Definitions within the study
The ultimate goal of this study is threefold. The first is to establish a clear understanding of the current situation of the availability of education to women in the Middle East. The second is to identify the nature of obstacles to women’s education, and the third is to recommend possible solutions or policy initiatives to overcome these obstacles. With these goals in mind, the research will include both quantitative and qualitative data, in three parts. The first part of the research will establish the historical and statistical context of the obstacles that have been, and are today, influencing women’s access to education in the Middle East region as a whole. The second part, in order to evaluate these obstacles more closely, will be a close study of these issues in just three nations: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Finally, the third part of the study will be an analysis of policy initiatives and suggestions that could combat these obstacles effectively.
For the purposes of this study, the region of the Middle East will be defined as these nations: Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
The term “education” here primarily refers to schooling, and means the process of being taught and learning vital information, skills, and experiences in a formal environment, with the express goal of increasing knowledge and abilities.
Pre-primary education is early childhood education, such as preschool or kindergarten, or other forms of early childhood care and learning.
Primary education begins in the first year of official or regulated schooling, until about grade five, or age ten, and secondary education is throughout middle and high school, or until about age 17.
Tertiary education refers to anything beyond high school education, including undergraduate and graduate studies, vocational or trade training, certificate programs, associate’s degrees, and the like.
Access to education is trickier to define. Here, accessibility will mean the ease with which a woman can find, and reasonably obtain, an acceptable or high-quality schooling, considering its cost, location, social acceptance or barriers, as well as legal, social, and personal incentives.
Obstacles to accessing education are any person, thing, process, place, phenomenon, or organization that prevents or decreases access to education by any means, or decreases the quality of the schooling.
Accordingly, education can be assessed by how well it achieves its goals, as well as by the quality of how it achieves them. David Chapman, of the International Review of Education, defines the quality of education as “the extent [to which] an education system is able to achieve the generally accepted goals of education, central to which are cognitive knowledge and skills development. For the most part, education systems are deemed to be of higher quality when students demonstrate higher levels of learning” (314).
For the purposes of this study, educational quality will also be assessed on how applicable the skills are to the students. This means that though students may reach a technically high level of learning in a particular area of study through memorization, if they are not taught information or skills that increase their overall abilities and understanding, it is a lower quality of education. This can be assessed for students mostly at the secondary and tertiary levels of education, however, it can also be assessed at the primary level in terms of literacy.
Therefore, an “acceptable” quality of education in this study will provide students with the knowledge and skills to be considered as a reasonable candidate for a job in their field after completion. This is a broad definition that could mean simply the ability to read, but more often in modern times means an understanding of multiple languages, critical thinking abilities, basic mathematical skills, and familiarity with technology.
A low quality of education, one that relies solely upon memorization and busywork, will be considered as a barrier to accessibility, since this study evaluates access specifically to an acceptable or high-quality education.
However, many Middle Eastern nations have high unemployment rates for both genders. Therefore, there is a void of what skills are actually useful or employable. Many graduates of tertiary-level education have skills for jobs that are not available, or do not exist in their countries.
This impacts the way education can be measured. The quality of education cannot be assessed through analysis of job growth, or amount of graduates who become employed in their fields; instead, it must be assessed by the school’s curriculums and the teaching strategies used in the classroom.