YAKAWLANG, Afghanistan — The women began acting about seven in the morning. Seen from a distance, they made up thin blue lines snaking throughout the barren tan mountainside alongside narrow trails traced in the dust, converging from numerous guidelines at the small school inside the bottom of the valley.

Wearing powder blue school uniforms and white headscarves, some of the ladies, ages 7 to 18, had already been strolling for an hour or extra by the time they arrived at the college. There have been smaller groups of boys, too, generally out of uniform, taking walks aside from the ladies.

By 7: forty-five, they were all collected for assembly within the backyard of the Rustam School, in a far off corner of Afghanistan’s Yakawlang District. It is the area’s best excessive college, years 1 through 12, and has an enrollment of 330 girls and 146 boys — astounding in a country wherein normally handiest a third of girls attend faculty.

The most important, Mohammad Sadiq Nasiri, 49, gave his each day pep communicate: Getting into university goes to be harder than ever this 12 months, so they’re going to should do higher than ever.

Rustam can also appear not likely area to encourage collegiate desires. With seven crude stone classrooms, supplemented by means of six huge tents, there are such a lot of college students that they’re divided into morning and afternoon periods simplest four hours long.

There isn’t any energy, heat, running computers or replica machines. Many college materials are written out in longhand by means of teachers. External useful resource once helped however has dried up. One trainer said she has fewer books than students.

Only 5 percent of the students have ma other and father who can examine and write, Mr. Nasiri stated. Most are the youngsters of subsistence farmers.

Yet Rustam’s 2017 graduating magnificence noticed 60 of 65 graduates customary to Afghanistan’s public universities, a 92 percentage university entrance charge. Two-thirds of those established have been women. A couple of years in advance, 97 percent of the graduates went to university.

Unlike most Afghan schools, Rustam mixes boys and women in its lecture rooms. “Men and ladies are same,” the primary stated. “They have the same brains and the identical our bodies.”

He added, “We tell those boys and women, there’s no difference between you guys, and you’ll all be collected while you visit college, so that you want to discover ways to recognize one another.”

One day overdue within the springtime period, Badan Joya, certainly one of five woman instructors among the college’s 12, was teaching a fourth-grade math class in one of the overflow tents. A piece of cardboard painted black served as a chalkboard, with simple algebra formulas scribbled on it. She requested her students, almost all girls, to name their preferred issue. They chorused: “Math.

That is not surprising at Rustam; 40 percentage of questions about the university entrance exams cover mathematics, greater than every other subject. And the women excel.

The head pupil in eleventh-grade math, primarily based on test scores, is Shahrbano Hakimi, 17. Ms. Hakimi is likewise head scholar in her laptop elegance, in which, on that latest day, the ladies have been reading the Windows working gadget, from books. Only one of the 60 college students had a pc at domestic.