If you haven't been following my blog, I am the District Coordinator for the Healthy Schools Project. I worked in eleven schools doing health promotion and basic health education. From what I saw and from the people that I met in my small town, these UNICEF statistics seem about right to me. What I would add is that this average would be very different if they separated the average into boys and girls. Women typically receive far less education than men in Guatemala. I would suspect the average for girls is closer to 3 or 4 years. I had numerous teachers tell me that girls being taken out of school way before they finish elementary school was a big problem (TRUE). It seemed to me that the trend was heading towards more education for girls as women are gaining social status within Guatemala, however they told me that the trend is more stagnant if not moving in the opposite direction. A number of teachers expressed to me that parents were pulling their girls out of school when they saw that they could read, write, and count because they believed that these were the main skills that their girls would need. The issue here, they told me, is that children are learning these skills earlier in school and so the girls are being taken out sooner than they might have in the past.
The picture below I took in one of my schools. The girls took turns cleaning the school bathrooms (and yes this was the school bathroom for the entire elementary school). Could you imagine children in the U.S. being expected to get out mops, brushes, and brooms and cleaning the bathrooms each day?!? Me neither.
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| Female students cleaning the school bathrooms |
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