What’s So Scary About Smart Girls? is a provocative read in the NYT. It makes some sad observations and reiterates what evidence proves: that education makes life better and that emancipating and liberating females is the way to realise the great potential of humanity’s “better half”. For example:
- If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.
- To fight militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so much in the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating militancy.
- For each additional year of primary school, a girl has 0.26 fewer children. So if we want to reduce the youth bulge a decade from now, educate girls today.
- Girls’ education can, in effect, almost double the formal labor force.
- Educating girls and empowering women are also tasks that are, by global standards, relatively doable. We spend billions of dollars on intelligence collection, counterterrorism and military interventions, even though they have a quite mixed record. By comparison, educating girls is an underfunded cause even though it’s more straightforward.
- It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States are trafficked into commercial sex each year.
(PestalozziWorld educates children for a better world and prioritises opportunity for females. Camfed is here.)
Comments