Denial of Admission to married girls

The Hindu

A school principal in Melur in Madurai district, Tamil Nadu, is reported to have denied admission to two girls whose parents had married them off after they completed Class X

Prima facie, it seems the principal is wrongly applying her authority. Also, in the broader social context, it seems strange and unacceptable that the benefits of education should be denied to a girl just because she is now a married woman

We need to understand the dilemma of the school principal who denied admission to two child brides

The state cannot acknowledge a child bride as an adult citizen with constitutionally endowed rights.

She is an ambiguous entity, a progeny of contradiction between the state and society. She inhabits a messy, forgotten corner of India’s modernity

In her denial of admission to the two girls who have now become married women, if we blame principal for misusing her authority and compel her to admit these girls — as the Tamil Nadu government will surely do quite soon, we miss the voice of teachers who are supposed to carry on their lean shoulders the full burden of the rhetoric of national development as a pedagogue (a school teacher) and social transformation. This latter role constitutes a grand illusion as they can expect to receive no cooperation from the larger society when they try to go against established norms

Therefore there is a conflict between the aims of a girl’s socialisation at home and the principles of education that revolve around a child’s agency and freedom This has to be resolved. But the question is: whose responsibility is it to resolve this conflict? Do schools have a role to play in this regard? Do teachers have a role? And what is the role of State in this regard?

Their pivotal role in democratising schools and reach out to Dalits, girls, the minorities, the disabled and all other children for whose education social norms are still in conflict with the values and objectives of education. There is a role for teacher training in informing schoolteachers about the challenges of addressing stubborn issues that come in the way of disadvantaged children and their responsibility towards them. Thus having a separate curriculum or an institution in addressing education of child brides, serves the purpose of reinforcing the existing attitudes that such children are to be regarded as “married women.” Children, even if they are married, do not become married women. It is so important to see them as adolescents, even if they are married and not to treat them as adults

Issues to be highlighted

Discrimination on the basis of gender is a major problem in schools

The cultural imprinting that turns girls into socially acceptable women

Need to examine human behaviour and the institutions that shape it. In this case, the institutions are family and kinship. Their joint venture ensures that a little girl starts to learn, from infancy onwards, that it is her destiny to leave her natal home for an uncertain future in a family to which she will belong after marriage. This destiny is cast in the rock of cultural practices, ranging from religious rituals to everyday language of lullabies, songs, idioms and metaphors. For the single-minded pursuit of matrimony, the girl’s appearance, body movements, habits and dispositions are to be honed into the approved model of beauty, self-restraint and self-abnegation. Space and time are supposed to shrink into increasingly narrow corridors of activity, and the natural desire for freedom a girl might have felt as a baby must be dissolved into a regime of responsibility and self-denial

Whether girls have a childhood at all, or whether they move straight from infancy into adulthood

An explicit conflict between the aims of girls’ socialisation at home and their education at school. Tradition and customs require girls to learn during childhood that they must submit to male authority in all aspects of their life. The core of this learning lies in giving up any claim to intellectual autonomy and individual uniqueness. With the full force that religious and caste beliefs, and their representations in mythology, might be expected to carry for the young mind, girls are made to internalise the all-encompassing social value of their bodies for reproduction. Restrictions on physical movement and posture, and on the use of time and space begin much before puberty, but after menarche these restrictions acquire comprehensive rigour

The incompatibility of the norms of girlhood in India with the basic principles of education

Progressive pedagogy is supposed to enhance the child’s confidence and courage to develop her identity as an individual. Both in terms of its emotional content and the reasoning on which it is based, the agenda of cultural imprinting of girls’ minds contradicts the objectives of child-centred education