RASC News Agency: Despite the Taliban’s relentless propaganda campaign proclaiming the establishment of an “Islamic educational system,” the stark and disturbing reality unfolding within Afghanistan’s boys’ schools exposes an entirely different narrative one defined by coercion, censorship, and the systematic dismantling of intellectual life. What now exists under the guise of “education” in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is neither academic instruction nor moral development. Instead, it is an aggressive and methodical brainwashing operation, meticulously designed to raise a generation of ideological foot soldiers conditioned for submission, violence, and unthinking obedience. Classrooms have been transformed into ideological barracks; blackboards into bulletin boards of fanaticism; and teachers into wardens of a repressive, anti-intellectual regime.
Under Taliban rule, the traditional curriculum has been gutted. Core subjects essential for a child’s mental and emotional development such as the arts, civic education, critical thinking, literature, English, and even physical education have been surgically removed. These have been replaced with dogmatic content rooted in extremism, jihadist rhetoric, and enemy demonization. The deliberate erasure of diverse knowledge not only suppresses individual thought but actively cultivates an environment where violence is sanctified and ignorance institutionalized. The textbook, once a gateway to knowledge, has been replaced with shallow, state-issued pamphlets devoid of any academic merit. Concepts such as “science,” “reason,” and “wisdom” are no longer explored but are reduced to hollow slogans used to legitimize an otherwise intellectually bankrupt regime. In Taliban-run classrooms, education is no longer a process of enlightenment it is a tool of domination.
Children are punished, often violently, for harmless personal expression. A boy wearing a brightly colored shirt or sporting a different hairstyle is beaten with sticks or leather straps in full view of his peers. This is not discipline. It is state-sanctioned humiliation, aimed at breaking the will of children and enforcing a culture of absolute conformity. These punitive practices have no foundation in pedagogical principles or authentic Islamic values. Rather, they reflect a deeper pathology an ideology that equates obedience with virtue and individuality with rebellion. Meanwhile, the teaching profession in Afghanistan has suffered a catastrophic collapse. Thousands of qualified female teachers have been expelled, and countless experienced male educators have fled the country, unwilling to participate in the Taliban’s charade. As a result, many classrooms are now overseen by untrained, illiterate loyalists or remain entirely without instructors. What little classroom activity occurs is often performative, a hollow imitation of real schooling, devoid of intellectual substance or pedagogical intent.
Across many provinces, the Taliban have established newly branded “religious schools” that function less as places of spiritual learning and more as ideological training camps. These institutions indoctrinate students into a worldview defined by rigid binaries: “us” versus “them,” “believer” versus “infidel,” “obedient” versus “traitor.” The concept of “jihad,” rather than being presented as a personal or spiritual struggle, is grotesquely distorted into a doctrine of hatred and vengeance. The West is portrayed not as a region of diverse cultures and ideas, but as a monolithic enemy synonymous with heresy and invasion. This linguistic and conceptual manipulation is not merely theological it is political. It is the foundation of the Taliban’s strategy to entrench extremist ideology at the cellular level of Afghanistani society. Today’s doctrinal slogans will become tomorrow’s marching orders for a new wave of radicalized youth, raised not in schools but in ideological silos of resentment and fear.
And yet, in the face of this educational collapse and the long-term radicalization it threatens, the global response remains muted. The Taliban have repurposed Afghanistan’s educational infrastructure into a clandestine network of ideological outposts, all while avoiding significant international scrutiny or sanction. This failure to act is not only a moral abdication it is a strategic one. The world’s silence, whether through negligence or fatigue, serves only to embolden the Taliban’s anti-education agenda. In this bleak landscape, the Afghanistani child is not merely deprived of access to schooling he is denied the right to imagine, to question, to aspire. A regime that masquerades its ideological repression as “Shari‘a” is committing a profound betrayal not only of children’s rights, but of the humane and enlightened traditions of Islam itself.
The Taliban’s educational project is not simply regressive; it is ruinous. It is an act of generational sabotage that aims to destroy not just knowledge, but the very capacity to dream. And if the international community continues to look away, it risks becoming complicit in the intellectual and moral impoverishment of an entire nation.
