The terrorists in Afghanistan have taken their fight to little girls. How brave!
In a small, sunlit parlor last week, 20 little girls seated on rush mats sketched a flower drawn on the blackboard. In a darker interior room, 15 slightly older girls memorized passages from the Koran, reciting aloud. Upstairs was a class of teenage girls, hidden from public view.What a religion! They shoot 73-year-old nuns in the back and lob missiles at schools to attack little girls. And what's nuts is that they are Muslim girls learning the Koran. Why wouldn't Allah want little girls to learn about him? Why would he want his warriors killing children while they are learning about him?
The location of the mud-walled home school is semi-secret. Its students include five girls who once attended another home school nearby that was torched three months ago. The very existence of home-based classes is a direct challenge to anti-government insurgents who have attacked dozens of schools across Afghanistan in the past year, especially those that teach girls.
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President Hamid Karzai told audiences in New York this week that about 200,000 Afghan children had been forced out of school this year by threats and physical attacks.
According to UNICEF, 106 attacks or threats against schools occurred from January to August, with incidents in 31 Afghan provinces. They included one missile attack, 11 explosions, 50 burnings and 37 threats. In the four southern provinces under serious assault by Taliban forces, UNICEF said, nearly half of the 748 schools have stopped operating.
The terrorists don't want the little girls to learn but that doesn't stop the girls from learning. Despite the threats, the girls want to learn. I think that tells you something about what we accomplished in this nation. Terrorists may want to undermine it but these girls have tasted freedom and they want to continue to learn despite the danger, we should help them to do so:
During the 1990s, a decade of civil conflict and religious repression, education stagnated across Afghanistan. Many teachers fled the country, and many middle-class families educated their children abroad. For those who remained behind, especially in rural areas, public education became virtually inaccessible, especially for girls. In some areas, female literacy fell to less than 1 percent.Not even the boys' schools are safe:
Today, most Afghans appear eager to make up for lost time. Their thirst for knowledge is strong, although public education remains controversial for girls in many rural areas, especially once they reach puberty and are barred by custom from mixing socially with boys. In northern provinces, where the Taliban threat is minimal and tribal customs tend to be more modern, many communities have welcomed foreign offers to build schools for girls.
One such community is the tiny village of Mollai in Parwan province, a lush but impoverished region of rushing streams and green, terraced fields. This summer, the U.S. Army built an eight-room elementary school for 300 girls in Mollai -- the first ever in the area. During a recent visit by a reporter to the third-grade class, every student in the room said she was the first girl in her family to attend public school.
"There are still a few parents who don't want their daughters to come, but we keep talking to them until we satisfy them," said the teacher, Mahmad Agul, 25. "We lack everything here -- paved roads, electrical power, deep wells, clinics. But this school was our highest priority."
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Where public schools are either too distant or too dangerous for girls to attend, hundreds of communities have turned to private home schools, many of them sponsored by the nonprofit Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. During the Taliban era, the committee operated inconspicuous home schools in many provinces. With the revival of the Taliban threat, they are again becoming an important alternative.
Go read the rest of the article. We are so blessed with many opportunities for education, it's a shame that there are nations where people have to struggle to be educated.But school officials said not even they were safe from attack now. In one village hidden among the brown, rocky hills, the only boys' school was heavily damaged by a bomb six months ago, and teachers said some students had stopped attending.
"It happened at three in the morning," said Syed Hassan, 46, a math teacher. "When we came running, the windows were all shattered and the pages of books were scattered on the ground, even our holy Korans.
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