Griffith Feeney
Educational attainment by sex and age is shown in accompanying table from the Myanmar Population Changes and Fertility survey of 1991. Of the population aged 15 years and older, 65 percent completed at least Standard 1 and 35 percent had not completed any standard, i.e., achieved less than one year of formal education. Thirty percent of all persons aged 15 and over completed Standard 5 or higher and 12 percent completed Standard 9 or higher. Only 3.5 percent entered university.
Educational attainment is uniformly higher for men than for women, but the magnitude of the difference varies considerably by level of education. The most extreme difference is in percentage completing Standard 5 or higher, 36 percent for men versus 24 percent for women. The smallest differences are at the extremes of educational attainment. Thus 68 percent of men compared with 62 percent of women completed Standard 1 or higher, and 3.7 percent of men compared with 3.4 percent of women entered university.
These aggregate figures are misleading, however, if it is not recognized that older persons received their education in the more or less distant past, so that the current situation for adults represents an accumulation of educational experience over more than half a century. The main value of the age classification in this context is the indirect indication of historical trends in schooling.
Standard 1 may be identified with age 6, whence persons aged x at the time of the PCFS would have completed Standard 1 approximately x-6 years ago. Standard 5 may be similarly identified with age 10, Standard 8 with age 13, and Standard 10 with age 15. This correspondence between age and time may be used to date the educational attainment of different age groups and in this way portray the historical trend. Since the oldest age groups received their education over half a century ago, the historical depth is considerable. Persons aged 70-74 at the beginning of 1991 would have completed Standard 1 circa 1924, for example, persons aged 65-69 circa 1929, and so on.
Interpreted in this way, the data in the table show that there have been tremendous gains in educational attainment in Myanmar over the past 60 years. Among persons of schoolbag during the mid 1920s (aged 70-74 at the time of the PCFS), only 23 percent completed Standard 1 or higher. By the late 1980s, when persons aged 15-19 at the time of the survey were educated, this had risen to 84 percent. Over roughly the same period, the percentage of persons completing Standard 5 or higher increased more than four times, from 9 to 40 percent,and the percentage of persons completing Standard 9 or higher increased more than seven times, 2.5 to 18 percent.
Educational attainment increased more rapidly during the 1940s and 1950s than before or after. Women's attainment rose more rapidly than men's, and by the 1980s young woman had nearly the same educational attainment as comparably aged men. The largest differences are in percentage completing Standard 5 or higher. Among persons aged 55-74, mostly educated before 1940, only about 5 percent of women completed Standard 5 or higher,compared with about 15 percent of men. Among persons aged 15-19, educated during the1980s, 38 percent of women and 42 percent of men completed Standard 5 or higher.
<gfeeney@gfeeney.com>
