If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.
Greg MortensonRead
Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Educating girls leads to community empowerment and health improvements.
The quote highlights the profound impact of educating girls on societal development. While boys may leave their villages in search of opportunities, educated girls often become community leaders who implement positive changes in health care and hygiene, ultimately reducing infant mortality and fostering cultural shifts towards women's empowerment.
Themes
EducationGirlsEmpowermentCommunityHealth
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in speeches advocating for women's education.
More from Greg Mortenson
All quotes →If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.
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You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.
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If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs.
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In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.
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