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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.65y9ya

>

Where these data come from
One hundred years of schooling in Androy (20th to early 21st century) : political, social and family logics of school attendance in a region of Madagascar

Abstract

Located at the extreme South of Madagascar, the Androy Region has several specific characteristics compared to the rest of the country when it comes to schooling: enrollment and literacy indicators there are the lowest of the island, and school attendance is particularly higher among girls than among boys at the primary level. Seeking to understand these particularities, this research aims to study, over the long term (from the emergence of schools to today), school attendance or lack thereof in the region. With the goal of understanding school dynamics and school enrollment practices in the Androy Region, the research attempts to reveal the evolution of logics and stakes that play out in the inter-relations between education policy, school supply, and social and family demands regarding school attendance. More specifically, the aim is to understand the academic "lag" and describe school enrollment trends in the Androy Region; and reveal the plurality of social and family practices regarding schooling and their underlying logics. At the crossroads of sociology, demography, history and anthropology, this research mobilizes several quantitative and qualitative sources that are compared and criticized in light of their production conditions: discourse and statistics (both administrative and school-related) drawn from colonial period archives, the statistics and educational policy announcements by the Ministry of Education, the 1993 population census, the 2008-09 demographic and health survey, and socio-anthropological study conducted in Tsihombe district. Contrary to the frequently touted argument that school is "rejected" by the population of the region, which has long been seen as "archaïc", "backwards" and refusing "progress", this research suggests the complexity of factors explaining the "school lag" in the Androy Region. These factors include the low interest of the successive (colonial and post-colonial) powers in the development of the region, whether in regard to schools or in general; the refusal to "submit" to the central authorities and the mistrust towards the administration and the State (fanjakana) and the institution that trained its agents; local power stakes in the quest for knowledge and school culture, which vary over time and depend on individuals' and groups' positions within the social arena; and finally, the ability of school itself to enable real acquisition of academic knowledge, which varies over time and by location. Taking a multidimensional and relative vision of poverty, this research also places the importance of economic capital in families' school enrollment practices into perspective. School enrollments does not appear to be dialectically linked to the monetary and financial dimension of families' assets, but rather more intimately linked to their social capital -in the Bourdieusian sense- and the ability of educational capital to produce symbolic capital. Continuing on from this line of reasoning, while school attendance has been higher among girls than among boys since the mid-1980s, this was the case initially "by default" until a true preference for girls' enrollment emerged more recently. This recent phenomenon seems to relate to the broadening of possibilities for women in society while a focus on school attendance among girls and women's empowerment is taking stronger hold among the public authorities and even more within the international organizations actions in the region. Even though shool attendance had grown during these last fifteen years, the issue of inequalities in schooling remains : less than one out of two children accesses school in the area, and only one out of three boys, the gender gap widening and leaving boys behind, at least in statistics point of view at the regional level.

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