Education and Rural Women: Towards an Alternative Perspective

Abstract

I was somewhat puzzled when I was asked to present a paper on Agencies for Rural Women’s Education. The inevitable question that came to my mind was - are we planning different agencies for educating rural women?  Is it not more essential to ask the question why educational agencies all over the world had to wait for the international women’s decade to discover rural women, even though they constitute the majority - in terms of numbers, contribution to human survival, and still among the most deprived, ignored and exploited, of the world’s population?  Should we not, as educators, look within ourselves, and the systems of acquiring and transmission of knowledge that we have served and helped to develop to search for our errors and biases?