Schooling: A Privilege or a Right?
This moving speech by Kakenya Ntaiya at TEDxMidAtlantic in October, 2012 really helps shape the view of what others’ lives are like in nations where women are raised more to be mothers and wives than to be thinkers and readers. Coming from the Maasai tribe, Kakenya was told that she was engaged to be married at 5 years old. In their traditional culture, men are raised to be hunters, leaders, and possessors of all property while women historically played a second-fiddle role.
Kakenya went to school because her mother (abused and beaten when she disagreed with her husband) was denied an education and she wanted better for her daughter. Kakenya wanted to be a teacher so she told her father that she would only go through with the cultural “ceremony” if she could go to high school. He agreed and she went through with it so that she could continue her education beyond the compulsory level of 8th grade.
Figure 1: Education in Kenya (WENR, 2015)
Kakenya went on to get accepted to college and she could only afford to go with the financial help of the whole village. Although not well received at first because she was not a male, the villagers supported her to head to college in Lynchburg, VA even though she was a female. While in school, she learned that female genital mutilation is against the law in Keyna and she did not have to do that to get an education. Each year, she learned, 3,000,000 per year females face the same thing.
Now, she operates a school for females only which educates 125 students at a time. Her wise words, “if you change your world … you are going to create a better future” struck home for me because it really speaks to the courage she had to change her own reality even though it was not easy.
References
Clark, N. (2015). Education in Kenya. World Education News + Reviews. Retrieved from: https://wenr.wes.org/2015/06/education-kenya
Ntaiya, K. (2012). A girl who demanded school. TEDxMidAtlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/kakenya_ntaiya_a_girl_who_demanded_school