The Continuing Adventures of Females Getting Dicked in Education

My first encounter with female students came a few days ago, when Wahida arranged for us to visit the local Bagrami school during the hours of women's instruction. Because there are no co-ed classrooms, the females take the school in the early morning, and the males in the afternoon. Despite the division of gender in the seats, coeducational faculty is permissible. Whether this is due to the scarcity of female teachers or patriarchal authoritarianism (or some zesty combination of both) I am not sure.

The first classroom we visited, Wahida talked about the FabLab, why girls especially should come and learn about computers. After she had finished, I also asked the girls what they want to be when they grow up: The responses, in order of popularity:
Doctor
Teacher
Engineer (!)

"Your Colleagues, The Boys, are all coming every day after classes, and they are very smart." I said. "So I am sure you must be even smarter." This got some giggles. Not a fair statement, but sometimes girls need to have some fun at the expense of boys.

One young lady stuck out in my mind. In a class of students ranging in age from (I'm guessing) 11 to 14, she was one of the youngest (People here are a little on the smaller side, so when I estimate a child's age I tack on 2-3 years, depending on how happy they look. sad, stressed out people age faster everywhere on the planet) But she stood at her desk and spoke passionately in a loud and squeaky voice that in the Quaran the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) said that women and men were to be equal. But men do not want us to be equal. I had to argue with my dad just to come here. And it's not fair, dammit. There was much applause.

Adriana made a very good point in all of the classes - "Women have always had to work hard for equality. Even in the united states, equality with men is still relatively new. Everyone must work hard to maintain it." We were left with lingering promises - "I will come, but I must get permission from my father" the girls all said. Not just the students - the female teachers also required permission from their families to come to the lab, probably only 5 blocks away.

In our followup with the principal, I had the opportunity to meet some of the male instructors, who filed in for tea when the bell rang. Some of them were religious, old fashioned hardliners, and had pointed questions for us.

"Why should I let my daughter go? How do I know she will be safe?" One old gentleman asked.

I had Wahida translate for me - "Sir, my father is very strict. At first, he did not want me to come here. But I showed him pictures and let him talk to my boss (an embellishment, but whatever), and now he is happy that I am here and is convinced of my safety halfway across the world." This seemed to placate them. There are some closed-minded folks, but these we can work with. It's the zealots and extremists, whom we can never hope to convince of anything, that are the real danger. And you don't find those people teaching sums to fifth grade girls. You find them sending death threats to the girls whose families want them to learn math.

Our visit must have worked because as of a couple days ago, the Fab Lab was packed with a batch of... little girls! And some older girls! This was a heartening development, although it underscored the sore need for parity.

I was frustrated that two of the female instructors who had promised to come were not there. This left us with three rooms of waiting young ladies, without even an instructor in their native tongue. One room occupied itself by appointing a sort of drill instructor, who would shout out the names of computer components as her classmates repeated after her:

"Mouse!" She would shout
"MOUSE!" They all rejoined
"Keyboard!"
"KEYBOARD!"
"Monitor!"
"MONITOR"
"CPU!"
"CPU!"
"Mouse!"... and on and on. For an hour.

To make matters worse, there were some network problems that day - so there was no internet. And I, in my stupidity, had failed as yet to familiarize myself with the Sugar OS. When I walked into a class full of ten year old girls, huddled four to an OLPC, I was ashamed and frustrated to be unable even to help them take pictures with it. So instead I fired up iTunes on my mac book. Because if there is one thing that transcends language it is Roadrunner Cartoons. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by 15 little Afghan girls making "meep meep" noises, instilling in them a simultaneous love of Chuck Jones and technology... this is so deeply gratifying I can't even put it into words. I will treasure this moment until I die.

And then, there's Sadia.

Meeting this young woman was simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking. The day after the girls came for the first time, Mehrab came to my room to let me know that there was a tenth form girl who wanted to learn algebra. She was accompanied by one younger girl on the first day, and two more younger girls on the second day. What is most disheartening is the difference between Sadia and The Boys. She is widely considered by her peers to be the cleverest girl in her form, yet her skills lag her male counterparts by at least a year. She brought the tenth form book, and wanted help with what I assume was her homework. Yet we couldn't move ahead to manipulating single variable rational equations. She hadn't mastered fractions.

Keep in mind, this is a problem I encounter frequently in American classrooms, boys and girls alike. Students are shuffled ahead into more advanced classes, awarded marginally passing grades for performance that by any reasonable metric would be considered failure, and then expected to keep pace with curricula they're clearly unprepared for. It's unfair to everybody, and this attitude of "preserve the student's ego at any expense" has led to our pathetic national losses in education. If anyone wonders why our infrastructure at home is failing, why our public science programs are languishing and why everyone in the first world has better broadband than we do - look no further than our dismal math and science performance, compared even to developing countries like China and India.

I'm not convinced that this is the fault of dependence on standardized testing, necessarily - though I'm no fan of "teaching to the test." I am, however, convinced that part of our problem is cultural. At home, when I ask a class full of regular kids (i.e., not gifted, not accelerated in any way) what they want to be when they grow up, I get

Professional Athlete
Singer

Regular kids are informed by the media - and our media is the shallowest, most vapid media on the planet. It's purposefully designed to shorten attention spans and make people want to buy shit they don't need - and the best way to do this is with images of sex and violence. Film and television - really, advertising - have elevated the art of materialism to a science. And it has made our children very stupid indeed. This combined with the comforts of industrialization have also made them lazy. No wonder we are considered "the great satan."

Our cultural differences are reflected in the marvelous performance of the boys' math class. The boys are dynamic, focused, anxious to participate, eager to succeed. I am led to understand that their normal coursework is very rote, which is not how I do things. I talk for a while, then we all participate - the students come to the board to solve problems, and the ones who get stuck are assisted by peers. It is often difficult to get kids to come to the board in the US (depending on the class) but here the kids eat it up. They do their homework. They bring questions from their other class. They correct me when I forget an exponent. These are fantastic students, because they value the opportunity to learn more. I wish kids back in the states did as well.

What's interesting is, the boys seem to have no problem learning from me because I am female. It could be because the impression of competence endowed by my American-ness overrides gender biases. I also talk and act with confidence, not deference - it's amazing how simple postural cues can be used to manipulate teenage boys - in any language. I'm sure some portion of them are coming for the simple novelty of interacting with a girl of any nationality who is smart and looks them in the eye.

In talking to some of the NGO workers, I have learned more about the achievement disparity here. Even men who are college-educated professionals often marry women who are pig-ignorant: illiterate, uncurious, unable even to identify their own country on a map. One of the guests here at the Taj is a woman named Cecelia - she has worked with many local families and expressed some frustration that the husbands do not hire tutors for their wives. But in my opinion it is too late for tutors once a woman becomes a wife and mother. Not that tutoring for these (nominally) grown women would be bad - education is my short answer for everything. But those resources would be far better invested in the daughters of these worldly men - as much as they are willing to provide, and the earlier the better.

Sadia has the same drive and desire to learn as the boys, but if other girls have it they are slow in coming. Perhaps their families are unwilling to let them consort with us - perhaps they are shy. I suspect that the critical period has passed for many, and that they will never have this desire. After all, many girls are married by the time they are 18 or 19 here (some as young as menarche). I know I didn't really focus on what I wanted to do with my brain until I was 17, and I grew up with every advantage in the world. But then, I can expect to live about twice as long as the average Afghan. Which makes the need for education so very urgent.

So even if they can't remember how to find the roots of an nth degree polynomial, I would still like to leave "my" young men with higher expectations of the women in their life. I want them to think that intelligence is a virtue in girls. Even if there is a tragic shortage of educated women for their mothers to select for them, when they are fathers in a few short years I hope my students will encourage their daughters the same way they will their sons.

What is pleasing is the knowledge that the people we are turning out at the Fab Lab will be the Best and Brightest of tomorrow. These are the kids who are going to rebuild this country. We've already got them on the internet, sending out feelers, talking to people all over the world, learning that there is more to life than the way things have always been done here at home. The promise of technolgy and freedom is tangible to them.

And never doubt it, kids. Freedom IS our primary export. For good or for ill.