 Good afternoon. I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Libraries, and I'd like to welcome you to our second talking in the library event for this spring semester. Our guest speaker is professor and Dr. Hayat Alvi from the Naval War College and Adam Braver, who's our library program director and professor of creative writing, will introduce her in a moment. I wanted to mention our final talking in the library event this semester, which will be on April 9th and we will be hosting the fiction writer Garth Greenwell, who will be our Vermont Fellowship Creative Writing Distinguished Fellow, and he'll be reading, he'll be leading the creative writing workshop that we host every year. And he will be speaking about his novel, What Belongs to You at Rogers Free Library at 7 p.m. on April 9th, so I hope you all will come out for that. We're grateful to our former alumna, Mary Teftor Happy White, as she was known, who earned her degree here at Roger Williams in her 80s, late in life, and she made a generous gift to the library about 10 years ago that made both this series talking in the library possible, as well as this space. And we're also grateful to her son, John Hayes and White, Jr., who continued his mother's legacy by donating more funds to create this glassed-in performance and presentation space. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Adam Braver to introduce our speaker, and thank you all for coming. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Those of you who were able to come, I think it's good. You're gonna be glad you came and you can make people feel bad who didn't come. So anyhow, today's talk is a good example and reminder that rarely are there either, rarely are there either or propositions. Although many of the toughest issues facing our world get reduced and simplified down to positions that appear in opposition to another to the other, in fact, they often are much more complex and often function in gray areas. Today's program will look at the interconnectedness between literacy, education, and international and national security. So it's our pleasure to welcome back Hayet Alvi to RWU. We met her in June when she attended a conference that we had here at Roger Williams, the northeast region for the northeast regional section of scholars at risk. She came representing the, I think, I think you were representing the Naval War College. I know one has to be careful about who you represent and don't, but yes. But we've very much contributed a lot to the discussions we had there. Dr. Alvi is an associate professor at the Naval War College. She's previously was at American University in Cairo and director of the International Studies program at Arcadia University with a specialization in international relations, political economy, comparative politics, with a regional expertise in Mid-East and North Africa and South Asia along with Islamic studies. Although she is proficient in Arabic and Urdu, she will be speaking in English today. And also, interestingly enough, I bet this doesn't come up, but I would love to talk sometime about your experience being a Fulbright fellow in Syria. So among the objectives of the Talking in the Library series is to, is that we strive to engage in conversations that involve complex and sometimes difficult ideas in order to better understand our world and our role in it. Thank you so much, Adam and Betsy for inviting me and Roger Williams University. And thank you all for coming and attending fresh after your spring break. Betsy, I moved already because of the, can you hear me okay? I'm very moved already because of the venue you just described, Mary Teft, if I got that right, and the fact that she earned a degree in her 80s. And I could not have customized this talk better to fit the venue and what it symbolizes better than the way it kind of, through the cosmos, came together. So I'm very, very moved by that. That is so admirable. And thank you. If that was calculative on your part. As you can tell, I'm very passionate about literacy and especially women and girls and literacy. And that's why I use Malala, Yusuf Zai in my talk, to illustrate not just her message, but also to, as Adam said, package it in a way that hopefully comes across how important and significant literacy and illiteracy are as important variables affecting both positively and negatively, respectively, security. From personal security all the way to national and international security. So that's what I'll discuss and let me just give the general disclaimer that these will be my personal views and not those of the United States Department of Defense or the Navy. Let me begin by talking about a few concepts about literacy and a few data points and statistics. And then, and I'll try to go a little fast because I want to give plenty of time for Q&A. And then I'll talk kind of specifically after the data I give you and concepts. I'll talk specifically about Malala herself and why she's significant and why her message is so important. And I want to preface all of this by saying that these are not issues that are just related to the developing world. We have problems with literacy as well in developed countries, advanced countries, however you want to describe them, the opposite of the developing world. In fact, I'll show you the data. We have a problem of illiteracy in the United States. So I'll get to that. So I just want you to bear in mind as a mental footnote that because we kind of have a tendency to see this as a a bias or a stereotype of what used to be called the third world, we don't say that anymore, developing world or developing societies, that's not the case. Actually literacy issues or literacy challenges exist everywhere, globally, even in the United States. Let me very quickly address some of the photographs I have here. The one in the middle, I'm sorry, I don't have a pointer with me, but the little girl who's all dressed up with a garland around her neck, she's a child bride in India. You're going to see that literacy and illiteracy issues are very interconnected with female constraints for female development. And by development, I don't mean just physical, I mean mental, intellectual, etc. So here you have an example of a child bride. That's not just unique to South Asia or India. That happens in many, many parts of the world. So that's a problem. You see a woman on the bottom left there just before Malala's picture and she's carrying a big heavy barrel. I took that picture in Nepal a few years back and she was working in construction. Now, I know South Asia kind of well. I know Indian culture quite well. Nepal, I went there for a first time visit. But I've seen such images in India all the time. Women work hard labor in construction all the time. But yet they don't have the parity in rights and freedoms and personal choices and literacy in education often, especially in that part of the world. So what a contrast that is. She can carry heavy bricks and mortar and all kinds of construction equipment and supplies, sometimes even with a baby wrapped in a cloth on her back. I've seen it. But yet she doesn't have those rights and freedoms and protections, and especially the right to education and literacy. Of course, you probably know the iconic blue burqa of Afghanistan, especially during the rule of the Taliban. A lot of this is interconnected with Malala and her personal story. So you're going to see some linkages to South Asia, South Asian culture, South Asian female status, and Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular, and how the Taliban rule and Taliban presence in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, because Malala is from Pakistan, had negatively affected and continue to in many ways the lives of females, girls and women. So I put that picture in there. Anyone know what this far right picture is? Sorry about it being a bit gruesome and graphic. No one knows. OK, that's fine. Sadly, I'm very familiar with it through my research. But this was is the Kabul soccer stadium in Afghanistan, the capital of Afghanistan Kabul. It was the soccer stadium and it's where when the Taliban came to power in 1996, they would hold executions in public. Now, if you look closely, you probably don't want to, but you can see that the man hovering over the woman in the burqa is holding a rifle to her head and he has pulled the trigger. She was this woman was among the very first few to be executed in public in this stadium by the Taliban. If you're more interested in this, the source of that picture and the details behind it are in a very important organization, their website. It's called RWA, Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association RWA. And they actually did underground schools for girls because they went underground during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. And they have some spectacular stories to tell. So if you're interested, just go to Google or whatever search engine. Look up RWA and you'll find be aware of those. Some of the pictures are very graphic because they don't hold back on telling the truth. So what is literacy? I know this sounds very basic, very fundamental, but it's important to go over some definitions and concepts. Literacy, education for all global monitoring report of 2006, UNESCO report chapter six categorizes these components of how we define literacy. It's an autonomous set of skills. It's applied, practiced and situated. It's a learning process and it is textual. Then you have kind of a formal definition. The most common understanding of literacy in that formal definition is that it's a set of tangible skills, particularly the cognitive skills of reading and writing and that comes from the same report and that's the page number. How are literacy and education linked to security? In almost every practical way you can think of. Education is attributed a key role in both preventing conflict. I would even insert in their resolving conflict and rebuilding post-conflict societies. Food and water security, how would you not know what is hygienic or safe or healthy or toxic if you don't know how to read and write? Also in terms of food and water sources, right, you need literacy for that. Economic security, every aspect of that. Employment, jobs, training, that's all linked to literacy and education. Health and human security, anything linked to human security and physical health is empowered and strengthened by literacy and education. Legal security, protections and due process. A lot of young girls and women in these very difficult and challenging societies are not aware if they have any legal rights and protections. Even if they're on the books, gender and of course human rights security. And that goes for both, males and females, so this is not exclusive. So now you see literacy and education being linked to almost every aspect of security. Well, let's dig into this a bit further. In recent years, and I'm not going to read these line by line, sorry, some of the slides are a bit wordy, so I'm just going to summarize. In recent years, literacy has actually been recognized as a human right at a global level. So just like the right to life protection from murder or conflict or massacre or genocide, which are things that UN conventions have recognized, so has been literacy. Literacy, learning to read and write, your basic fundamental literacy is now a human right recognized globally. Uses of literacy, especially in a very modern, if you want to call it, globalized world today, interconnected, interdependent, globalized world, we need literacy and knowledge for more knowledge, for more education, and of course, learning and using technology. And of course, you know from social media and other things that it's also needed for social participation. A literate community is a dynamic community, one that exchanges ideas and engages in debate. Illiteracy, however, is an obstacle to a better quality of life and can even breed exclusion and violence. Think of intolerance, think of prejudices, and that's the source of those quotes. What do we mean by adult literacy rate? We talk about literacy all the time, but in terms of actual definitions, what do we mean? Well, that means for the purposes of collecting data and statistics, adult literacy rate, if you go to UN data or any other kind of national data, refers to persons aged 15 and over who can read and write. That source is the UNICEF source, so that's pretty credible. I have selected some statistical data to share with you, and I'll mention, when I'm finished with this, some facts about the United States. I've included, of course, South Asia, so you have Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Pakistan, let's go there first, it's in red on the bottom left. I did that in red because that's where Malala is from, and she's such a vocal advocate for female literacy and education. So if you take a look, 2015 estimates show that male literacy, this is how many men and boys, well, we're talking adult literacy, so age 15 and older, males 69.5% of the total population in Pakistan are called literate, meaning they can read and write. So if you do reverse math, that means close to 30% are illiterate. Females 45.8%. Used to be much worse for females. The illiteracy rate was much higher in South Asia before. In the last few decades, it's improved incrementally for females, not to standards that should be met in the 21st century. If you look at Afghanistan, again, literacy is 52% for male, 24.2% for female folks, that's a literacy rate. So almost 75% illiterate for females. And in my research, when you actually look at some rural, really rural villages and provinces, in Afghanistan, I found as low as 2% and less for females in the real outlying rural areas. India, male 81.3%, female 60.6% literacy. Those have improved again over the last few decades, but if you consider for a second, India has a total population of 1.3, roughly 1.3 billion with a B, right? And so out of that, if 60% of that is female literacy, which means 40% is illiterate of 1.3 billion, that's not a good number in 21st century, still has a long way to go. Niger, I put that in because female literacy is only 11% and South Sudan was terrible too, female is only 16%. In Yemen, again, it's improved over the years, last few decades, but sadly because of the current conflict situation, they've taken so many steps backward. A lot of children being killed, a lot of them not even being able to go to schools and a lot of schools and hospitals being deliberately targeted in airstrikes. So Yemen is a really, really difficult and tragic case for both males and females. Bangladesh, 58% for females, 64.6%. Now, I did a quick research on the United States and there's actually no real official number out there in terms of percentage, but some sources have indicated that the estimate in 2013, my research showed about 32 million U.S. adults are illiterate. Now remember, that can be a little bit conservative. It could probably be even higher than that. So illiteracy is a problem in the United States. There was a Huffington Post article that talked about this, and I think it was from 2013, so if you're interested, you can look that up. So again, when I did the U.S. research, it was a range that they talked about, roughly between 10% and 14% of the total population, illiterate adults. But there's no solid number like they're showing up here. You gotta ask why. I don't have the answer. So total world population literacy rate is 86.1%. These are 2015 estimates. Male is 89.9%. Female, 82.2%. Now, this little footnote here is very important to consider, and that is that some of the worst illiteracy percentages even today are in parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and most of them are women and girls. I wanted to show you, you better not complain about how hard it is to get to Roger Williams' campus, right, that it can be extremely challenging for boys and girls in many parts of the world to get to school, but yet they are so determined to get their education. I didn't take these pictures, but I got them from the internet, but you can get an idea of Nepali girls going to school crossing a rope. Now, I know this was credible because they actually covered this in, I think it was Friends24 or BBC News, if I remember correctly, one of those, and they had a video report on this, and they actually showed it, and it was really heartbreaking to see. Yes. Yes, hand-by-hand. And many fall and die in the water, yeah. And that's every day, every morning and every afternoon, yeah. And that's because they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the bridges, they don't have the proper infrastructure, yeah. There's a good NGO that's providing some bicycles in India, so there are some good stories out there, too. This is very common in parts of Afghanistan, asset attacks on young girls going to girls' schools, especially by the Taliban. And just a little snapshot of young girls being eager about getting an education, and like Malala, when she was a young girl, if you read her autobiography, you know that she was always very passionate about education for girls. Here's one in China. So we take our conveniences for granted. Now this, especially what you see with India here, I've seen with my own eyes, okay? So these are actually school buses, quote-unquote. Children crammed into these small rickshaws or taxis, right? India, Thailand, okay? Pakistan has similar situations, and they're literally packed like sardines. And don't forget, the temperature can get unbearably hot in these parts of the world. They also have horrible accidents, too, and it's awful to hear about them because, you know, they're so packed in, overcrowded. Now I wanted to compare that with Japan, because this is an advanced society, advanced economy. There's a school bus in Japan. Inside, they have computer monitors for each seat. How's that for the school bus ride? So quite a difference, you see this, and compare it to this. You have to ask yourself, why? Why is that? I'll pause here and shift gears to Malala's message and why she symbolizes and presents one of the most compelling messages and points for the 21st century. And again, I want to emphasize this is not just for females, but also for males. Boys and girls need education. They need literacy globally. But because of the statistical data you just saw, it's more dire for girls. So Malala, she's probably 20 by now. I forgot when her birthday is, but when I did the research, she was 19, born in Pakistan, Swat Valley. Right now, she's attending Oxford University in the UK. She has received the Nobel Peace Prize at age 17, the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She's also received the Sakharov Prize in Europe for Human Rights and Freedoms and co-founded the Malala Fund. Now, if you go to her Twitter account, you can follow her on Twitter, and she's very active in her fundraising activities globally for the Malala Fund, which is used to build schools in her part of the world, but also globally. So it's a very important fund. Some important quotes from her book that I like to share with you. One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world. Remember, the Taliban shot her in Pakistan when she was in her school bus. Not like the Japanese school bus, but a different kind. And that's a riveting story in itself, and you can read the details of it in her book. There's a quote in her book. I realized what the Taliban had done was make my campaign global. That's very profound for a young teenage girl from South Asia to realize that, you know, she's able to make good of that horrible situation and tragedy and violence. Then she was asked, and there's a great John Stuart at the time daily show interview with Malala. I don't remember the year, but I'm sure you can find it online. It was just the only word I can describe it as was delicious to see that interplay between John Stuart and her. And he asked her point blank, if the Taliban were here, what would you say to them? Or how would you feel? And her answer, of course, was just full of wisdom and remarkable and full of compassion. And this is another quote from her book. I don't want revenge on the Taliban. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban. And then I think this says it all about the situation with the Taliban and like-minded extremists. And she's spot on with this. The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. And I think that's very, very true for a lot of reasons. I will not read this, but this is kind of a quick biographical sketch of Malala. It comes from her book, and I just summarized a lot of it, and I'll just quickly tell you some main points. One of which is when her Swat Valley home region in Pakistan got overrun by the Taliban at the time. Remember, this is Pakistan, not Afghanistan. She was young. She was a schoolgirl, and she talks about it in her book. But she also mentions that at the time she had forged a relationship with a BBC news reporter. She did it anonymously where the reporter asked her to keep a journal as a girl living under the Taliban, anonymously or under a different name for her protection. And she did it. She kept a journal and she would, every week, I believe it was, every week she would submit pieces of her journal to that reporter to describe what it was like to live under the Taliban as a girl. And it's quite nightmarish. It's quite depressing and dark. It's literally constraining because girls weren't allowed to go out, they weren't allowed to go to school, they weren't allowed to be themselves, especially outdoors. So that's part of her biographical sketch. Again, being so young and having such a profound insight and ability to write so eloquently and articulately about that experience and convey it to the broader audience, it's remarkable. The rest is about her fund and how she got shot and the Nobel Peace Prize. Again, I urge you to either watch the documentary about her because I believe that's been circulating lately or read her autobiography, which is probably even better to get all the little details. But there are really remarkable points in her life that really were life-changing in her kind of world view and her passion for playing a role in promoting literacy and education for all children, but especially for young girls. I got a lot of this from the Nobel Peace Prize website for her. So if you're interested, that's the URL for that. And it describes all of this. Just to give you that snapshot of how globally she became familiar as a symbol of female literacy and education and of course a victim of Taliban violence. And of course that's her family. Her father in particular has played a very significant role in assisting her in that driving passion and generating that driving passion for literacy and education for children, but especially for girls. And she talks about that in her autobiography, how important her father, the role he's played. Now that's very unusual for a Pashtun man in the Swat Valley region to be so pro-girl, if I can put it that way I'll put in quotes pro-girl. It's very unusual. In fact in the book she describes how his friends in his circle when she was born and it was announced that the mother had a baby girl. The father celebrated and his friends in his circle asked, why are you celebrating? It's a girl. And he said, I'm celebrating. It's a girl. So a different mindset and that of course has an influence on her. Anyone know what her mother was doing when she got shot in the school bus by the Taliban? So this is very interesting too. I thought again very amazing coincidence. Her mother was attending a literacy workshop while her daughter was coming home from school on the school bus and getting shot by the Taliban. Her mother's been illiterate for a long time and she was learning how to read and write. So I love using political cartoons and I think these really summarize well what we're talking about when it comes to the Taliban and Malala and these kinds of extremist attitudes and what she said in her quote about extremists. So weapons of mass instruction, the fear of education, the fear of girls being educated. So I'll read that in case you can't see in the far back. That which is most terrifying to a militant, I'll say fundamentalist. And that is a girl with a school book. And yeah, I mean the Taliban at the time tried to spin this in many ways to not make them look bad, believe it or not. But yeah, education for girls and they're the ones who are saying, whoa, this is a threat. This is a major threat. And of course to the minds of many extremists, an educated girl is a threat to their status quo. The crossing guard with the stop sign and machine gun, the Taliban version. And of course here he has the belt, suicide belt and she has the school books. So I'll close with some quotes that are very dear to me. And one of them is by an Islamic Sufi, a mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi. And he says, you were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life? And I think that pertains very much to how girls in many parts of the world are suppressed from flying, from soaring, from transcending. And they're kind of very meager and mediocre existence, sometimes even oppressive existence. And then I love this quote by Malala, with guns you can kill terrorists, with education you can kill terrorism, which is again very, very true. That's where I'll stop it and open it up for Q&A. Thank you all very much for listening. Thank you. Questions? Yes, please. Yeah, in fact, thank you for bringing that up. Please identify yourself if you don't mind. Yeah, thank you. In fact, I should have mentioned that when I was giving the statistical data. I usually do and I forgot. This is very true, in fact. So that means you have to take it with a grain of salt because those are your own, the global governments that are giving their own data sets. And if you go through the actual, and I really encourage you to actually look at the hard copies of previous UN development program statistical data, UNDP, that comes out every year. These days, of course, you can get it online, but even if you go back to the really old ones, you see that there are a lot of them that are left blank. So I'll pick on Saudi Arabia. They almost always, sorry for the oxymoron, almost always never give out that kind of data. And if they do, it's very much embellished. So even the data we saw, and I can try to go back to that, has to be taken with a grain of salt. So they're probably very conservative numbers. It's probably a lot worse in reality. So I thank you for bringing that up. That's a very important point. In research and academic material that you put together and publish or present, the best you can do is mention that disclaimer that this data comes from the governments themselves. A better probably approach would be NGOs or non-governmental organizations that actually do specific work in these areas. So that would probably be a less embellished number if you go in that direction, which for scholarly purposes is a better idea. Thank you for that. Any other questions? Yes, Betsy? Yeah. So my background is my undergraduate degrees are journalism and international studies. I double majored. So really national security and other kinds of security in those old, old days didn't come into play so kind of predominantly as it does today. Today everything is security related. In those days, they're kind of separate variables, right? But today everything's linked. Food security, water security, human security, all of that. My master's degree was in Near Eastern Studies and mostly Arabic language, and then my PhD in political science. So I didn't really get hardcore security until I got into political science and then Naval War College where I've been for 10 years. That's where my real kind of microscopic interest and focus on security per se has been fine-tuned. That said, excuse me, I am a product of South Asian culture. So far before undergraduate studies, I understood kind of intuitively and instinctively what it's like, not in the extreme oppressive sense, but what it's like to have disparity being a, or gender disparity being a South Asian heritage female, even though I grew up in the United States. Because it's cultural. It's deeply rooted in South Asian culture. And let me emphasize, it's not unique to South Asia. You're going to find this everywhere. Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, everywhere. Where females have a lot of biases against them, right? And so I'm sorry for the long-winded answer, but this is kind of where, as a child, I always knew I would want a higher education. It was just a drive, almost like Malala, but of course I'm not Malala, but it was a drive within me that I will always get a higher education, no matter what it takes. So that had nothing to do with security, but it kind of nicely melded together at this stage. Yes, Adam? Yeah, so I'll give you the bumper sticker answer, which is military is for the purpose of warfighting and using what we call the dime toolbox. D for diplomacy, I for informational tools, M for military, and E for economic tools. And usually military globally focuses on the M tool or the military tool for answers or solutions to problems. United States armed forces are not unique to that. It's not that we exclude education, we educate obviously our own troops and soldiers and so forth. However, the kind of immediate answer to this, I think it's safe to say in the purely military circles would say, that's not our job. Our job is a military answer and using the dime construct, right, that whatever we're capable of using. Now I made the argument, actually in an article that got published in Tampa Tribune a few years ago, that the dime construct actually needs an extra E, which is for education. Not just for the troops and soldiers, but also for those you are targeting. But again, that has to come from the ground up in those societies, right? So I mean that's part of Malala's struggle, right? You have the Taliban, they're very anti-knowledge and anti-education, and in fact I'll give you a film that you might want to watch. It's called Kandahar. I don't remember the year it came out, but you can find it probably on Netflix or any DVD source. It's called Kandahar and there's a scene in it of a Taliban run seminary or madrasa in Afghanistan. It's a fictionalized story of a true story. And I mention this because that scene really depicts the reality of how Taliban and in more modern cases ISIS, right, run their schools. They understand the war of the schools. They understand it, that this is a war of schools. So you're hitting on something that I always punctuate, which is military response is not enough. And these guys, the bad guys, they know there's a war of schools. ISIS ran its own schools. But what is their curricula? What was the Taliban curricula, which you would see in the movie Kandahar, that scene? It's two things. One is memorizing the Quran without understanding it. So little boys would be trained to memorize the Quran, but not understand what it says. The second thing in the curriculum is jihad, violent jihad. And in that scene, in that scene in Kandahar, in the movie Kandahar, the teacher actually asks a little boy in the school, how would you kill an enemy soldier? So those are the only two things. So they understand that it's a war of the schools. And I've always used that label. It's a war of the schools. Malala knows this very well. The problem is governments and militaries alike. They have a quick fix, which is send out the military, do airstrikes, which have a temporary effectiveness. ISIS has lost its territory. Taliban has lost its territory, but the ideology is not snuffed out. The schools are still there in Afghanistan. So it's up to governments, it's up to society to try to deal with that. Now Malala tried, she got shot. So what's the answer? What do you do after that? So you need more like-minded men, fathers like Malala's father, who is pro-girl and not anti-girl. How do you do that? You have to have a change in cultural mindset. That doesn't happen overnight, as we know. Now I'm curious, so have you thought in asking the question, have you thought what maybe the military can do in regard to this other than the military response? I need help in that area because, like I said, there's this kind of default reaction on the part of governments and militaries. So think about that. Maybe you'll get the Nobel Prize if you come up with the answer. Anyone? Questions? Yeah, so it's a very good question. And I'll be honest, I'm a little bit disconnected from the K-12 education system. I've been in kind of adult age range education for a long time, so I'm not sure what's going on in K-12, but as an educator, if I were to guess, I would say, and based on a lot of things I read, I would say we have a major crisis in our educational system in K-12. And all this data and research and articles that I see, and I am a new Zahalik, on a regular basis that countries like China, other Southeast Asian countries, South Korea, etc., Japan, they far outdo us in education at the K-12 level, tells me that that's a major crisis, not challenge, but crisis for the United States. If we can't do by the end of high school, and of course the dropout rate itself is a separate issue, and there's more usually statistically more male dropouts than females, but our dropout rate is really high and not getting better. That's a whole other can of worms, but if you can't do basic reading and writing and math by the end of high school, we're in trouble. We're in a lot of trouble. If you don't read books and intellectual resources that are going to stimulate your intellectual capabilities up until your grave, in my opinion, you're in trouble. We are in trouble. So we need that. We need the intellectual discourse. We need strengthening of K-12 educational system. We need to prioritize education. If you look at, I might get myself in trouble here, but if we look at how much money we put into, and here I'm talking about the United States and I am an American, proud American citizen, but I'm very saddened by this. How much money we put into things like, for example, these days, candidates running for office, funding wars and conflicts, funding things that are not human security priorities in general, and of course, the value that should be placed on education and teaching and teachers. We're not going to win this race of education and intellectual advancement as well as technological advancement with competitors. This is not going to happen. We're shooting ourselves in the foot by not placing the highest value on education and educators. And I'm glad you brought that up because it allowed me to be on a soapbox for a second. I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I've seen some commercials about new TV comedies or cable comedies that actually make teachers look really, really disgusting. And I don't know, is that the new trend? I really don't know. And is this trying to reflect the reality if that's the case? We're in a lot of trouble. Or just a message that conveys that teachers are so disgusting and so morally deficient and all of that in a comedy that spokes fun at teaching in schools. Am I right? Am I missing something here? But I see these commercials and it turns my stomach to see that. And as an educator, I find it highly offensive. And if that's what's going on in schools, that's even worse than what I thought in terms of the situation for American schools and education. So I really, really hope that it doesn't look good right now, but I hope we really improve our value system to highly value education and educators. Because until we do that, we're not going to improve in so many aspects of society and other aspects of security. Sorry. I'll address that in just a moment. Do you have a follow-up? Okay. Excellent. You didn't speak up earlier when I... That's okay. I'm so glad. Thank you. If you're interested in my slides for your major, let me know. I'll be glad to give it to you. Yeah, thank you for that question. Personally, I don't have that other than what I've seen with my own eyes with the Indian rickshaws full of kind of overflowing with little kids. But I did see the documentary. I think it was Friends 24 about the ropes. And it was a very good documentary. And it's in English. If you don't watch Friends 24 in English, if you know French, that's even better. You can watch it online and it's quite good. And they have some outstanding video documentaries like that. So it's all about improving quality of life, right? Children and parents rightly motivated will realize that in order to have a better future and a better quality of life, and of course in the modern world, even those who are poor might have some, maybe some access to images through the internet or other computers or the neighbor has a computer or whatever. In the old days, it was television that antennas would be in the slum areas. Now it's satellites, right? So there is some technological access and they can see it and say, wow, I want to be that woman doctor or I want to be that woman pilot or I want to help my village build a bloody bridge, right? My kids and grandkids don't have to go through this, right? So it's at a very personal level of motivation and of course the parents don't want their kids most of the time to be doing what they've been doing, which is probably, you know, cultivating the fields out in the farm, not getting anywhere in terms of money and finances, having too many mouths to feed. And they want better for their children as well. Now I'll put a little footnote to that. A lot of South Asia is still a feudal society, meaning that those who are farm, this is a great kind of tangent here, but it's related to literacy issues. A lot of farmers in India are committing suicide because of the debt they owe and because they're getting no attention from government, their subsidies if any are not there, but they're committing suicide and this has been happening for a long time. And they're poor of course, they're poverty stricken. What's going to happen to their children? It's a cycle, it's a vicious cycle. Again, they have to till the land and children have to help but it's feudal because the debt gets inherited by the next generation, right? So it's a feudal society, so not everywhere, but it still remains the remnants of it. So that's yet another level of primitiveness that is a major constraint on advancement and development at a most basic level. But it's really at the end of the day, it's really as a child like Malala, I want what's best for my future so that I can give back to my society and community. For parents who can have that vision, it's to make sure that the children don't suffer the way they did. Yes? Sure. So true, yeah. Thank you for adding that. In fact, a lot of that mirrors the South Asian case as well and in fact, like I said, Malala's father is kind of the exception rather than the rule. So the parental attitudes are very, it depends from family to family but it can be especially in that kind of circumstance, very similar to what you described so thank you for that. I'll even add, many years ago I was asked to provide a review of a school in Ahmedabad, India. I was asked to provide a written critique of a K through 12 school and I spent the whole day there and I spoke to the principal running it and he told me that even though the caste system is illegal in India, a lot of parents refuse to send from the local vicinity, send their kids to school because they don't want intermixing with the cast. So even that and that was just, I think that was 2004. So that's still very much a part of the mentality. So again, it goes back to your original question, which is how do you change cultural attitudes? Well, that takes generations. Well, thank you all very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks very much.