias, and poverty corner them out.
Many strides have been made in education gender equality since the end of World War Two. The amount of girls frequenting schools, even in the least-developed of nations, has exponentially risen rapidly over the last five decades. Industrialized nations in the western hemisphere have achieved “maximum education equality for girls,” while in the still-emerging expanses of the Middle East, Pacific Asia, and South America, girls are slowly, yet steadily, catching up to their male counterparts in their census department (Medel-Anonuevo 4).
In other regions of the world, however, gender equilibrium in education still leaves a lot to be desired. The often-stereotyped arenas of Sub-Saharan Africa and India struggle to meet the yearly standard for equality as set by UNESCO, while growth in Baltics and Central Asia has stuttered for a decade. There remain one-hundred million minors around the world that still lack primary schooling, and of this number, a head-hanging sixty-percent are girls. Nations such as Yemen, Nepal, and Afghanistan have “half the female literacy rates” than that of