By the time Tahmina Ataee arrived at Bard College Berlin, she had already studied under three education systems, crossed two borders, and learned four languages. But the opportunity that once made her journey possible has disappeared for nearly all Afghan girls, as the door that once led to education and brighter futures is being forcibly shut.
Over the past two decades, a remarkable generation of Afghan women proved what was possible when educational doors were open. As Afghan sociologist Abdul Wahid Gulrani explains, the transformation of women’s education after 2001 was not simply academic. “Girls who grew up in dusty courtyards and unsafe neighborhoods suddenly entered classrooms, universities, and public life. They became teachers, journalists, and community leaders,” he said. For women like Tahmina, it meant the chance to imagine a different future.
Today, Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education are forbidden to girls and women, according to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The agency estimates in 2025 that “nearly 2.2 million girls are now barred from attending school beyond the primary level,” a reality UNESCO warns “almost wiped out” two decades of steady progress for education in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, “women have been banned from universities” since December 2022, cutting off one of the few pathways for higher learning, UNESCO reports. The consequences of these actions are profound. UNESCO estimates the “suspension of women’s higher education alone is expected to cost the country up to US$9.6 billion in lost potential by 2066.”
Today, formal schooling for many Afghan girls has been driven into hiding. According to NPR, some teenage girls now attend secret tutoring centers hidden in basements and private homes, where they study English, the Quran, and high-school level subjects. As Gulrani observes, “education in Afghanistan is not dead, it has gone underground.” “Across the country, girls continue to study secretly in homes, basements, and informal community classes. Some are taking online courses through their phones and laptops. Mothers are teaching daughters at home,” Gulrani said. This quiet but resilient movement, he says, shows that “while the Taliban can close schools, they cannot extinguish the will to learn.”
In this landscape of shrinking horizons, stories like Tahmina Ataee’s stand out as a glimpse of the talent and ambition now at risk. In Kabul, her education reflected the mix of schools that emerged after 2001, when private, international, and public institutions expanded opportunities for girls. She first attended a global private school, then an all-girls Turkish high school where, as she put it, “we had to learn everything twice, once in Persian and once in English.” She even enrolled in an American university in Kabul before her education was disrupted by the Taliban takeover.
Ataee’s path is not unusual for her generation. She is part of a generation of Afghan women whose lives were shaped by two decades of expanded access to education. Between 2001 and 2021, millions of girls entered classrooms for the first time as private and international schools opened alongside a growing public system. Many of those students later left the country, some as refugees and others on scholarships; however, their education enabled them to build new futures abroad.
Still, national progress often masked the realities inside individual classrooms. For Ataee, the experience looked very different from many of her peers. In Kabul, her classmates were often the daughters of politicians and businessmen, while she was the only Hazara student in her grade. The difference, she said, wasn’t only social. “They put a lot of emphasis on religion and like religious practice,” she said. “We even had a mosque inside the school. That was uncommon.”
Religious expectations felt unfamiliar to her. “I have not grown up to be like that,” she said. “My dad is a very, very non-religious person. My mom has had a bit of a background, but she’s also chill.” Yet pressure to conform was constant. “It’s also not peer pressure, but I guess it is, because they’d be like, oh, it’s lunch break, we have an hour-long lunch, and I would go eat first, but they’re like, no, we have to go pray,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it brainwash, but I was also traumatized, so I would call it that.”
At home, faith mattered less than education. Her father, who worked for a German nonprofit in Afghanistan, encouraged her to focus on learning. Tahmina recalls her father asking, “why would you like believe in such things?” Among Hazara families, this emphasis on education was common. “Not only just my family but friends I know and also relatives, they put a lot of emphasis on education,” she said. “They always like push their kids to study.”
Tahmina’s education was interrupted when the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021. “We had to leave everything behind,” she said. “We used to live in a flat, and then everything we owned was gone. I don’t have that sort of attachment to materials anymore.” With help from her father’s German employer, her family left Afghanistan, first to Pakistan and then to Germany. “We were one of the first families they got out,” she said.
Arriving in Germany, Tahmina recalled, “it was a bit chaotic when we got here as well, because they thought we were undocumented or, like, illegally entering, which was not the case.” They spent their first weeks in quarantine camps, navigating new rules and procedures. “It was scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “One day they’d wake you up to do blood tests or like very procedural things, but like to us, I was like, what are we doing?”
As they settled, Tahmina continued her studies online. Before leaving Afghanistan, she had been enrolled “in an American school,” she said. “Then, because of the whole takeover, they were like, okay, our current students can continue their studies online without any tuition, so that’s how I was able to do two semesters while I was in Germany.”
When the university reopened a branch in Qatar, she realized she could not continue there. “I was like, this is not going to happen because I’d have to be there,” she said. “My brother was like, oh, there’s a branch here, you can apply.” At the time, she was learning German and preparing to apply to a local university. “Everyone had the same sort of plan,” she said. “You study German, get to university level, and then apply to a German school. That was my idea of how it’s going to be.” Ultimately, Bard College Berlin offered a different path. “I applied and I checked and I was like, oh, okay, I guess I got accepted,” she said, laughing.
Now at Bard, Tahmina is excelling academically, consistently earning top grades. She is also channeling her experience into research on Afghanistan’s brain drain, investigating why the country’s brightest students and professionals leave and how the loss of educated women affects Afghan society. “I’m trying to understand how the talent that was built in the country can be sustained, there is not a lot of research on it,” she said.
For Tahmina, this research is deeply personal. The barriers she faced in Afghanistan, and the millions of girls whose education is now stifled, inform her understanding of what is at stake. Her work highlights both the potential of educated women and the societal cost when that potential is denied. She hopes her future job will do more than study the problem as she hopes to work for an organization that helps people.
