Education: The Ability to Choose

Most of us wake up every morning to the sound of a beeping alarm, and we realize that we have to get up and go to school again. We get to school, and we moan and grumble about how boring our classes are, how we just want to go home and sleep, and how we wish we had no homework. We see education as something that is forced on us and that while it is useful, it is tedious and requires too much effort. But it has always been something readily available to us; there are so many sources that we have access to from which we can gain knowledge, like libraries and the internet. Because of this, we never really learned the value of our education.

But then we hear about the lives of people around the world, people like the girls in Swat Valley, Pakistan, who do not have this widespread access to knowledge. And we realize how lucky we are. They are not encouraged to learn like we are; in fact, the opposite occurs. The Taliban militants, who have taken control in several areas of Pakistan, pour acid on them and destroy their schools to discourage girls from getting an education – a basic right that we should all be guaranteed to. Instead of encouraging progress, they are using their religion, a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, to keep what they believe are the traditional and therefore better ways.

The only reason I can see for this is that they are afraid of what women getting an education would mean and the changes that would arise. They are afraid that they would no longer be able to exert control over the people, since there are more people that are educated and not clueless, and educated people are much harder to control than the clueless that will just accept whatever they say. But they are also afraid of change and of progress. Women receiving an education creates a huge change in their society, and they fear this change.

This fear of new or different things is something that has caused many conflicts through history, like the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The reason Hitler was able to gain support on the idea that Jewish people were not human was because the rest of the people in Germany did not understand them. The Jewish people practiced a different religion and had different beliefs and a different lifestyle. Many of the them were not as hard hit by the Depression, which probably caused some resentment among the other Germans. Because of their lack of knowledge about them, the Germans agreed with Hitler and alienated them. But perhaps if they tried to understand the Jewish people rather than persecuting them for being different, people would have stood up to Hitler rather than ignorantly following whatever he and the media said.

So, I ask you to think about the role education plays in your life. You can still grumble about going to school but don’t take it for granted. Education frees us from our ignorance; it allows us to understand others and helps destroy prejudices, reducing the fear we all have of the strange and the different. It basic right that we are all entitled to. If everyone was able to get an education, everyone would be able think for themselves and to choose their own actions. They would not follow the media as blindly as we have done in the past. As someone who is able to receive an education, it is our job to make sure that everyone else has the same choice. Today, little is being done for these girls in Swat Valley and around the world who are fighting for an education. So I ask you do you want a world that is still susceptible to being led by their fear like the world during World War II, or are you willing to do something to change that by fighting for equal education for all?

If you are interested in other opinions about what can be done to improve the situation in Pakistan go here