“Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow. Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.”
-Malala Yousafzai from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
Young minds in the United States are privileged to have a system of public education that allows the knowledge of the classroom to be universally accessible from kindergarten up until the fourth year of high school. Although the system is flawed at times, we are lucky enough that there is even a system in the first place that is available to young boys and girls. This, though, is not the case for many young girls, such as Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban at only 14 years of age in order to gain her silence concerning education reform for women. It’s a chilling and remarkable story, one that not many of us can relate to because we are not accustomed to being told that we cannot gain knowledge within a classroom; in fact, we are encouraged to. When we ride the bus to school or are taken to school by our parents, we do not expect a masked and armed man to stop us in the middle of the road and ask us to identify ourselves so that they know which child needs to be assasinated. This is an anomaly to us since we have never been told that we are not allowed in a classroom, not allowed to learn.
And yet, across the globe, this inconceivable story became a reality for Malala on October 9, 2012, when a member of the Taliban stopped her bus, entered it, and subsequently shot her and injured two other girls riding home from school. Despite the attempt on Malala’s life that day, she is now the youngest nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize today.
Why?
Because instead of being silenced by the Taliban’s attempt on her life, Malala recovered in the hospital and continued even more vigorously for the advocacy of education reform in her hometown of Mingora in Swat Valley and beyond. Her speeches have been broadcasted throughout the world, and they demand that there be peaceful dialogue in order to allow for the progression of women’s education and rights. She stands firmly by the belief that to be educated is a right rather than a privilege for the favored few. Her testimony is one that personally touched me in many ways, and it is one that reminds us all that we cannot take what we are given by our education system for granted. There are young girls just like Malala that are starving to learn, and, thankfully, with the voices of people like Malala, progress and change are coming. I encourage you to listen to the entirety of Malala’s UN Speech. Listen carefully to the voice of a young girl who refuses to be silenced by the violence and oppression of an enemy that is willing to kill her in order to prevent her from speaking.
Dates courtesy of: Husain, Mishal. “Malala: The girl who was shot for going to school”. BBC News Magazine.