Winning the war for education

Afghan boys were limited to Islamic study under the Taleban. Picture / Reuters

KABUL - In the guest room of a small mud house in Kabul, 25 children sit cross-legged on the floor. The walls are covered in tacked-up schoolwork. At the front, a teacher is writing sums on a blackboard. This is not a school building though, it's the teacher's home.

The youngest child in the class is 9, the oldest is 17, but they are all studying together. This is a school for those left behind by Afghanistan's war-torn education system.

Hamida is 17. Before she started class last year, she could not read and knew no maths. She had never been to school. The class, partly set up by Children in Crisis, is the first chance she has had to get an education.

These children are victims of the Taleban regime four years after it was overthrown. Unable to go to school under the theocracy, they find the new Government won't teach them. Afghan rules say children cannot advance in the education process unless they have passed exams by a certain age.

Those who were prevented from going to school by the Taleban are too old to rejoin the system. Everyone knows the Taleban closed Afghanistan's girls' schools. What is less well known is that boys were given only a medieval-style Islamic education.

The Children in Crisis project condenses six years of school into three years of intensive teaching, allowing children to make up lost time and get back into the system.

For Hamida, it means she will get a basic education before she is married. She is engaged, but her fiance's family have agreed to delay the wedding until she completes the course.

For younger children, such as 13-year-old Rabia, it means they will be able to catch up with the system and get into the Government schools, making university a possibility instead of a life of illiteracy.

Sha never went to school. But now her 17-year-old daughter, Jana, is getting an education in the accelerated classes. "I am illiterate," she says, "but I'd like my daughter one day to become a teacher."

In the icy hills above the Shomali Plains, where battles once raged, a class is being held on the floor of a mud building. Lessons have been adapted to Afghanistan's educational needs.

One of the subjects is landmine awareness - Afghanistan has one of the worst landmine problems in the world. The teacher here, Farida, like most of the teachers on the programme, works at a Government school in the morning, then teaches the accelerated class in the afternoon.

Training teachers to get children through the course at twice the normal speed, without any of the facilities available at the Government schools, was one of the biggest challenges for the accelerated scheme.

Programme trainer Sayed Ghani proudly shows a picture of Mujahed, who wasn't allowed into the Government schools because he has no arms and only one leg.

He is now teaching the new things he has learned at the accelerated class to other children.

In the more liberal areas around Kabul and to the north and west, many of the classes are mixed-sex.

Overall, 52 per cent of the students in the scheme are girls, a big achievement in a country where fathers are still deeply suspicious of anything that takes their daughters out of the home.

Another of the teachers on the Shomali Plains is Sayed Wazir. During the Soviet occupation, he fought against the Russians in these same hills with the mujahedin under the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Hekmatyar is now fighting the US, but Wazir has returned to the job he had before the Russians came, as a teacher. In a makeshift classroom in a mosque, he is helping to forge a future for his country. 

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