Restricting Women’s Education Equally Oppresses Men — That’s Why the Taliban Are Doing It
The Taliban are step-by-step paring back the rights of women in Afghanistan, but not to empower men, to equally oppress them
Since returning to power back in 2021 the Taliban have been gradually and rather brutally cracking down on the education and employment rights of women, it seems they are petrified of women being educated and in the workforce.
Those in the country who have bravely attempted to fight back have been ruthlessly cracked down upon, beaten, whipped, and more often than not, killed.
The most recent example is that of Mursal Nabizada, 32, who was one of the two remaining female MPs who had stayed behind in Afghanistan after the Taliban ousted the Afghan government. Whilst in the sanctuary of her home, assailants broke in and shot her dead, the authorities say they are investigating but let’s be honest, I’m not holding my breath that there will be justice.
The question is why are the Taliban so afraid of educated women?
The straight answer is they are not, they are afraid of an educated population, and one of the best ways to ensure that your population is not educated is to restrict the education of women.
The best way to control a populace is to restrict education
For nearly the entirety of human history, compulsory education through a schooling system was not a thing mainly because it was better for most to be taught by their parents.
But then through technological advancement, the world got extremely complex — and in a very short space of time at that. As such, everything changed which is why in the late 1800s the Victorians brought in compulsory schooling for both boys and girls — the first in history to do this.
This compulsory schooling is one of the key factors that led to the democratisation of our societies.
For example, it’s no surprise that little over a few decades after the Victorians made schooling compulsory, all those who could not vote in the UK, which included the majority of men, got the right to vote — yep, the majority of men got the right to vote at the same time as women.
The same story is told in other leading Western nations, which followed the Victorian’s lead on the compulsory schooling front, and found themselves in full democracies not long after.
It makes sense why, education fuels societal democratisation whereas a lack of education fuels dictatorships. For example, Socrates didn’t believe in democracy because he felt that an uneducated populace trying to select a leader would be a bad idea.
He’s right, people who have no education make terrible selections which is why societies with poorly educated populaces struggle to maintain democracy and more often gravitate to dictatorship.
Arguably, this is what happened in Afghanistan, despite the best efforts of the coalition forces, they were unable to get good enough educations to enough Afghans to be able to maintain a democratic nation, a fact the Taliban took advantage of.
The less educated the population the less democratic the society
It’s extremely logical to have the most educated people select the leader, such people are the best at selecting a leader because they have the tools to do so and so will in most instances make the smartest choice.
However, the smartest choice for a small number of educated people will be very different to the smartest for a large body of educated people i.e. people always put self-interest first.
This is why in a nation where the whole populace is educated, leaders find it hard to remain in power even if they do well let alone if they do poorly i.e. they have to keep a majority of the population happy, not just a tiny minority of educated people.
This is why education is the enemy of dictatorships, it creates an extremely large unified force that will hold them accountable and kick them to the curb if they do not act in the best interests of the majority.
That means it is much harder to abuse your power when you are facing an educated population. However, restrict education so that only a tiny minority get it, then you can manipulate that large unified but uneducated force to control the minority with the educations, and on the flipside, you can manipulate the minority with the educations to control the large unified but uneducated force.
That means by restricting access to knowledge you can gain absolute power over a nation, which is why defacto dictatorships like China, Russia, North Korea, and the Taliban, employ such tactics. They obviously do it in different ways, but the principle is still the same, restrict access to knowledge to gain and maintain power.
Restricting people’s educations is how dictators gain complete control
I’m a big fan of George Orwell’s book Animal Farm mainly because it tells perfectly the story of how to create a dictatorship — or as we call it now, an authoratianist leadership. From start to finish, it is a story of how the pig dictator Napoleon hoards all the knowledge while doing everything he can to restrict the rest of the farm animals from getting that knowledge.
By the end, he has a school that is only for the pigs where they are taught the knowledge he wants them to be taught, and because he has manipulated history to tell the story he wants told, even they lack the knowledge to challenge him.
Not just that, outside of the pigs who have the power, none of the animals have the time to even try to truly accumulate any knowledge to overcome their exclusion from education. This is because the way the farm has been set up is they have to work from dusk till dawn.
If you have to work from dusk till dawn, let alone having no time to get an education, even if you could get an education, you have no time to use that education to challenge the leadership. In societies where women are restricted from the workforce, so in societies where women don’t get an education but men do, men have to work from dusk till dawn and can never take time off.
That means they always need the leader, so Napoleon, to keep the food on the table. That means Napoleon controls the majority who are uneducated, and the minority who are educated.
Keeping women out of the workforce is extremely clever for dictatorships because it robs men of any hint of time or ability to challenge them
If you restrict women’s educations, they can’t work, if they can’t work, somebody has to provide for them, guess who that somebody is. Men.
It’s popular among some extreme feminist circles to argue that this reality benefits men by giving them power over women. It’s popular amongst some toxic masculinity circles to agree with this sentiment, which is why they want to create such a world.
However, both are talking absolute rubbish, it oppresses men just as much as it does women — that means it makes both men and women who are not in the minority in power equally powerless in different but the same ways.
Here is how. Firstly, because women aren’t allowed an education, their children will have a primary carer — the mother — that is uneducated. Children who have a primary carer who is uneducated on average suffer much worse life outcomes even with good schooling than those who have educated parents.
But I hear what you say, the men will still be educated because they are allowed to go to school. Firstly, the men will never be around because they will have to work extra hard to support a dependent adult along with the children. Secondly, they won’t be educated, at least not to a decent level.
Here is why. Mothers are, have always been and likely always will be children’s most influential teachers — don’t get me wrong, dads rock and are massively important, but mothers are even more so. It is the same in every species, mothers are the most important teachers — at least when it comes to young children, it becomes more even as we age, but when it comes to young children, it’s all about mothers.
This is why in the past women were often more rounded on an education level than even men on many levels, mainly because they had to teach the boys and girls when they were young, so they needed to know what to teach the boys and girls.
But if you restrict a mother’s knowledge by restricting her education you by default restrict the knowledge that both boys and girls alike will get, and you will restrict it at the most important point, when they are preteen.
This reality ensures that both boys and girls alike outside of the elites — regardless of whether they go to school or not — will all be at an immense disadvantage by the time they reach their teens. There would still be hope if they had time in their teens and early adulthood to make up the deficit.
Neither will ever get that time — no, not even men. This is because the men in such societies have to as soon as they are able take up any employment possible and start working, then the moment they are earning enough to be able to provide for a woman, they will have no choice but to take one as a wife. Yep, just like the women don’t get much choice over their husbands, the men don’t get much choice over their wives.
Many sons in such societies even get trapped because they have sisters who need supporting, and the father is unable to support them any longer on his own. This leaves the son with no choice but to take up the flak, and he can’t get married until his sisters are married off because he can’t afford a wife while supporting his family.
Even if he could, and even if he only has to support her, he will have an adult child that he will have to provide for for life, so he is barely any better off. By restricting access to contraception, he will also have to swiftly start providing for the children they have.
This will make the man have no choice but to kowtow to the leader, who only has to offer the opportunity to put even a little amount of food on the table to keep him under control.
That means this man who got off to a poor start on the educational front because his mother was not educated, but then got a little bit of a boost by being allowed to go to school, immediately is pushed into the workforce, and then is trapped in the workforce by having a woman and children depending on him and his earning capability at all times.
Even if he is lucky enough to go to university, it won’t matter because in this type of world on an individual level, women need men, and when women need men on an individual level, that need must be met on an individual level. The moment that any man in such a society meets that need, is the moment his chance to pursue any life he wants is over because the moment he meets that need, he has a lifelong dependent.
That is the power of restricting women’s educations, it doesn’t just lead to uneducated women who are dependent upon men, it equally leads to poorly educated men who are forced to work non-stop from a young age to meet that dependence, who are forced to kowtow to the leadership for a pittance of food, because they need it to keep their family’s alive.
That means restricting women’s educations robs both men and women alike of the education, the time and the freedom to challenge the leadership, which is why the Taliban are doing what they are doing. They want to rule unchallenged and there is no better-proven way of doing that than to restrict people’s educations — especially women’s.
Final words
The greatest path to dictatorship will always be creating an uneducated populace, and the last century has taught us that one of the best ways to do this is by restricting the education of a gender — specifically women. Even in the West, we are actually seeing the repercussions of this, but in the opposite way. We pushed so hard to boost women’s education that we are now seeing men at a disadvantage and suffering from a system that has become biased against them on an educational level.
This is leading to a society in which there are far too many men who have not been given the opportunity of a proper education, which is why so many men are struggling to get into the labour market and maintain relationships. This is creating mass friction, and that friction is starting to see all of our rights — men’s and women’s alike — be threatened.
That’s why it’s so important that we fight to ensure that everyone regardless of gender, ethnicity, whatever, gets an equal chance at gaining an education. That means we need to fight non-stop to create an education system that works for all, and fight for it in our own countries, and everywhere. Democracy and the rights of the majority rely upon it.
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