Kathryn Wright

Lifelong enthusiasm for creative teaching and learning, in schools, in higher education. Arsenal supporter.

[Sarah Ludford 🇬🇧 🇮🇪🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @SarahLudford]

“If, as the BBC now accepts, it’s wrong to show white people dressing up as grotesque parodies of black people, how come it’s fine – indeed, wonderfully enlightened and progressive – to show men dressing up as grotesque parodies of women?”
https://t.co/JQtzIj41km

[Sky News @SkyNews]

Today (15 August) marks 1,792 days since secondary schools closed to girls in Afghanistan.

With the help of Rukhshana Media, @SkyYaldaHakim heard from girls who are unable to work, study and live the same lives enjoyed by other girls around the world.

#Afghanistan

[Yalda Hakim @SkyYaldaHakim]

Today (15 August) marks 1,792 days since secondary schools closed to girls in Afghanistan.

I've spent almost two decades reporting from Afghanistan - the only country in the world where girls are systematically denied an education.

With the help of @RukhshanaMedia, we heard from girls who are unable to work, study and live the same lives enjoyed by millions of other girls around the world.

These are their stories.

#Afghanistan #LetAfghanGirlsLearn #fiveyearslater 
#humanrights

[Jahanzib Wesa @jahanzebwesa]

Afghan Women Voices 🇦🇫

—Afghan women have joined the protests rallying behind the phrase "My voice is not private."

—They sing as a powerful act of defiance using their voices as a symbol of resistance against the oppressive rule of the Taliban.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan:

An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution.

At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.”

It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday.

The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir..

IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree.

IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” . . .

The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.”

On Tuesday, in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal, The Spectator revealed that Ahmed had been given the prestigious assistant professorship. We noted that in a 2002 pamphlet, republished in 2017, she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching that child marriage is wrong. Like the paper’s author, Mirza, Ahmed has also said that modern science is a problem, because in the “teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.”

After that story created a storm, the education faculty took decisive action. It removed the names of all its staff from its website, presumably to stop anyone who doesn’t know about web archive tools checking to see if they’ve hired any more wrong’uns (spoiler alert: they have

Other action has been less forthcoming. The faculty clearly hopes to ride this one out, issuing a statement that it is “committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law.” Well, we must reluctantly agree that Ahmed – benefiting from the democracy she condemns – should have the freedom to say that English is “one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach, or (while teaching at Cambridge) write that Muslim students shouldn’t have to worry about “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”

But that’s quite different from believing that Cambridge University should fund her to promote her ideas to the future leaders of the country.

Still more indisputable is that a university subject, even one as debased as Education at Cambridge, should not promote baseless, anti-scientific twaddle in the name of academic research.

But it does.

[Sarah Ludford 🇬🇧 🇮🇪🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @SarahLudford]

It’s a massive condemnation of the West that it is devoting more effort to allowing men to self-ID as women than on getting women in Afghanistan liberated from total oppression & trauma

[Yalda Hakim @SkyYaldaHakim]

"Women's rights is not an internal issue. We all have a shared responsibility to protect it."

Journalist and founder of @RukhshanaMedia @ZahraJoya speaks about the restrictions facing millions of Afghan women and girls.

Tomorrow (15 August) will mark five years since the Taliban returned to power.

#Afghanistan #LetAfghanGirlsLearn #fiveyears #HumanRights

[Hannah Neumann @HNeumannMEP]

Tomorrow marks five years since the fall of Kabul.

Five years ago, we asked: How do we protect Afghans from the Taliban?

Today, too often, we ask: How do we work with the Taliban to return Afghans?

The Taliban haven’t changed.

But we have. And we are failing Afghans.

1/8

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

“They have an ideology. And that ideology is not going to let them give women any kind of freedom.” Afghan woman’s rights activist Mahbouba Seraj tells me that under Taliban 2.0, just like under Taliban 1.0, life for women and girls in Afghanistan will always be restricted.

[Kathryn Wright @kathycwright]

In those 5 years they could’ve become teachers, doctors, business women…. ‘I lost years, but I never lost the dream.’ Read Afghan women’s resilient and hopeful words: https://t.co/tj3fUKS8Ro #LetAfghangirlslearn

[Reuters @Reuters]

Half of Afghan women rarely leave home as Taliban restrictions deepen, UN agency says https://t.co/jG7RhmWzhZ https://t.co/jG7RhmWzhZ

[Heather Barr @heatherbarr1]

The Taliban have forcibly disappeared six staff members of the nongovernmental group Women and Children Legal Research Foundation (WCLRF) for nearly a month, Human Rights Watch said today. https://t.co/vLubzpIszO

[Sharif Hassan @MSharif1990]

Talib govt has confined around 20 million women within the walls of their homes in #Afghanistan in the past 5 years. The draconian regime has robbed women’s right to edu,work,travel &visiting public spaces. It has been carrying out a gender apartheid before the eyes of the world.

[Sarah Ludford 🇬🇧 🇮🇪🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @SarahLudford]

When I was young I would never have expected to have to rely on the @Telegraph to support my rights as a woman.
But here we are.
My outlook has not fundamentally changed. But that of the paper I once regarded as my good friend - the @guardian - most certainly has.

[Yalda Hakim @SkyYaldaHakim]

"The world has forgotten that there is no more punishing or unforgiving place to grow up as a woman than Afghanistan."

Acclaimed writer @khaledhosseini, author of The Kite Runner, speaks about the restrictions facing millions of Afghan women and girls.

This Saturday (15 August) will mark five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.

#Afghanistan #LetAfghanGirlsLearn #fiveyears #HumanRights

[Anna Maria Junus @JunusAnna]

The fact that males assault and rape each other in prison is not a reason to send them over to the women's prison to assault and rape women there.

[Prof. Gary Francione @garylfrancione]

People of good will who really care about the equality of women need to recognize that trans ideology is nothing more than a blatant attempt to abolish women as a sex class and to give men the power to define "woman". If that does not alarm you, you need to ask yourself why.

[Bev Jackson @BevJacksonAuth]

@Heccles94 I don’t want the uk to be a place where the demands of men who say they are women matter more than the rights of women and girls.

[Ian Smart @ianssmart]

This could be sorted if Yvette Cooper simply wrote to every NHS Trust tomorrow insisting they must follow the law within 7 days or every person responsible for defying it will need to find another job. Why is that not happening? Who actually runs the NHS if not the government?

[Kathryn Wright @kathycwright]

Link to @christinalamb ‘s article here: https://t.co/BWGxnAtQVn

[Kathryn Wright @kathycwright]

The importance of education to these Afghan women expressed in their introduction to their poetry anthology: https://t.co/tj3fUKS8Ro Thank you @christinalamb for today’s @thetimes article describing the extreme physical & mental hardships of Afghan women. #LetAfghanwomenlearn