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