The United Nations Is Not Malala

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown spreads the word about the United Nations' presumptuous claim to "be" Malala Yousafzai:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gordon-brown/malala-yousafzai_b_1966409.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=101512&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

Malala Yousafzai has this much in common with my hometown's poster boy for school choice, the late David Peters: to see either youth, or read about how they laid their lives on the line for other children, is to want to "be" them. Or "be" their parent or sibling, depending on your age.

I want to mention the one I knew personally here, because both teenagers had something important to say to the world. What David had to say to us was, partly, that that "I Am Malala" business is not only presumptuous, but also a headlong leap to the wrong answer.

Right. First of all, it's incorrect to use the same verb tense for these two human beings, because their life spans did not overlap. David Peters was born in 1969 and died in 1982. Malala Yousafzai was born in 1997 and was still in critical condition at last report, so we can still speak of her, hopefully, in the present tense. For the purposes of this post, however, I want to talk about activist gestures that were made in the past, about what people have already done, so I'm going to use the past tense, with no intention of suggesting that Malala is not going to survive...I hope she does.

Also, I'm going to use their first names...not because youth made them inferior (character outweighs youth, and either of them had enough character for a hundred average people), but because the different systems of spelling Pakistani names in English mean that everybody types Malala's family name in a different way, so her first name is the way to find material about her. So we might as well be consistent.

Any other common elements in the two stories? David Peters and Malala Yousafzai were born into intellectual homes, related to educators. Both were conspicuously bright, as well as appealing-looking, little kids. Both developed precocious foreshadowings of social consciousness at an age when most children's brains do not process the idea that other people feel things. Both were noted for compassionate, public-spirited "community work" while still in middle school. Entering their teens, both considered the possibility that they might actually become martyrs for the cause of protecting other children's right to a real education.

The difference is of course that David was American...born in a country that already guarantees every child something in the way of an education. Unfortunately, when Big Government tries to guarantee every child a uniform education, what Big Government is able to deliver is an inadequate, inferior education, an "education" that limits intelligent children to the same level of achievement as brain-damaged children.

David actually risked his future for the right not to attend government-funded schools. Nobody who knew him, or his family, could imagine that this implied any perception that anyone would really choose not to be educated. At most, people with severe learning disabilities might need the right to choose to be educated in a selective way--like the thirty-year-old man David helped to learn to read, who hadn't been able to learn to read while he was young enough to receive government-funded schooling. (The man has a substantial library by now.)

For David, as for most of his family, the concern was guaranteeing children the right to study what they need to know, often to work beyond what the government-funded schools had defined as "grade level" for their age, in environments that are free from bullying and abuse. David's most specific concern was abuse by a teacher who had become incompetent, for what now seem obvious medical reasons, but was protected from the consequences of her incompetence by the union-backed tenure system.

When Big Government "guarantees every child equal rights to education," one of the immediate consequences is that children lose the option of learning fifth grade math from someone less obnoxious than I remember Miss Meanie as being, or less physically abusive than David's classmates remember her as being. Children are assigned to Miss Meanie and they have to learn fifth grade math from her or not learn it at all. The fact that, as Miss Meanie has been racking up tenure, a whole generation in a small town is defined by a shared perception of Miss Meanie as having become less competent and more hateful every year, becomes irrelevant. Any attempt to avoid being given an emotional block to learning math by Miss Meanie and study math with someone more congenial becomes a crime against the community.

David Peters found himself facing representatives of our beloved state of Virginia in court. Our government officials showed mixed feelings before the lawsuit began, and there was never any question of government officials threatening David's life. While one judge and one commonwealth attorney were threatening to send him to reform school, another gentleman who served as commonwealth attorney in different years, and our delegate to the state legislature, were taking David's side.

Nevertheless, David found it necessary to leave Virginia and take an underground tour of the Deep South. During this tour, apparently in response to some older relatives' fears that they might never see him again, he discussed the possibility of his death and affirmed that his perceived martyrdom might help his cause. His death, three weeks later, seems to have been a genuine accident...but one of which he was not afraid. Like Malala, and like Socrates, he affirmed that "To a good man no evil thing can happen after death," and knew himself to be a good man...in the sense of mensch, complete and mature human being, which certainly includes Malala too.

Virginia's legislature had supported the idea of school choice before David's death. If anything, his accidental-martyr story solidified existing support for an idea that was recognized to be good. Nevertheless, Delegate Ford Quillen sent David's parents a copy of the new state law that affirmed school choice, printed a few months after David died.

Malala was born on the other side of the world. For her, the option of attending school was a new thing for her generation, something women in her mother's generation had had only if their parents could afford to take them abroad.

As noted in an earlier post this morning...that Indian Muslim young man who testified about his sisters' lack of an education was an aristocrat, and that "old lady who taught them a few prayers" was a privilege most girls in the Himalayan region didn't have even in the 1970s and 1980s. Schools were scarce. Rich boys went to abusive boarding schools. Poor boys went to work.

That informant, whom I'll call Jahan in honor of his best-known ancestor (the builder of the Taj Mahal), bombarded his American friends with support for the idea that better educational opportunities for Muslim youth in the Himalayan region would be part of their own culture, not to be confused with "Westernization." The culture does attempt to promote chastity by separating men and women, but has traditionally upheld the ideal of women being able to teach girls, deliver babies, and otherwise work in community with one another.

Mainstream Sunni Muslims have often stressed the idea that their religion values education, primarily for sons but whenever possible for daughters, and quoted their Prophet Muhammad as having said, "Whoever educates two of his daughters is assured of a place in Paradise."

The difficulty about educating daughters, and for many families even educating sons, has been cast as a matter of resources. Poor families may need the pittance a six-year-old boy can earn on a menial job, now, more than they can believe they will need the income he might get later if he had more education. After all, how many teachers and doctors can there be? If the job you can guarantee your son, in an increasingly crowded world, is going to be peddling junk, why not teach him to unscrew usable parts from old motors before you teach him to read.

Whereas daughters are most in demand for arranged marriages while they are young--perhaps even too young--and expected to be able to have lots of babies. So parents who know their daughters won't be bringing a lot of money into their future homes, understandably, want to get their daughters married off early and let their husbands worry about their education.

It's a mean, miserable system that developed as a way of coping with overcrowding, pollution, famines, plagues, and premature death...and that tends to help these things continue.

Malala and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai (or however people may try to spell his name), aren't alone. Although Greg Mortenson is American (and his management of his charity has been challenged by American funder Jon Krakauer), his book describes his work as a facilitator with dozens of people in the Himalayan region. Mortenson presents himself, in fact, as exactly what "Jahan" was looking for--someone to raise funds in the English-speaking countries to allow local people to start their own day schools, teach their children what they consider worthwhile, and make it possible for poor children to get at least an elementary education before they take full-time jobs. These "stones into schools" do not require American or British supervision. They are Islamic in whatever way the teachers are Islamic. Their goal is not to make Pakistanis into Americans or Christians, but to level the playing field between Pakistanis and wealthier Indians, Saudis, or other foreign competitors for white-collar jobs in Pakistan.

Where do the Taliban come into this, and what is their actual goal in trying to block Pakistanis from receiving a culturally appropriate education? According to the young writer known as Latifa, whose book you can buy from me (here), it is not to preserve some notion of "pure" Islam, but to take over, exploit, and ultimately destroy potential competitors for the "good" jobs. I'm not there. I can't say for sure. Ask the people who live there. Ask the Yousafzai family.

Should the United Nations be charged, or "tasked" as they like to put it, with responsibility for thwarting the Taliban's sinister plot to cast a sort of expanded tribal war as a religious reform movement? Yikes. Can Pakistan save itself? Without detonating its nuclear weapons? One would hope so...but this is getting into Foreign Policy, which is one topic on which this web site does not claim the right to pontificate.

Anyway: the United Nations is not Malala. The United Nations is a big-government entity, often perceived as a bunch of idle and incompetent people desperately in search of a way to justify their existence by trying to subvert any or all of the sovereign and/or democratic governments of this world. Malala is simply one of the nicest, bravest, and most lovable young people on Earth. There is no comparison, much less identification. There may well be individuals in the United Nations who are capable of learning from Malala, or even from David, but the United Nations is inherently unsuitable for any effort to continue anything either of those young people began.

Malala stands for little girls (and boys) who want an opportunity to serve as much-needed nurses, teachers, artisans, factory managers, and storekeepers, within a family-focussed and Sunni or Sufi Muslim culture, doing what they believe God intends them to do.

Big Government stands for adults who see little girls (and boys) as raw material to be processed through a factory-like institution where, if they do get their opportunities to become storekeepers or factory foremen, it will be at the expense of their family-focussed culture, their connection with that sense of what God intends them to do, and--whenever an abusive teacher gets into the system--potentially their sanity or their health.

Can the United Nations really serve the same purposes as Malala...by subverting most of what the United Nations has already done, by opposing the whole idea of an intellectual caste trying to override national government, or even local or family "government," and upholding the rights of the individual child to school and career choice? Well...you know I'd like to see that, in the way that folks in Alaska might like to see a little more summer weather today, but I can't believe it's going to happen in my lifetime. The United Nations has accomplished some humanitarian work but it's just not going to be able to do as much for people as the same people, given half a chance, can do for themselves.

This web site tries to be fair to both sides. This web site encourages readers who feel especially drawn to this case to read both sides. If you think Pakistan needs U.N. help to free itself from the Taliban, after reading what's available to you, go ahead and sign the U.N. "I Am Malala" piece-of-presumption; there's a link embedded in Gordon Brown's article. If you think Pakistan should be able to stand up to the Taliban on its own feet...unfortunately, I'm not expert enough on the internal affairs of Pakistan to recommend any specific contacts, but you probably have your own.

I had contact with people in the Himalayan region up to the point when I married someone else and thus cut off all the hope some of these people had felt that I was going to marry "Jahan." I can tell you that I believe these people are sincere; they don't pretend to be altruistic, they intend for their own young ladies to be the doctors while the "village girls" become the nurses, and so on so far as possible, but they are public-spirited and willing to let a reasonable amount of benefits trickle down to their less privileged neighbors. What I can't tell you is where they are, fifteen or twenty years since I last saw them. None of them answered this web site's plea for decent Muslims to denounce the hatecrimes of lunatic Muslims; I don't know how many of them exist in cyberspace at all, nor what screen names they use if they do, nor what languages.

What I recommend to Americans who want to work on this issue is to get to know people from the Himalayan region. The ones who are trusted and respected in their communities will be Muslims. They're not fanatical about gender segregation, but they do believe in modesty and in same-sex friendship; try to bond with same-sex friends. Get to know them as individuals, find out how reliable they are in business and money, and support the ones whom, after working with them for a few years, you find to be honest and honorable. Nobody is above temptation and the opportunities for temptation in international charity are immense, but there are a few decent human beings everywhere.

Although I just decided that this web site needs a label for news from the Himalayan region (Pakistan, India, Afghanistan), we probably won't be making this story a running feature at this web site, because (a) none of us reads Urdu and (b) it's taken me, Priscilla King, three days to be able to write about Malala's story even in this remote way without feeling queasy. And also (c) I could be wrong about Pakistan's ability to defend itself; I'm working with other people's reports and a belief system based on what I've seen to be true primarily for the United States.

I just wanted everyone out there to understand why I, personally, am not signing "I Am Malala."