About

One

The School

Afghanistan is the only country in the world where women and girls are denied the right to education. UNICEF estimates that 80% of school-aged Afghan girls and young women — roughly 2.5 million people — are out of school. Nearly 30% have never entered primary education at all.

Living Wisdom High School is a free, accredited online high school for Afghan young women who have been shut out of the classroom. Students are aged 14 to 20. They attend from home, by video, often on a shared phone, and they graduate with a diploma that an online university will accept — which for most of them is the whole point.

The school runs in partnership with Victory Afghanistan, a 100% volunteer organization that teaches English to Afghan women as a stepping stone to higher education. Victory Afghanistan had long been looking for a way for its students to earn an accredited diploma; Living Wisdom had the accreditation and the curriculum. Every student Victory Afghanistan refers arrives with the English proficiency to succeed here.

Computers

A working computer is the condition of attending. A student who cannot obtain one is not eligible to enroll, no matter how well she qualifies.

A new computer costs $600 to $700 in Afghanistan. The school funded them until partway through its second year — latterly at $500, usually toward a used machine — and then stopped. About a third of students need help affording one, and that cost is now what keeps otherwise-eligible students out. We hope to resume that support; it is the single change that would open the school to every student who qualifies.

Two

The Curriculum

Education for Life.

Living Wisdom teaches the Education for Life curriculum, developed by Education for Life International — the same model used across the Living Wisdom schools worldwide. It is built on four ideas.

Personal excellence

Bringing your best energy and effort to whatever you take on.

Self-discovery

Understanding who you are, what you love and value, and what you can contribute.

Balanced development

Building body, feeling, will, and intellect together, not one at the expense of the others.

Maturity

The capacity to relate to realities beyond your own with empathy and appreciation.

In practice this means classes open with meditation. It means a Self-Expression and Communication course sits alongside math and history. It means every student completes a service-learning project, and every student's growth is tracked through the school's Tools of Maturity framework — resilience, empathy, integrity, purpose — not test scores alone.

For students who have spent years confined at home, the mental-health dimension is not a supplement to the academics. It is a large part of why the school works. Meditation and yoga are taught as tools for holding steady in circumstances the school cannot change.

From the graduates

“The Self-Expression and Communication class taught me how to express myself with confidence, without doubt or fear.”

NS

Read what our graduates said

How we measure progress

100%

of students complete a service-learning project and receive one-on-one mentorship toward what comes after school.

earned an A or A+ in English

2024

83%
2025

88%
2026

90%

Academic progress is tracked with the IOWA Assessments, measured year over year against each student's own previous result rather than against native-English norms — which is the only comparison that means anything for a student studying in her third language.

Three

Our History

It started with one application.

In January 2023 — eighteen months after the Taliban banned female education beyond sixth grade — Living Wisdom received an application from an eighteen-year-old Afghan woman, Silsila Makhfi. She was awarded a full scholarship. She excelled, and then completed an entire additional semester's coursework alongside her own classes to make sure she met every graduation requirement.

Six more Afghan students joined the following school year. One of them, a graduating senior named Frishta Hashimi, introduced the school to Victory Afghanistan — and the partnership that now defines the program came directly from a student.

Demand was immediate and enormous. Victory Afghanistan initially wanted to enroll 100 students in fall 2024. The school deliberately started with 25 instead, to protect the quality of instruction and to build local leadership first. That decision is the reason the program is now run, day to day, by Afghan women on the ground.

Growth

2022–23

1

student
2023–24

6

students
2024–25

29

students
Fall 2025

54

enrolled
Fall 2026

63

enrolled — current

Living Wisdom School draws on 50 years of educational leadership. Living Wisdom International serves middle and high school students worldwide.

Four

Faculty & Leadership

Seventeen teachers, fourteen of them living in Afghanistan — and three of the co-teachers are graduates of this school.

Two of the seventeen teach as volunteers. Alongside them are three co-teachers and twelve assistants. They were trained in rigid, lecture-based systems and moved to student-centered teaching quickly. Employing them is not a side effect of the program; for women banned from public work, it is a second thing the school does.

The three co-teachers are the part worth stopping on. Each of them graduated from this school, stayed on as an assistant, and now teaches alongside the staff who taught her. A student who enrolls here can see, in the woman running her class, the thing the school is actually for.

Living Wisdom

Kathy Rodrigue

Director, Living Wisdom Afghanistan

Nearly three decades in student-centered learning. BA, Evergreen State College; MA in Psychology, Antioch University Seattle. Teaching since 1995, from 4th grade through high school, in classrooms and online. At Living Wisdom since 2020, where she has built the online learning programs the Afghan students depend on. She oversees curriculum, teacher training, credit assessment, graduation tracking, and accreditation — across a nine-and-a-half-hour time difference.

Nitai Deranja

Principal & Program Director, Living Wisdom School

Founding Principal of Ananda Living Wisdom School and the architect of its educational model. Director of Living Wisdom International Online High School, President of Education for Life International, and Chief Mentor for the DLF Foundation Schools in New Delhi. BA, UC Berkeley; MA in Education, UC Davis; California Lifetime Teaching Credential; Phi Beta Kappa.

Jaya Bottaro

Co-Director and Board Secretary, Living Wisdom School

A certified Education for Life teacher with a background in psychology. She manages the bookkeeping for the Afghanistan program and makes sure teachers are paid on time — the unglamorous work the whole thing rests on.

Peter Skillman

Board Chair, Living Wisdom School

A software engineer with over 35 years in technology, specializing in web application development, across the private and public sectors. BA in American Studies, magna cum laude, Amherst College. He provides governance and strategic leadership, and has built much of the school's digital infrastructure — including this site and the student information system behind it.

Victory Afghanistan

Roquiya Sayeq

Public Relations Director

Oversees student and volunteer-teacher onboarding across Victory Afghanistan's programs. MS in Applied Data Science, University of Chicago.

Selena Paulsen

Volunteer Guidance Counselor

Thirty years in local government, arts, and education nonprofits; Development Officer for a public library district in Northern Colorado. BA, University of Colorado Boulder; MPA, University of New Mexico. She helps students build education plans and get through application processes. Founder of the Article 26 Foundation, a family nonprofit providing microgrants to Afghan young women for exam fees and laptops.

Alumni who teach

Frishta Hashimi was in 10th grade when the Taliban took power and her education stopped. She found English classes online, then started teaching English to girls in her neighborhood. That persistence earned her a full scholarship to Living Wisdom, where she graduated in 2024 — and it was Frishta who connected Living Wisdom and Victory Afghanistan. She now teaches here part-time.

Samreen Sadaat is also a graduate of this school and works with Living Wisdom.

Both are named here at their own written request. Everyone else is identified by initials or by a pen name, which remains the policy across the rest of this site. Their words are on the In Their Own Words page.

Afghan women are barred from school. This one enrolls them.