UC Berkeley

Access to formal education has expanded across sub-Saharan Africa over the past 20 years, as a result of a global policy commitment to provide "Education for All." In Malawi, an ambitious 1994 policy eliminated primary school fees, causing primary school enrollment to increase by over 60 percent in a single year. Yet these new opportunities to attend primary school have not been paired with similar expansions at higher levels, and in 2010, less than one percent of Malawian youth who entered school could expect to complete secondary school. In this context of expansive ideological horizons and narrow objective opportunities, this dissertation examines education as a cultural system. It is concerned with the ideals, practices, and dispositions that are promoted through educational materials, enacted by students and teachers, and aspired to by those who are excluded from schools.

I show that gendered schemas of bodily restraint and female sexual vulnerability are essential components of this cultural system. These pervasive schemas opposing sex and schooling shape aggregate-level demographic patterns, in terms of educational outcomes as well as sexual relationship trajectories. This analysis reveals new insights into how cultural meanings, and the various ways people respond to and enforce them, constitute the patterns that we observe using survey data.

The dissertation consists of three empirical studies that use a variety of qualitative and quantitative data sources, including a linked set of over 100 in-depth interviews with teachers and students and longitudinal survey data collected in Balaka, Malawi from 2009 until 2012. The first chapter identifies the sources of these cultural narratives linking sexual restraint and educational success. Institutionalist theory argues that African schools in sub-Saharan Africa are part of an increasingly homogeneous and secular "world culture." I argue, however, that the missionary foundation of education in sub-Saharan Africa laid the groundwork for a locally distinct conception of education, where schooling is understood as a set of pious practices through which individuals seek salvation. Using archival records, I show that Christian missionaries in Africa have played an instrumental role in shaping the institutional forms of schooling, from the initial construction of schools to serve evangelical purposes to the slow and incomplete transition of educational authority from the missions to the government. Using interviews with teachers in Southern Malawi, I show that success in schooling is perceived as a form of ascetic devotion. Education is primarily a moral, rather than academic, endeavor, and salvation is achievable through the avoidance of profane temptations.

The second chapter shows that these cultural narratives are part of the causal process leading female students to leave school after becoming sexually active. Interview evidence reveals that relationships are viewed as causing students to leave school through three mechanisms: increased absenteeism, poor academic performance, and pregnancies. Longitudinal survey data show that female students do indeed face an increased risk of leaving school if they are in a sexual relationship, but this association is not explained by any of the three mechanisms emphasized in the qualitative data. Returning to the interviews, I show that the teachers, parents, and students behave in accordance with this deeply embedded cultural schema, and in so doing help to sustain its relevance in the lives of students.

In the third chapter, I examine how these cultural schemas surrounding education lead to the stratification of sexual experiences. I collected detailed event sequences describing respondents' romantic relationships, using a card-sort technique implemented as part of the longitudinal survey. I employ optimal matching and hierarchical clustering techniques to sort these sequences into clusters, and show that these groupings are strongly correlated with educational attainment. I spend the second half of this chapter examining three competing theories, each associated with specific causal mechanisms through which formal schooling structures women's sexual experiences. I find that rather than shaping sexual behavior though the accrual of human capital or through instilling different ideals, education seems to position women differentially in the sexual social field, allowing them to be perceived as more attractive and to have access to more desirable sexual partners.