The Taliban’s “abusive” educational policies are harming boys as well as girls and women, a new report by Human Rights Watch shows. Released on Tuesday, December 5, the report shows a rise in the use of corporal punishment, a shortage of qualified teachers, and regressive curriculum changes, undermining the overall quality of an education system that was deemed highly ineffective even before the Taliban’s return.
While the Taliban have not prohibited boys’ education beyond sixth grade, the right group says that their actions undermine access to education for all children and young adults. This violates Afghanistan’s obligations under international law, including the right of all children to education.
Transforming Afghanistan’s education system has been a central focus for the Taliban since their return to power. The regime barred girls from attending schools beyond sixth grade, imposed gender segregation and a new dress code at public universities, and vowed to overhaul the educational curriculum in an attempt to propagate its ideology among the younger generations. The group has also built a vast network of religious schools (Madrassas) across the county.
Although the Taliban have been globally condemned for banning girls and women from secondary school and university, Human Rights Watch says there has been less attention to the deep harm inflicted on boys’ education.
Interviews Human Rights Watch has conducted in eight provinces show a wide trend of the dismissal of female teachers and their replacement by unqualified men sympathetic to the group. Even then, the report says, students are left to sit in many classrooms with no teacher at all. Many science subjects such as biology, physics, and computer are not taught at schools because of a lack of qualified male instructors, hampering the quality of an already dysfunctional education system in a world growingly driven by technology.
Sahar Fetrat, an assistant researcher at HRW who led the research for the report, said that the Taliban’s damage to the education system stretches far beyond the ban on girls’ access and affects boys too. “By harming the whole school system in the country, they risk creating a lost generation deprived of a quality education.”
The report also shows a spike in the use of corporal punishment, including officials beating boys before the whole school for haircuts or clothing infractions or for having a mobile phone. Propagation of physical violence as a means of control and regulation in the education system, HWR says, raises serious concerns about the student’s mental health and their future development trajectory.
Despite heavy international investment, the country’s public education system remained unresponsive to the needs of a modern and rapidly changing world even under the republic. However, with the Taliban’s re-ascend to power, there are worries that public schools could be turned into factories for brainwashing children. Afghanistan has one of the youngest populations in the world with more than 65% of its people under the age of 25. The Taliban’s efforts to revamp the educational curriculum and infuse in its extremist ideologies could help the group reshape Afghanistan at a much faster pace than expected.
In addition to revamping the curriculum in the public schools, the Taliban are also building a wide network of religious schools, Madrasas, some of which will specifically train Jihadi fighters. Earlier in August, the Taliban’s Ministry of Education announced that their leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has ordered the construction of hundreds of new religious schools across all provinces and the creation of 100,000 new teaching positions for these religious schools. The Ministry of Education is the only public service delivery organ that spends a substantial portion of the Taliban’s budget other than the security sector. The expansion of population control through surveillance brutal violence and ideological indoctrination through the education system shows how the group prioritizes cementing its grip on power over any public demand for services.
