Anti-educationism in Afghanistan
From the romantic embrace of education to the general distrust in the intellectuals to the Taliban anti-education-ism.
In 2020, a video surfaced on social media where a teenage boy in a Kabul street was asked why he did not attend school, to which he replied with a question, “what good did Ashraf Ghani, who went to school, do?”. He referred to the John Hopkins doctorate holder president of Afghanistan. That was a year before Ashraf Ghani’s US-backed government fell, and he fled the country. Occasionally, Ashraf Ghani boasted about his elite education, saying his opponents were not suited to attend his lectures. The UK-based Prospect Magazine declared Ashraf Ghani 2nd among the 100 world thinkers in 2013, after the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Nevertheless, the country fell into disarray under the watch of its most educated ruler, whom the New Yorker once called Afghanistan’s Theorist-in-Chief.
My high-school Pashtu language teacher often told us that educated people destroyed the country. There are grains of truth to the statement made by my teacher, who long died before witnessing the mess the educated Ashraf Ghani left behind. He referred to the Kabul University Marxist students who later staged the bloody 1979 coup d'état against President Dawood and then fought with the…
