Aspirations and self‐hood: exploring the meaning of higher secondary education for girl college students in rural Bangladesh

Abstract This study focuses on girl college students in a rural area of South West Bangladesh exploring the meaning and value they give to higher secondary education. By listening to their voices, the ethnography shows that unlike their younger counterparts, who stop studying in order to get married, girls who enrol at college develop more complex and differentiated aspirations for the future. They show a strong sense of self‐worth and self‐esteem in articulating publicly their hopes of becoming economically independent and more in control of important life choices. The study suggests that, by prolonging in temporal terms the transition to adulthood, higher secondary education challenges girls' perception of themselves, favours the development of a different sense of self‐hood. and increases their agency and capacity to negotiate their own ways of being part of their families and their society. Keywords: rural Bangladeshgirls' higher educationtransition to adulthoodself‐hoodagencygender Notes 1. College means here Intermediate college that comprises grades 11 and 12. Primary education comprises grades 1–5. Secondary education is divided into first secondary and higher secondary. First secondary education comprises grades 6–10. At the end of grade 10 the students have to sit for a final exam; if they pass it they obtain a Secondary School Certificate (SSC). Grades 6–10 are attended at so‐called high schools. Higher secondary education comprises grades 11 and 12. At the end of the 12th year, the students have to pass a final exam to get a Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC). A regular student would start high school (grade 6) at the age of approximately 11 or 12 and finish high school at approximately 16 or 17. The two‐year Intermediate college course corresponds in timing to the sixth form college of the English school system. 2. The 2007 World Development Report Development and the Next Generation also stresses the importance of developing the 'capacity of young people as decision making agents' (Citation2007, 53) in the five main transitions they go through: learning after primary school, starting a productive working age, adopting a healthful life style, forming a family, exercising citizenship. The World Development Report acknowledges also these transitions are gender differentiated since puberty (Citation2007, 65). 3. My fieldwork was funded by the Simon Population Trust. 4. Del Franco (Citation2006) extensively discusses parents' perspectives on boys' education and its role in their employment opportunities. White‐collar jobs, chakri, are particularly valued. 5. There are several big and small local NGOs in the area, funded by national and international donors. They run projects for poverty alleviation (microcredit, agricultural extension, health and sanitation) and promotion of human rights. They also work with women by organizing them in groups of about 15–20 members. There is an extensive literature on the role of NGOs in Bangladesh (see Devine Citation2003, Citation2009; Lewis and Siddiqi Citation2003; Lewis Citation2004; Khan, Ahmad, and Quddus Citation2009). 6. This refers to the sum paid biannually by the government to girls with good school results up to 12th grade. 7. See Ahmed (Citation2004) for a discussion of the notion of 'understanding' (bujha). 8. Kumira College is a simple degree college situated in Kumira, not far from Tala. It constitutes the closest alternative for girls who for different reasons cannot afford to go to Satkhira, Khulna or Jessore. 9. Purdah, which literally means curtain, has not to be understood only in the limited meaning of the physical seclusion of women inside the house. Both for Hindu and Muslims purdah entails an ideal of modesty enforced through 'prohibition on movement, gesture, speech and association and the development of feminine characteristics like virtue and shame' (Ahmed 1993, 60). Papanek argues that purdah operates through two different principles: 'separate worlds' and provision of 'symbolic shelter' (Citation1982, 6). The first is mostly related to the division of labour and a series of rules regarding the use of space. The second underlines the tension between the private domain pertaining to women and the outside world. 10. The 'resisting' individual is for Gramsci a phase in a process: 'if yesterday (the subaltern element) was not responsible, because resisting a will external to itself, now it feels itself to be responsible because it is no longer resisting but an agent necessarily active and taking the initiative' (Citation1971, 337). Resistance for Gramsci presupposes limited awareness and responsibility, and a sort of passive reaction; it presupposes not a false but a contradictory consciousness. Agency is, on the one hand, a transformatory one that implies a collective will, a political action in the perspective of changing the structures of subordination. Does this means that outside a perspective of structural transformatory change for Gramsci there is only mere reactive resistance? Actually it is not so, Gramsci continues the same passage saying: 'but even yesterday was it mere resistance, a mere thing, mere non responsibility? Certainly not. Indeed one should emphasize how fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position' (Citation1971, 337).