“Everything you have in your life can be taken from you. Your money, your home, everything you own. But there’s one thing that no one can ever take.” Shabana Basij-Rasikh’s life has been shaped by her parents’ belief in the power of education.
Shabana has come a long way from the time she studied in a secret school for girls during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan when girls’ education was banned. Since then, her country has come a long way too.
“There were many times during those years that my sister and I begged our parents not to send us to those secret schools. We cried, we pleaded, we said we were scared and didn’t want to go. My parents were so strong, though. My father would point to his head, and say, ‘Your education is yours forever. It’s your greatest asset. Treasure it.’”
Shabana is now an educator, humanitarian, women’s rights activist and the President of School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), a school she co-founded for Afghan girls in 2008 while studying at Middlebury College in Vermont, U.S. The school — the first Afghan boarding school for girls — aims to change its students from believing that their role in society is to raise a family to becoming critical thinkers and leaders who understand that they have the power to shape their nation’s future.
The result of a change in regime in Afghanistan led to the ban on girls’ education being removed. With more and more girls entering schools, the changes being witnessed in the country are twofold — some for the better, and unfortunately, some are for the worse. Explains Shabana, “For instance, there are women-owned businesses in Kabul and across Afghanistan today, and Afghan women hold positions of authority in professions like law and journalism, and certainly that’s something you’d never have seen during Taliban times. That said, many of these women are taking risks simply by holding these positions, and girls still face harassment — both verbal and physical – simply because they want an education.”
There is still a long way to go: A survey conducted annually since 2006 found that the percentage of Afghans who agree or strongly agree with the statement ‘Women should have equal opportunities like men in education,’ has declined from 91% in 2006 to 81% in 2016. “That’s a very disturbing finding – and it’s a trend we need to reverse,” feels Shabana, who, in 2018, received the Malalai Medal, one of Afghanistan’s highest national honours, for her work in promoting girls’ access to education.
She speaks to EDGE about her belief in the power of education to create change and why educating girls is a win-win for all stakeholders in society.
Why is education seen as a threat in some societies?
Education is the bridge we build between “what is” and “what could be,” and that’s something that some people, especially people with power, can find upsetting. I think it’s important for educators and our allies to emphasise the positive benefits that all members of all societies can share when there is equal access to education. Levelling girls up doesn’t mean levelling men down; it doesn’t mean that family bonds will be weakened or that deeply and truly held religious convictions will be negated. Educated girls marry later, have fewer and healthier children, earn higher wages, and spend the majority of their income on their families — these facts have powerful upsides for every society on Earth. It’s our role as educators and advocates to make clear that girls’ education doesn’t overturn what works; it takes what works and helps it work better.
You received your education in different environments: a secret school in a restricted society and then a liberated one — college in the U.S. What are some of the best takeaways from each?
I’m often asked what surprised me the most about studying in America: was it the co-ed classrooms, the amount of homework, the expectations of the teachers? It was actually none of these — It was the fact that I was surrounded by a number of students, both male and female, who took their educations for granted. They didn’t act like education was a privilege. For the first time, I was seeing what it was like to live in a society where equal access to education was a given. In America, a girl didn’t have to struggle to be educated. She didn’t have to take risks. She had the freedom to learn — and the freedom to skip class. Girls’ education was normal, not something that needed to be fought for.
In Kabul, under the Taliban, I learned to value education’s transformative power and, once the Taliban fell, I found myself surrounded by girls who hadn’t been able to go to the secret schools like I did, and who were now many years behind in their studies. I’d been so fortunate, and I created SOLA partly in response to seeing those girls who’d been deprived of years of schooling. Strange as it is to say, we work now to create a day in Afghanistan when girls no longer have to see education as a privilege; someday, education will simply be normal.
What should quality education aim to do?
I think, more than anything, the goal of an educator should be to make students unafraid to ask questions. I don’t mean only within the classroom setting – I mean, everywhere in the societies in which they live.
To my mind, the most beautiful question a child can ask is “why?” There’s nothing malicious or subversive about this one word: It’s the means by which a child gains knowledge of the societal norms that underlie our interactions with each other — and by answering the question, we as adults are inevitably led to consider the validity of these norms ourselves. We know why the world works the way it does; a child doesn’t, and when a child asks “why?”, an adult often finds herself, in the process of explaining the answer, wondering if the way the world works is the best way for it to work…or if there’s room to innovate a better way. The question “why?” challenges all our assumptions – It’s a small word with the power to create huge changes.
Why is it important for stakeholders like non-profits, corporations, philanthropists, policy leaders, global influencers, and grassroot activists, to get involved in education?
Education, especially girls’ education, changes the world, and I mean that literally. I mentioned, earlier, that educated girls earn higher wages and have fewer and healthier children; certainly, that by itself should be enough to drive cross-sector collaboration on ways to get more girls in school.
Particularly compelling to me There wasthe a recent study by an international consortium of climate scientists and policy-makers called “Project Drawdown,” which ranked the 100 most-effective methods of reversing global warming, and listed “girls’ education” at Number 6 – that’s a higher ranking than they gave to rooftop solar panels or electric vehicles. It’s important for all the stakeholders you mention to get involved in girls’ education because girls’ education directly impacts every single stakeholder – it’s an issue that transcends borders and economies and becomes one that touches the lives of everyone on the planet.
In your school, how do you strike a balance between regular education and imparting a global perspective?
I think that the best way to nurture a global perspective in students is to ensure that they’re given exposure to the global community. There’s a national curriculum in Afghanistan that private schools like SOLA are required to adhere to, but we supplement and enrich it with significant educational opportunities that we deliver 100% digitally. Our students interact on Skype with international tutors on an almost daily basis, and our teachers benefit from online training provided by highly-qualified mentors from around the globe. We intend for our students to grow to be proud Afghan women who see themselves as citizens of the world, and online learning is critical to that effort.
I feel it’s important, though, for our students to also have practical, hands-on engagement with the world outside Afghanistan. One of the most impactful ways we accomplish this is Through our annual winter programme, during which we bring a group of students to secondary schools in India for educational enrichment courses. We’ve partnered with schools from New Delhi to Pune, and with organisations around the world, in developing a curriculum that has powerful real-world applications – for example, we’ve been fortunate to have professionals at tech giants like Google volunteer their time to create and teach a coding curriculum, which we’re hoping to expand in the next year or so. We’re looking forward to coming back to India with our students this winter, and we’re excited to expand our partnerships in this country in the years to come.
Shabana is one of the speakers at the TEDxGateway in Mumbai in December 02, 2018, the theme of ‘which is Ideas Worth Spreading’.
