Education
Approximately 71% to 78% of females are literate, in comparison to 85% literacy rates in males. More women receive secondary- and tertiary-education than men. Fifty percent of working women have a college education, compared to 16 percent of working men. In contrast, in 1970, only 2% of women were literate (compared to 15% of men).
According to a UNESCO report, the percentage of women graduating from universities is higher than in Western countries.
The quality of education is lower for females than males. Curricula and textbooks are updated less frequently, and teachers tend to be less qualified. At the higher levels, males have better research facilities.
One of the official educational policies is to promote "belief in the One God, Islam as the way of life, and Muhammad as God's Messenger." Official policy particularly emphasizes religion in the education of girls: "The purpose of educating a girl is to bring her up in a proper Islamic way so as to perform her duty in life, be an ideal and successful housewife and a good mother, ready to do things which suit her nature such as teaching, nursing and medical treatment." Policy also specifies "women's right to obtain suitable education on equal footing with men in light of Islamic laws."
Saudi women often specify education as the most important area for women's rights reform.
Read more about this topic: Women's Rights In Saudi Arabia
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In my state, on the basis of the separate but equal doctrine, we have made enormous strides over the years in the education of both races. Personally, I think it would have been sounder judgment to allow that progress to continue through the process of natural evolution. However, there is no point crying about spilt milk.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)