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There is a reason you keep hearing about the power of educating girls in the developing world. It's a reason so simple that you will probably view it with suspicion, as I once did. It's this: educating girls works. Really works.

Everything has to do with education: If you educate the girls, you educate the family, the community, and society, in general.

The young women in my classes are feisty and clever and believe, often with the passion of youthful optimism, that feminism is a battle already won. I worry for them - and for my daughters, too.

The prevailing view was that girls were outside of school because of the resistance of families to their education. But when I visited a local village, what everyone told me - the chiefs, the parents, the children - was that girls weren't in school because it was the boys that had a better chance of getting paid work in the future.

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.

When girls are educated, you get effects that cascade throughout society.

Those 62 million girls who are not being educated around the world impact my life in Washington, D.C., in the United States of America. Because if we aren't empowering and providing the skills and the resources to half of our population, then we're not realizing our full potential as a society, as mankind.

At any rate, girls are differently situated. Having no need of deep scientific knowledge, their education is confined more to the ordinary things of the world, the study of the fine arts, and of the manners and dispositions of people.

Education, doing homework, is the way to lift up girls. Around the world, where girls are educated, the economy and the standard of living rise.

Population growth is straining the Earth's resources to the breaking point, and educating girls is the single most important factor in stabilizing that. That, plus helping women gain political and economic power and safeguarding their reproductive rights.