One year and one day ago, a fifteen year old girl travelling home with her friends on their school bus was shot in the head. Much like the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and the two elder Kennedy brothers, it became a "shot heard 'round the world": Western media seized on the story and ran with it in a flurry of both shock and outrage; photos of a then-predominantly unknown Malala Yousafzai were beamed from the distant heartland of Pakistan's Swat Valley into living rooms from Los Angeles to London and on across Europe as the news, and the outrage, spread. Eventually, it was announced that Malala had been shot by the Taliban, although to this day there are still conflicting 'reasons' for the attempt on her life: some say it was because she spoke up for the education of girls in her country, others because she was a vocal opponent of the Taliban and their efforts to assert their dominance in the region. Whatever the Taliban's own personal justification for the shooting Malala and the two other girls injured in the incident, Shazia Ramzan and Kainat Riaz, remain resolutely alive and well. Shazia is attending school in Britain; Malala and her family are also in this country, trying to rebuild their lives and come to terms with a way of life very different from the one they are used to. Malala says she dreams of being able to return to her homeland, to her home and her friends in the Swat Valley, yet even now the Taliban say they would shoot her again if she was to return. She has become a symbol, a passionate advocate of the right for every girl across the world to receive an education and be treated equally to her brothers, yet she is still only sixteen years of age. It is a terrible, wonderful burden to bear and yet, having read her memoir which was released this week, I can't help but feel that no one is more equal to the task than Malala Yousafzai.
The firstborn child of a poor Pashtun family in the town of Mingora in the once-beautiful Swat Valley, Malala's father was commiserated with after her birth for having a daughter instead of a son. Fortunately for Malala, and probably the world, her father Ziauddin is an enlightened man in an oft-unenlightened place; he named his daughter for one of the great heroines of the Pashtun and, as a young man from a poor family with no money to pay for his education, he worked hard to be able to fulfil his dream of going to university, getting his degree and coming home to open a school for the children of his local area - the same school Malala and her friends attended. I'm not going to delve too deeply into the family's story; no words of mine could ever do it justice when Malala and her co-writer Christina Lamb do so perfectly eloquently, and besides I think everyone should read and discover Malala's story for themselves (seriously, read this book. If you consider yourself a functioning member of the human race you need to read this book...actually, make that ALL races. Malala doesn't discriminate and neither do I, so be you Human, Martian, Android, Time Lord or any other, you *need* to read this book...) All you need to know is this young woman and her father were speaking out against the Taliban and fighting for girls to receive an education for years before the attempt on her life, something I didn't know and a fact I feel curiously ashamed of...
Contrasting Malala's inspiring advocacy for girl's education with the news this week that both England and Northern Ireland have among the worse levels of numeracy and literacy in the developed world is enough to make my blood run cold. Now I'm not saying I was an angel at school, far from it, and there were times I hated having to go with an all-consuming passion, but at least I live in a country where I am not only given the opportunity to receive some form of an education, it is a given that I will do so. It both bewilders and terrifies me, doing the job I currently do, to see how many young people point blank refuse to go to school, or do everything they possibly can to disrupt things when they can be strong-armed into the building, and how many parents seem quite prepared to go along with that. These are the future movers and shakers of the world, people; if you aren't afraid you bloody well should be! I left 'compulsory' education at 16 way back in 1998; while there were unquestionably 'naughty' children in my classes throughout school and we could be a wee bit cheeky, it was nothing compared to some of the shocking stuff which goes on in classrooms today. I don't remember a single case of ADHD among my peers in all the time I was in school, yet nowadays it seems there are more children in our classrooms with this label - and the accompanying medication - than ever. Now I don't want to get into the whole "is it a real condition or is it just bad parenting?" debate, mainly because I don't have any definitive answers and sometimes think it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, but still I find it a frightening statistic. We are drugging more kids than ever before, have more children with behaviourial problems than ever before, and seem to be failing dismally at meeting even the most basic skills with these kids. How on earth do we expect these children and young people to go on to becoming fully-functioning members of society, especially with the Tory Government's sweeping welfare reform changes and its insistence that everybody goes out and works, dammit, when frankly there's a hell of a lot of these people who won't be fit to do anything?!!
I genuinely don't think young people in this country realise how incredibly lucky they are. You know what, we all hated school at one point or another; there is absolutely nothing 'revolutionary' in their insistent whining that they hate it and it's boring and too hard and why can't we just play on our computers/stay in bed all day/go out and get hammered in the park on cheap cider/whatever the current 'thing' is for not going to school these days. Tough shit. Doing things you don't like is part of life. I hate paying taxes but if I don't, I get a nasty visit from the Inland Revenue and a sudden lack of hospitals/schools/policemen, all things I actually need and which we all take for granted. Would I like to not go into work every day if I could be paid for staying at home watching telly? Well duh! And yet I go into work, pay my taxes and the world keeps spinning. Yet apparently we think it's a good idea to reward a child who hasn't been going into school by taking them on a day out if they manage to go in all day every day for a fortnight! How is this sensible?! On the one hand, it gives these kids a ridiculous sense of power and entitlement, and I'm sorry but they are still kids and actually we are the grown-ups; and on the other hand, that is obscenely unfair to all those other kids who manage to get themselves into school all day every day for an entire academic year (barring the odd sick day or whatever) without getting so much as a pat on the head!! WHAT IS ALL THAT ABOUT?!! You're not telling me that Little Johnny likes going into school any more than Little Bobby does; given the chance Little Johnny would quite happily sit at home all day and play on his PlayStation (other games consoles are available...) and yet he turns up each and every day, moaning about his teachers and the blatant unfairness of maths homework on a Friday which has to be in on the Monday, and gets nothing. Little Bobby, meanwhile, makes an appearance for all of a week and is suddenly whisked off for a day on the seafront for his achievement. How the Little Johnnies of this world haven't yet led an armed uprising against Little Bobby and his ilk is beyond me, frankly...So yes. School sucks. Homework sucks more. And teachers and authority figures exist only to make your life a misery. You know what? Study hard, become a teacher and voila! The power to make other people's lives a misery by handing out triple algebra on the last day of term is yours!!
To be less facetious, however, I do think some young people in this country have no frigging clue how lucky they are. If you are educated you can do anything, be anything, go anywhere....the world and all its infinite wonders are yours, and that's not something to be sniffed at. Across the world millions of children, the majority of them girls, remain uneducated, puppets and pawns of a world they can't possibly comprehend because they weren't given the dignity of being able to ask "why?" or "how?" or "what for?" There are girls married off at ridiculously-young ages to men old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers, having children when they are no more than children themselves. There are girls whose only education is how to cook, to keep house, to look after a husband and family; who have no aspirations beyond that because they are not taught and not encouraged to think that they could have a life beyond that. (This is not to belittle those in the developed world who choose to stay at home and raise a family, but that's kind of the key word right there: choose. They at least were able to make an informed choice, something denied to their sisters elsewhere in the world). We speak of the next great political leader, the next great scientist or economist; the person who might discover a cure for cancer or AIDS...any one of them could be one of those children denied an education, yet because of that very fact we will never know. More importantly they will never know, either what they could be capable of or what their worth may be - something we in the developed world seem to all to easily take for granted.
Malala Yousafzai's campaign to speak up for education and for the rights of women and girls is something which should be shouted from the rooftops. In the body of this courageous, unassuming, self-confident young woman there burns an absolute conviction that everyone - everyone - is entitled to an education and, with that education, to make free and informed decisions about themselves and the world they live in. And she believes this because it is the absolute right of each and every one of us to be able to do so. If I had my way, a copy of Malala's book would be given to each and every child in this country, along with the video of the speech she made on her sixteenth birthday at the UN Headquarters in New York, to try and make them realise just how incredibly fortunate they really are. If it changes only a handful of minds then it will have been a worthwhile endeavour...
Malala wants to be a politician like one of her heroines, Benazir Bhutto; to go back to Pakistan and be a force for change, for good, in that oft-troubled country. I for one wouldn't bet against her. As she said in her speech at the UN, and again in her memoir, books and pens are the most powerful weapons we have to change things, to bring light to the darkness. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. In this child, this teacher, we have an instrument which might do just that...
Anyone wishing to support the Malala Fund in its aim to empower girls by providing them with an education can do so here. It may be a small step, but from such small steps epic journeys are begun...
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