More than 200 Nigerian girls are missing after being abducted from school by Boko Haram militants nearly a month ago. One of the group’s leaders has said he’s planning to sell them as slaves. It’s thought they were kidnapped because the Islamist Boko Haram doesn’t approve of girls’ education. As the evidence mounts that educating girls is one of the best ways of alleviating poverty, extremist ideology means that girls in Nigeria and Pakistan are finding it harder and harder to go to school.
The debate has been tamer in Britain, but The Spectator has followed it for the last 150 years or so. In 1865, the magazine called for more funds for the education of girls.
The standard of English culture will depend far more during the next few generations on the advance in the education of women than on that of men, which last has already reached a respectable standard, and the former is still, take the country as a whole, almost beneath contempt.
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