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Girls' education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.

I was born in Iran, left at a very young age - less than a year old - and grew up and was educated in the West.

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

I studied international relations in England, and I wanted to pursue higher education and be able to analyze what was going on in Iran politically, not only in Iran, but in the Middle East.

There are co-ed schools in Saudi, but those are American or British. My dad, of course, believed in the good old CBSE Indian school system and thus, my younger brother Ishmeet and I were put in an all-boys CBSE school. My mother could move out only if she wore a burkha.

Arizona has three of the top 10 public high schools in the nation. We know how to educate a child. We just need to do it more often in more locations, and where we're having issues are in low-income areas where - where kids don't have a parent that cares or two parents that care, and, of course, also in our tribal nations.

When we home schooled my oldest, Jasper, in eighth grade, I saw how empowering it is for a child to learn in their own way. That rebooted my thinking about education.

Quite a few, actually, are involved in education. They have had the same experience Hanna and I had: when they started having their own kids, they didn't want them to have a poor educational experience; they wanted them to enjoy school.

Good home-school educational plans have the kids in groups with other children often and consistently. Because common sense dictates that isolating people is never good and home-schooled children really benefit from being in those type of programs.

I was home-schooled. My mom wasn't a fan of public school systems.