A New Book Opens

Pause in comfort for a moment this morning, while sipping your coffee or juice, to consider what just happened in Afghanistan. For a generation, we’ve seen many things blow up in that dusty, medieval land, especially in the months since we saw some things blow up in our own modern land. But Saturday, Afghanistan’s Monday, was the first day of the first new school year there in many years.

Can you recall the wonder and excitement of school’s first day--the new shoes, new friends, new routine, books and things to learn? Well, here’s what they’re excited about in Afghanistan’s Taliban-free schools--having shoes, getting a classroom, fewer bullets flying around, books lacking bigotry, no arrests of teachers for instructing girls.

Life won’t change in one semester. War there has been an enduring business and way of death. And appalling American ignorance and indifference helped create the Afghan anarchy so fertile for Al Qaeda. True, some schools have 1,000 pupils for 10 classrooms, requiring shifts. Rooms are unheated. Some have desks. But thanks to an amazingly swift effort involving UNICEF, numerous nations and millions of American youngsters who mailed $4.6 million of allowances and earnings in response to President Bush’s plea, maybe a third of Afghanistan’s youths--by a rough wartime estimate--started down the long road to literacy this weekend. Charity aside, think of this as American self-interest. One more nation’s new generation of boys and girls openly growing and learning together is one less home for hate and intolerance.

America’s neighborhoods, schools, faculties and families are not perfect. But tomorrow, on America’s Monday, when you’re about to mutter over school buses waddling along, the momentary gridlock at school drop-offs and the fresh ink stain on the right knee of someone’s newest school pants, think for a moment about Afghanistan’s schools, where they’re so tickled that the artillery shell holes are patched and there’s actually glass in the windows. As we await spring break and those college acceptance letters, maybe there’s an important lesson about education and our own lives to learn here from the distant crude classrooms there.