Summary: This article is an ethnographic study of the effects of schooling in rural West Bengal, India. Beginning with Amartya Sen’s claim that access to schooling, particularly for girl children, will unproblematically increase women’s empowerment and improve gender equality, Dia Da Costa examines how schooling is actually changing gender relations on the ground, including how the effect of schooling is shaped by the expectations of other social institutions like marriage and the family. Da Costa elaborates:

Apart from grounding analyses of schooling enrollment initiatives within familial trajectories and relations, we must also situate them in employment rates for men and women, average marriage ages, divorce rates, trends in violence against women, and displacement from agricultural work. These rates and trends must be viewed as educational issues since the ability to provide for parents, children, and wives is a concrete expected outcome of schooling.

The author concludes that while neither she nor her informants question that schooling and literacy provide benefits, there may also be significant costs in the form of conflicting institutional expectations:

In West Bengal, where concerted efforts in economic redistribution and political decentralization have been made, the alienation, insecurity, and marginalization represented in words of parents and young men and women are haunting. Acquiring schooling is significant for girls, but its associations with empowerment and security must be measured in context. Where there has been little direct redistributive benefit to women and increasing violence against them, for the intervener asking why she cannot be someone’s future, schooling is but one fraction of a necessary institutional response. Lack of redistributive equality, the threat of violence, and marital desertion also mark the ways women construct the meaning and value of their schooling. However, how should young men with their school certificates in hand belong to their families and communities as notional bearers of future security? Young men in rural Bengal have had patriarchal protections of all sorts and live in a state with a pro‐poor government that has been working for the benefit of historically disadvantaged people. Undoubtedly, alienation marks these men’s present experience since for the young man asking why he cannot be someone’s future there is no available institutional response.