Educational outcomes across the generational and gender divide: the rural family habitus of Pakistani families living in poverty

Abstract

Education for all as a global agenda has particular repercussions for those living in rural poverty. By adopting a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interview data collected from fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in 10 rural Punjabi households, we expose the intersections of education, gender, poverty and rurality. The concept of a rural family habitus focuses attention on the collective, relational and dispositional worlds of such families. Three dimensions are used to analyse reproduction and transformation in each narrative set: intergenerational educational dynamics; on-going gender dynamics; and, social dynamics within the rural field. The findings challenge the stereotyping and assumed homogeneity of rural families whose gender cultures and positive educational dispositions are diverse and complex. The gendered histories of parental education, their aspirations, and their social status in the rural field intersect with the changing gender relations which result from schooling, and the increasing differentiation between educated and uneducated rural families.

Keywords:

• educational outcomes
• intergenerational poverty
• Pakistan
• rural family habitus

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

We would particularly like to thank the participants of this study for allowing us access to their world and the field researchers Fareeha Ali, Tauseef Ahmad, Noorulain Ali and Ghulam Mustafa. We are grateful to DFID for funding the Improving the Outcomes of Education for Pro-Poor Development: Breaking the Cycle of Deprivation (RECOUP) research programme [Grant No: RPC HD8] within which we ran the Youth, Gender and Citizenship project, and to the reviewers for their extensive and very helpful comments on the draft article. The views expressed here are those of authors alone.

Notes

1. Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement survey 2011 (GOP 2012) shows that 17 million children between 4 and 16 years (i.e. 36%) were out of school; 56% are girls.

2. In the case of the Algerian Kayble, Bourdieu (1979) described the centripetal forces which shaped women's lives and the centrifugal forces which determined male socialisation.

3. The family size of each rural family was different, and the relationships of youth to their parents differed as a result of sibling order. Parents typically assess whether and for how long each. The banding of the sample only refers to the educational level of the parents not to their children's.

4. In 2010, semi-structured interviews lasting anything up to 90 minutes were conducted with the 4 sampled individuals within each of the 10 rural families. A total of 40 interviews were generated.

5. In terms of giving back, the team provided floor mats for children, blackboards, chalk, water coolers, jugs and glasses, and learning aids.

6. Female researchers showed interest in the domestic activities of the respondents, such as interior decoration, asking young girls to demonstrate their skills such as making vases from plastic bottles and boxes from ice-cream sticks.

7. The framing and impact of caste and social class is different in Pakistan from elsewhere in South Asia. Although family members in our study self-identified with their caste, this identity was not that visible from their appearance or discourse. Here we focused only on those occasions when the interviewees referred to their caste status. Future research on rural poverty in Pakistan needs to consider the relevance of this complex relationship to schooling.

8. Rural schooling experiences can reinforce rather than challenge social/gender subordination, and aggravate masculine hierarchies (cf. Keddie, Mills, and Mills 2008). A critical analysis of the impact of local schools in rural communities is needed if we are to grasp the significance of their role in such rural settings.