Imagine this. A young girl sits in a dusty Cairo police station with her mother and two officers. She is hesitant as she gathers the courage to tell her story but, as she begins, she paints herself as a superhero; rather than a victim of kidnapping and sexual assault, she becomes a powerful figure who defeats her hateful nemesis. Though she can neither read nor write, Yasmin wields her voice and holds the officers’ rapt attention as she tells her harrowing story throughout the afternoon.
Finally. The world is watching. The horror of what is unfolding at this very moment for 276 schoolgirls still in captivity in northeast Nigeria led the nightly news for the first time. It was a big story on every channel on Monday and hundreds of thousands of tweets made it a trending topic.
Growing up in her remote Nepalese village, located deep within the Solukhumbu (Everest) Region, Ngaki faced many hardships common among girls in Nepal who endeavor to go to school. The rural location of her village combined with the realities of her day-to-day life led Ngaki to wonder and worry about her future. She often doubted that it was possible for a girl in her circumstance to get an education.
The unspeakable horror of the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old girl in the capital of the world's largest democracy, India, on December 16th has brought to the forefront the cruel, fatal, highly discriminatory gender norms prevalent in a country that now claims to be one of the worlds rising economic stars. A window has opened for responses that challenge these gender norms through critical dialogues and empowering education.
Many of us saw the moment in the documentary Half the Sky, based on the book by Nick Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn when Olivia Wilde asked as she walked through city streets in Kenya: "Who buys the soda?" The answer was men--women buy the milk and men buy the soda. This struck me, and I believe it tells the story of women and their impact on the world all on its own. It is estimated that when girls get an education, as women, they invest 90 percent of the income they earn back into their families-men invest 30-40 percent. UNESCO has found that each extra year of schooling that a girl receives boosts her future income by 10-20 percent (15-25 percent if the extra year is in secondary). This makes a strong case for girls' education as a tool for development.
In the United States, isn't it time we take a stand for teachers and put an end to the bullying from education reformers who think the scores on a high stakes standardized test can adequately define a teacher's practice without taking into account the impact of poverty and social inequity? Isn't it time that we - as a nation and individual citizens - stand up and speak up when the finger of blame is pointed at the individuals on the front lines fighting to deliver high quality learning in a system of education that does not adequately support their work?
