A rare nice story.
A School With No Heat or Computers but Many College-Bound Students. Mostly Girls.
By Rod Nordland
By 7:45, they were all gathered for assembly in the yard of the Rustam School, in a remote corner of Afghanistan’s Yakawlang District. It is the area’s only high school, years 1 through 12, and has an enrollment of 330 girls and 146 boys — astonishing in a country where normally only a third of girls attend school.
There is no electricity, heat, working computers or copy machines. Many school materials are written out in longhand by teachers. Foreign aid once helped but has dried up. One teacher said she has fewer books than students. Only 5 percent of the students have parents who can read and write, Mr. Nasiri said. Most are the children of subsistence farmers.
Yet Rustam’s 2017 graduating class saw 60 of 65 graduates accepted to Afghanistan’s public universities, a 92 percent college entrance rate. Two-thirds of those accepted were girls. A couple of years earlier, 97 percent of the graduates went to college. Unlike most Afghan schools, Rustam mixes boys and girls in its classrooms. “Men and women are equal,” the principal said. “They have the same brains and the same bodies.” He added, “We tell these boys and girls, there is no difference between you guys, and you will all be together when you go to college, so you need to learn how to respect one another.”
www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/world/asia/afghanistan-education-girls.html?searchResultPosition=2
thefrontierpost.com/a-school-with-no-heat-or-computers-but-many-college-bound-students/