One of my favourite non-fiction books is Bluestockings by Jane Robinson, a study of a group of indomitable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were at the vanguard of the rights of women to have a quality education in the UK.
When you consider how women outnumber men in Higher Education and that more women are training to be doctors and vets than men, it shows how female education has undergone a revolution in the UK in just over a hundred years.
Therefore, as the very proud Head of a girls’ school, a school that has had its roots in the city of Durham since the 1880s, I feel it incumbent upon me to emphasise to our pupils what strides educational opportunities has made for all in this nation, and women in particular. This is of particular resonance to me when one considers the possible future educational outcomes for girls and young women in Afghanistan as the new Taliban regime comes into government. At the first assembly of this academic year, as I surveyed the new Year 7s in their oversized blazers, shiny shoes and even shiner, happy faces, I had a real profound sense of sadness at the probable fate of girls of a similar age in Kabul, Herat and all the other Afghan provinces, where educational rights may be in danger of disappearing or at least severely curtailed. In early September, Afghan women protested on the streets of Kabul to rail against the loss of freedoms that this regime has imposed, and many were then beaten by Taliban soldiers. One protester was quoting as saying that the Taliban have told women that they have no place in the new order. How can those hard-won freedoms and opportunities that emerged after the deposition of the Taliban in 2001 be under threat of extinction?
One of the earliest casualties of the emergence of the Taliban 2.0 is SOLA, which was the only girls’ boarding school in Afghanistan. The Headteacher, Shabana Basii-Rasikh, is still only 31 years old and helped co-found this institution when she was a teenager. Once it became apparent that girls’ secondary education was in jeopardy in Afghanistan, she and her students fled to Rwanda, where they have sought asylum and have set up a new school. Before she left, Basii-Rasikh is reputed to have destroyed all her students’ records so that there could be no repercussions for her students or their family members. How tragic that names had to be expunged from a school register to protect lives.
Equally, in addition to Shabana Basii-Rasikh, the internationally renowned Malala Yousafzai, who became the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate at the age of 17, is campaigning for educational rights in Afghanistan. However, her reach is even broader and her activism highlights how educational rights in other parts of the world are unequal. As her website, the Malala Fund, outlines, her organisation works with girls and young women in countries as diverse as India, Nigeria, Brazil and the Lebanon. UNICEF has estimated that in India, which has a very large and wealthy population of middle-class graduates, only one in three girls complete secondary education, whereas in Brazil, despite its being the eighth largest economy in the world, 1.5 million girls are not in any education at all.
Ultimately, as we battle climate change and all the other vicissitudes of the world, we must never forget that basic civil rights to education are denied to so many females and that, shockingly, the debates of a former age still rage on.