World Literacy Day: The Taliban turned Afghanistan into a centre of fundamentalist education

By Paiman Arman* 

September 8 is World Literacy Day, a day that is vital for Afghanistan and its future. Yet, as the rest of the world celebrates, the girls of Afghanistan are forbidden from going to school. For more than two years, they have been deprived of the essential human right of education.  

Afghanistan made significant progress in literacy in the previous two decades though it was still far below the global average. A combination of 40 years of war, as well as successive crises that caused its educational institutions to collapse meant that Afghanistan has the lowest level of literacy in the world. In 2019, the Ministry of Education stated that only 42 percent of the country’s population was literate, and of those numbers, just one-third were women. With one of the youngest populations in the world, the amount of illiteracy in Afghanistan is a serious problem, one that will worsen now that women are banned from all forms of education.  

To achieve social peace, a country requires literacy. There is a clear relationship between the amount of illiteracy and poverty and the level of violence and war in a country. And again, it is violence and war at the hands of the Taliban that are two of the main obstacles to the growth of literacy in Afghanistan.  

After the Taliban took control of the country, education suffered at the hands of a regime ideologically opposed to modern learning. Now, in addition to illiteracy is the growing danger that the youth in Afghanistan are being recruited by terrorist groups and indoctrinated with fundamentalist ideology. The Taliban are modifying school curricula to serve their fundamentalist ideological objectives. It is obvious that they see controlling the education system as the most effective way to consolidate their ideological grip on the country. 

In addition, the Taliban have purposefully invested in the recruitment of young boys and girls to an expanding network of religious schools. According to Taliban officials, there are now 6,830 religious schools in Afghanistan, of which 5,618 were established in the last two years alone.  Meanwhile, there is still no plan regarding the need for a comprehensive literacy strategy in Afghanistan. And foreign organizations cannot fill the gap – there is still no sign of the literacy courses that UNESCO said it would launch in 2022. There is a growing danger that Afghanistan will again become a hub for fundamentalism and terrorism.  

Just as literacy is needed for peace, so is peace needed for sustainable development. Literacy accelerates development and enables societies to grow more inclusively and sustainably. All of these are also critical to achieving universal education and the Millennium Development Goals. Considering the symbiotic relationship between education, peace, and development, the collapse of the education system, the Taliban’s orientation toward fundamentalism will no doubt lead to a continuation of the conflicts and crises that have enveloped Afghanistan for so many decades.  

In the end, the exclusion of girls from education, the Taliban’s fundamentalist and ideological orientation of the educational system, and the expansion of religious schools will have lasting dangerous consequences not only for this country, but also for the region and the world.  

If no effort is made for a post-Taliban Afghanistan, the predictable consequence of this situation, at least for Afghanistan, will be the country’s transformation into a training center for fresh-faced fundamentalist forces and terrorism. 

*Paiman Arman is the pseudonym of a commentator and human rights activist in Afghanistan.