In Evanston/Skokie District 65, our sixth-graders are learning about Malala Yousafzai. By way of introduction, our class watched her Diane Sawyer interview and then read an excerpt from Yousafzai’s young adult memoir, I Am Malala.
During the lesson, I stood on the periphery and watched as my class listened to her story, many for the first time. Another corrupt layer exposed; the ugly truth of our world.
According to Malala’s memoir, she “was ten years old when the Taliban took control of her region [in rural Pakistan].” After the takeover, women were no longer allowed out of their homes without their husband, father or brother, and girls were no longer allowed to attend school.
Silence typically ensues as sixth-graders ponder the ramifications of a Taliban takeover.
The beauty of Malala’s story is that she fought back against terrorism. She spoke out on the radio and local television news programs about her desire to receive an education. And for this, she paid a steep price.
You probably know the story. On Oct. 9, 2012, on the school bus heading home, she was shot at point-blank range in the head and somehow miraculously survived.
As students read more about Malala, their questions pour in: “Why,” one girl asks, “do corrupt governments go after education? Isn’t education good for their society?”
This year, I sent the question right back. “Why would a ruling class want their population uneducated? How might this benefit the people in power?”
The reverberating parallels of these questions run deep in our current climate. They are deafening.
Of course, nobody in our country has been gunned down by religious fundamentalist extremists for advocating on behalf of the importance of education for women and girls … yet. But as we stand and watch this current administration shutter the Department of Education, I can’t help but notice the stark similarity between Malala’s reality and that of the children in front of me.
The Founding Fathers were clear: public education is vital in maintaining a healthy democracy, and, according to Derek Black for Time magazine, “[John] Adams was explicit: the education of ‘every rank and class of people, down to the poorest’ had ‘to be the care of the public’ and ‘maintained at the public expense.’”
And still, we see our national leaders take direct aim at public education. According to NPR, “At the start of 2025, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) employed more than 100 people. As of March 21, all but three employees [were] placed on administrative leave, and eventually laid off.”
These layoffs resulted in confusion and disorganization, which feels very much like the point. “The data needed to drive the next round of Title I and grants to rural schools” like the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) “isn’t going to happen as a result of the cuts to NCES staff and contracts,” reported a former, anonymous NCES employee.
“Without data oversight and guidance from NCES, William Sonnenberg, a retired NCES employee, worries federal grant money may not reach the low-income students who need it most,” NPR reported.
Clearly, three people cannot effectively do the job of a team of 100. Furthermore, Sonnenberg told NPR, “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say in a given year, I would get thousands of calls from local superintendents or other kinds of people at the school district or state level in Title I offices, asking for guidance.” Who will field such calls and support the communities in dire need of those federal dollars?
Why is fair and equitable access to public education so terrifying to those at the top? Especially to those who seek to rule undemocratically, with an iron fist?
The answer is simple. For Malala, and for all people, knowledge is power. An educated population is an informed electorate.
In the early days of our nation, as each state was founded, so too were their individual public school systems. Yet now, it has become abundantly clear that not all states are dedicated to funding public schools. We see this in the continual promotion of private school voucher programs and charter school adoption.
Handing over the entire responsibility of educating youth to each individual state will yield mixed results. Some states will flourish, continuing the fight to provide services to all students regardless of ability, race, gender-identity, sexual orientation or socio-economic status.
But other states will undoubtedly continue their efforts to defund public education — states like North Carolina, Kansas, Ohio and Florida, who all have track records of aggressively defunding public schools.
Florida redirected tax dollars away from public and toward private schools in the form of vouchers at an alarming rate, putting them on track to spend close to a billion dollars by 2019. And these dollars were not given exclusively to low-income students who could only access failing schools; middle-income and wealthy families were invited to participate in the voucher program too, Black reported in his book, School House Burning.
According to Alec MacGillis, reporting for The New Yorker, U.S. Sen. John Husted, of Ohio, is framing voucher programs for middle- and upper-income families as “advancing school choice,” instead of calling it what it is: the systematic defunding of public schools.
A quality education for all was, at its inception, a core value of our experimental democracy. The United States’ founding principle was revolutionary in its commitment to “turning away from a government dominated by elites [in hopes] that the common man could rule themself” (Time).
Malala understood this precious concept. She fought for her right to an education. She saw the writing on the wall: that an uneducated citizenry is voiceless.
Here in Evanston, our kids are asking all the right questions. But what kind of nation do we hope to leave for them?
Simone Larson: The reverberating truths Malala still teaches is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.