GIRLS STEP TOWARDS EMPOWERMENT: Bangladesh Open University Ladder to Hope through Gender Lens

Abstract

Women’s access to education must be treated as their fundamental right. And it is only through education that they would get the chance to prepare themselves in order to play their roles in nation’s social, economic and political spheres as equal members of society. In Bangladesh, very few women can enjoy such rights and live a healthy and prestigious life. At present due to government initiatives, girl’s enrolment in primary and secondary education is little bit higher than the boys. Despite of such encouraging scenario, there is a dark side behind this. Due to prejudice, mistaken education from family and society, lack of security, gender biased curriculum, dropout rate of girls is higher and their retention rate is low. Though there are facilities with free education till secondary education, lack of social motivation, mistaken education and increasing rate of violence against in different form, refrain them from education and encourage them in child marriage. Marriage is considered as the alternative to education, which ultimately leads to violence against women due to unpaid dowry. The article will analyse the issues of some social problem with special emphasis on mistaken family education. Curricula and textbooks are gender biased and classroom environment are more gender biased. Bangladesh Open University has all the freedom, access and opportunity to overcome the problems with their unlimited innovations to refrain the girls from education. Some textbooks of BOU will be reviewed from gender perspective and will put some alternative approaches. The article will emphasis on the uniform gender code, gender sensitivity and gender balance in among all the Open and Distance Learning Institution of the developing countries

Keywords

• Women, Education, Empowerment, Distance Learning, flexibility

Kaynakça

1. Bangladesh Open University: Textbooks Analysis Branch, R. M. (1997). Educational technology frameworks that facilitate culturally pluralistic instruction. Educational Technology, 37, 38-41.
2. Hofstede. (1980). Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related
3. Values. 5. Cross-Cultural Research and Methodology SeriesSage Library of Social Research; V.101 Kanwar, A. & M. Taplin (eds). (2001). Brave New Women of Asia, Commonwealth of Learning.
4. Lunneborg, P. (1994). OU Women, London, Cassell. UK.
5. Raj, M. (1982). “Women Work and Science in India” In Women’s Education in the Third
6. World: Comparative Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women CEDAW, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly Universal Declaration of Human
7. Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris.
8. UNESCO-EFA goals also contribute to the global pursuit of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially MDG 2 on universal primary education and MDG 3 on gender equality in education, by 2015.

9. Warschauer, M. (1998). Online learning in sociocultural context. Anthropology &
10. Education Quarterly, 29(1), 68-88. Wollstonecraft, M. (1929). The Rights of Women (along with Mill’s The Subjection of Women), Ernest Rhys (Ed.), Everyman’s Library, London. p. 27.