Education
Religious Liberty for Some
This year, Texas introduced a $1 billion school voucher program that gives parents thousands of dollars toward tuition at private and religious schools. But families choosing Islamic schools are facing obstacles, in a case that recalls a long history of debate over faith and freedom.
Degrees of Uncertainty
American universities are under strain amid visa restrictions and declining international enrollment. Even MBA programs are beginning to feel the heat, but liberal arts and science schools have faced deeper cuts.

The Life of a Student in Gaza
The destruction of Gaza’s universities has erased not just buildings, but entire futures. For students, it has turned years of study into uncertainty, forcing us to rebuild our hopes from the ground up.

Textbooks of Jihad
Alongside new textbooks, authorities in Sanaa have organized summer camps, in-school festivals and other educational activities that orient students toward the battlefield. As Yemen’s conflict nears its second decade, the Houthis are striving to place the next generation on a war footing and have shown no qualms about sending underage soldiers into combat.

What I Taught in the Emirates — and What It Taught Me
The UAE wanted loyal citizens above all to preserve its political model; that primary lesson filtered down to the education system, even if it wasn’t written in the curriculum itself, in the ways that some rules were enforced and others were not, why some people were deported and others worked for decades in the same school.

Kabul University’s New Chancellor Promises an Updated Taliban Outlook
The new generation of Taliban are a product of their times: more open to the prospect of gradual social change than their forebears, yet politically more militant. Many of them played important roles in a war that killed tens of thousands of Afghans but, as they point out, they too lost friends and family along the way.

In Kandahar, It’s a Dangerous Time for Women
We don’t want our country to be a playing field for games, great or small, by meddling neighbors or distant hegemons. You can instead respect our rights and sovereignty and see us as empowered people capable of helping ourselves, and the people around us, given a chance.