After 20 years and $2 trillion, the last American troops left Afghanistan in August 2021, and the Taliban reclaimed control of the country’s government shortly thereafter.
But embers of an idea those troops helped instill — that education could unlock the full potential of young women as human beings — continues to smolder, even after the Taliban shuttered schoolhouse doors to girls beyond the sixth grade, Marblehead’s Bob McNulty says.
Since October, McNulty and his Pax Populi associates have been bringing oxygen to that flame by operating a virtual underground school for 10 Afghan women beneath the Taliban’s radar, McNulty now feels safe sharing.
Education has long been at the core of Pax Populi, the “people-to-people peacemaking” program of McNulty’s nonprofit organization, Applied Ethics, Inc., which has operated in Afghanistan since 2007.
But McNulty acknowledges that the underground school is the organization’s most ambitious — and potentially risky — initiative.
Families who are allowing their daughters to participate in the school were first briefed on the security precautions that have been put in place and affirmed that they would help ensure the confidentiality of the effort.
“Each of these families is taking a very significant bet: that this is worth it for them that they do not want to see their daughters languish away, losing all their hope and their intellectual development, and becoming essentially household servants,” McNulty says.
In a strange way, McNulty believes this should be considered a successful aspect of America’s prolonged presence in Afghanistan.
“The legacy that we have is that there are still families that really want their kids — their daughters — to continue and get an education, despite the fact that the Taliban are not in favor of this,” he says.
Pax Populi’s curriculum roughly approximates that of a junior in high school in the U.S., according to McNulty. The history classes are based on a curriculum taught in Afghanistan prior to the resumption of Taliban rule. There are classes in precalculus, biology, an introduction to computer science and a bit more of an emphasis on learning the English language than in a typical Afghan school.
“The girls are finding it challenging, but they’re working really hard and making progress,” McNulty says.
For about a decade, when the presence of coalition forces made such a program safe to operate, Applied Ethics, then based at Bentley University, offered Afghan students one-on-one online instruction through the Pax Populi Academy. Bentley students liked it because it aligned more closely with their body clocks than a typical service learning opportunity, McNulty says.
“They get on their computer at 11 [p.m.] or midnight and would be having lessons with students in Afghanistan,” he says. “Both sides really really loved it.”
The Taliban reassuming control of the country forced such activities to pause, and McNulty says his organization’s mission initially shifted to trying to help Afghan refugees coming to the United States.
But by the fall of 2022, McNulty and Pax Populi’s associate director, Lara Chuppe, were ready to take a cautious first step back into the realm of online education to benefit young Afghan women.
Working with Charlotte Yeung, a National Youth Poet Laureate finalist who is now a sophomore at Purdue University, they offered an online poetry workshop.
“It gave them an unusual opportunity to engage in self-expression, because everything about their lives was trying to crush that,” McNulty says.
The next semester, Pax Populi started a program of intensive English learning to prepare students to take the Duolingo English test. Certifying their proficiency in the language stood to open the door to college in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Like a proud father, McNulty rattles off the program’s success stories — a young woman who enrolled this fall at Oberlin College; a young man, Hamid, who began his studies at Cornell University in September 2022; and another young man who learned about a month ago that he had been accepted to a business school in Leipzig, Germany.
In addition expanding the underground school to accommodate more Afghan women — 50 would be a reasonable goal for the fall of 2024, he says — McNulty is hoping to build out other aspects of the school’s infrastructure. One day, he hopes it can have the equivalent of the placement center found on college campuses, connecting students with work and further educational opportunities.
McNulty has not lost all hope that the Taliban might one day lift the ban on young Afghan women attending college.
“We’ve got to hope that the kids — they’re going to have to wake up,” McNulty says. “And when they do, they are going to have this massive deficit of people that were forced into institutionalized ignorance, and they’re going to need students who can actually do stuff,” McNulty says. “We’re preparing for the day when the Taliban wake up and change.”
If that doesn’t happen, the students at Pax Populi’s underground school still can aspire to attend college elsewhere and are also acquiring skills that may allow them to participate in the workforce virtually, McNulty says.
But perhaps the most important lesson being instilled in the Afghan women relates to their own self-worth, he adds.
“Everything about what is happening there is such a profound denigration of the value of women,” McNulty says. “And we are clearly and emphatically saying, ‘Do not believe that. You are worthy, and you have worth and dignity and value.’ We want them to have that assessment for themselves.”
To learn more about Pax Populi’s efforts or to donate to support its work, see paxpopuli.org.
