I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
1950s education didn't agree with me. I was totally lost.
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.
My mom grew up in Kansas, my dad in Indiana. They had boring childhoods.
And I was lucky enough to have teachers that really, really looked out for me and really encouraged all that. And in rural Louisiana, that was a rare thing back then.
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.
Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.
I didn't get interested in education until I had kids.
Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.
I went to big, broken, under-resourced public schools, but we had a real sense of community, because those were days in the '50s and the '60s when every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block.
I have seen the transformative effect that education has in the lives of young women and their communities.