“If the girls go to school, everyone will go to school,” says an Afghan student
The teacher starts her lesson after taking attendance and greeting each bright voice from behind the colorful circles on her screen. She talks while scrolling through slides with rainbow-colored maps, pictures of mountain ranges, and facts about Asia’s geography.
It looks like a typical virtual lesson, which most Canadians are used to after online learning became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this Grade 7 geography class is a secret one: girls from Afghanistan are taking classes from their homes thanks to the work of a Canadian non-governmental organization.
Since 2021, when they took back control of the country, the Taliban haveSchooling is getting harder and harder to get to. for girls and women.
The list of restrictions is getting longer.elementary school through post-secondary, with edicts blocking access A ban on women in the workplace, including principals and teachers, is also making it hard for girls to learn from Grade 1 on.
Even though some Afghan women and girls have left the country, the students who are still there are on the minds of many people around the world. Canadians, for example, support their efforts to keep learning.
Watch: When the Taliban stop Afghan girls from going to school, Canadians support secret classes.
“It’s a dangerous job, and we’re very careful about it,” said A., the Afghan instructor teaching the virtual geography class from outside the country. “My students are in danger because they’re not allowed.” To keep her and her students safe, CBC News is not giving out their full names.
The teacher said, “I love my people.” “I joined this program so I could teach them. To help them in some way.”
Her students know how important education is, and many of them still want to work in fields like medicine, engineering, computer science, and aviation.
One of the Grade 7 students, M., said, “We are studying for the future, and we hope that the situation in Afghanistan will change so that we can work for this country.” “If the girls go to school, the whole society will go to school in the future.”
Without girls going to school, her classmate B. said, “We won’t have any power in the future.” “We want to take this risk to get an education and build Afghanistan because this country needs us,” they said.
Parents make “sacrifices” so that their daughters can go to school
Many Afghans want to make sure girls keep learning because they have seen how far young women have come since the Taliban were in power 20 years ago, said Lauryn Oates, executive director of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WA), an NGO with chapters in different provinces.
Oates said from Vancouver, “Families know that this is the way out of poverty and that you really need an education to make something of yourself in the world.”
“It always amazes us to hear how women, mothers, and fathers make sacrifices to send their daughters to school, no matter what the situation is.”
Over the past 20 years, CW4Afghan has used the fast-growing internet infrastructure in Afghanistan to train Afghan teachers and share a huge amount of educational resources.
Staff members have been working on a new sister site with online courses similar to those offered by many international universities and colleges for older students who want to get more college credits.
After the Taliban took over Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, in August 2021, the group quickly switched to a new goal: keeping girls in school through online classes. Students in grades 1–12 can now log in to take live lessons with teachers, finish and turn in assignments, and take tests online to move on to the next grade. The schedule is the same as a normal school year’s.
“”The longer someone stays out of school, the less likely it is that they will ever go back and get all the benefits of finishing school,” Oates said. He also said that the goal is to keep everyone learning, no matter what is going on in the country. We reach Afghans in Afghanistan as well as Afghans who have moved away.”
More online schools and other ways to learn, many of which were started by Afghans living in other countries, are popping up in what is becoming a busy space. Oates said that despite the ongoing problems for female students, she is hopeful that things will get better.
“This could lead to new ways for everyone to get an education, including girls and women, all of Afghanistan, people with disabilities, and people with other problems,” Oates said.
Canadian schools are told to remove obstacles
CW4Afghan has also been working to quickly pair Afghan students in post-secondary school with schools in Canada. This is a path that has become more important since the Taliban put more restrictions on that sector in late 2022, starting with a ban on women going to university in December.
“We didn’t ask universities to start new programs or scholarships. Instead, we asked them to look at the resources they already had and ask, “What can we do about this crisis?” Oates said.
“Afghanistan might not change the way we want it to in our lifetimes, but the work we do now will make a big difference in the long run.” “It’s like planting a seed so that a tree will grow from it.”
Carolyn Watters, a former provost and professor emerita at Dalhousie University in Halifax, was one of the Canadian academics who decided to take action. In the past few months, the retired computer science professor, who now lives in Victoria, has helped put together a toolkit for Canadian institutions to help Afghan women start or keep going to college.
Her ideas include changing the way current programs work and looking at what is already available in a different way.A school might already have a policy that allows students to transfer in unusual or extreme situations, or it might offer scholarships to international students who are in need.
They might already be showing online classes to students in other countries. Watters said that these steps could also apply to Afghan women if the students know about them.
Watters also wants to make it easier for Afghan women to apply to schools in Canada. This could be done by waiving application fees, making bursaries for living costs (which help in addition to academic scholarships), making it easier to take English classes if needed, and taking a new look at how course credits or partial degrees from Afghanistan can be used in Canada.
“How do you connect the fact that universities and colleges have space and [Afghan] women have needs?” “We need to get these things to fit together much better,” Watters said.
She said that getting the word out about these opportunities through partnerships with groups like CW4WAfghan is important to make sure they are used effectively.
“We kind of need to step up because in two years, a whole generation of people who want to learn will be gone.”
“Life is worthless without freedom.
Razia Arifi, a 12th grader in Afghanistan who was part of the Hazara ethnic and religious minority, left the country with her cousins in 2021. She said it was hard to learn a new language and get used to life in Toronto after leaving her parents and a sibling behind.
But Arifi said she knows her parents were thinking about her future and well-being. The active teen has always been happiest when she was at the gym, talking about sports, or riding her bike outside. In Afghanistan, she said, girls were not allowed to go to the gym, which was taboo.
“They’d rather I go somewhere else where I can be happy and still go to school,” the 18-year-old said, adding that her favorite subjects at school are physics and astronomy.
Arifi said, “Life doesn’t mean anything without freedom.” “When I think about the Afghan girls back home, I think that I should try to work hard now that I’m here and have a big chance. I should try to do something so that when I go back, I can help some of them if I can.”
WATCH | Afghan A woman complains that her friends’ educations back home have been cut short.