By Shafiqa Rastagar
I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that the most oppressed group in Afghanistan society is students. What you see in the video is just one example among thousands. We have witnessed far more harrowing scenes. In this country, neither families support their children nor do any institutions.
When I started school, our house was far from it. We walked on foot, and the school bell had already rung when we arrived. Every day, a merciless teacher stood at the gate, blocking us with two sticks—one to hold us back and the other to strike our hands. At first, we pleaded and cried, but we grew accustomed to it over time.
Uruzgan was insecure. Schools remained closed for four years. Thanks to my mother, I had a private tutor and managed to keep up with my studies, but many of my classmates, when schools reopened in sixth grade, couldn’t even write their own names. In that same class, we had a teacher who was also a local police commander! No one questioned why a policeman was teaching? He was a ruthless man. One day, during an English lesson, when no one but me had learned the material, he ordered me to slap my classmates in front of everyone with a “military-style” slap.
I resisted, but it was futile. That day, he beat me with a stick instead—so severely that my hands blistered. When I returned home, I told my brother, who happened to be a friend of that teacher. He went and spoke to him—I don’t know what he said, but after that, the teacher never laid a hand on me again.
During my university entrance exam preparations, I attended a class at a learning center called Zahoor. There was a teacher named Sultani—an utterly despicable man. He shamelessly cursed at the boys and disrespected the girls in ways beyond imagination. But we thought we had finally succeeded once and passed the entrance exam. Little did we know that university would be an even worse experience!
Some professors were knowledgeable and kind, but others had merely copied their textbooks from Iranian sources without fully understanding the content. I remember studying Introduction to Law so much that the pages of my book became thin and worn. I read sixteen times for my 20% midterm exam, yet I only scored seven points.
For the final exam, I studied an additional twenty-seven times—a total of forty-three revisions—and finally scored 72! I was overjoyed that I didn’t fail. However, after the first semester, I stopped studying and preferred reading non-academic books instead.
I had a roommate who would wake up startled and start reading her book in a daze. This wasn’t education—it was trauma, oath god!
A video circulating on social media shows a teacher slapping a student across the face. It is said that the student attends an educational center named Kosar in western Kabul, Afghanistan. The incident of the teacher physically assaulting the student has sparked widespread anger and criticism both online and in real life.
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