Malala Yousfazi was going to school a few months ago in Pakistan on a morning that would change her life forever.
Her makeshift bus, which was more of a pickup truck with a cover on the back, was stopped by a man wielding an AK-47. Another went behind and called her out by name. Yousfazi was instantly shot in the head by a Taliban insurgent.
She was shot for just wanting to go to school. At a young age, she’d been advocating education for women and had received death threats from all over because she dared to go against the grain and say she had just as much of a right as males to go to school.
I find it shameful, as a teen in the United States, to see someone put themself in harm’s way for somewhere I groan about going to every morning. It really puts it in perspective how well we have it as part of the industrialized world.
I feel this young woman should be held up to everyone as a prime role model for her incredible courage. It perplexes me that if you were to ask most teens who they thought were role models; they are most likely going to point to someone in show business or an athlete. Not to say that there aren’t great people in either industries, but there are greater people who are risking life and limb for something as simple as being allowed to go to school.
Teens don’t value the real movers and shakers of the world. Sure, LeBron James can shoot a basketball, but I’m not sure if he’d stand in front of a gun and take a bullet to the head to play. Our reluctance to accept role models from intellectual and political movements has shown, as it’s been pointed out that one in three Americans couldn’t pass their own citizenship test.
With our arsenal of educational resources, there isn’t any reason why we should as a country, state, county, or community be behind. It seems that it’s not so much as unavailable resources (which is an issue in some areas), but simply rousing the interest of the students.
In the age of the Internet, ignorance is a choice. I don’t want to hear anyone complain about how much school sucks when the alternative is child labor, child marriage, and other backward practices done by nations like where Malala was shot. The most violent neighborhood in the U.S. still has more opportunities to escape via education than most countries do.
Editor’s note: Views expressed in this column are the writer’s and not necessarily those of the Recorder Newspaper.
