Inside Afghanistan's Secret Schools for Girls

[MsAmerica]

Inside Afghanistan's Secret Schools for Girls
By Elian Peltier

To avoid detection, the students vary their routes to the school and avoid walking in groups. Still, now and then, the Taliban burst into the school unannounced, as they did one morning in July during Ayesha’s midyear physics exams. The principal locked the students inside, and 14 young women kept scribbling in silence...

Nine out of 10 Afghan children age 10 cannot read an age-appropriate piece of writing, according to UNESCO. Only one in four Afghan women is literate...

In December, Somaya, 12, took her sixth-grade final exams but skipped the tests in Dari language, social studies and Quran studies, hoping to fail and repeat her final year. “I love going to school,” she said. “I simply wanted to stay.”

www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/world/asia/afghanistan-girls-education.html

How brave those girls and their teachers are. It's a desperate situation.

It's so sad when there's a situation like this, or like Iran, where it's such a closed society that it seems hopeless.

I’m glad that you put this thread up. I am so furious about Afghanistan. It’s peculiar - the issues that really take off and the issues that people don’t really seem to talk about much.

Can't read the link as need subscription.

You can either see if the library has a subscription, or you can use what I've provided to try to Google more elsewhere. More and more sites have paywalls, due to A.I., and I have no control over that.

It seems to me Afghanistan may be the single worst country in the world, vis-a-vis women.