The headline trickily suggests that one should forget Malala; unfortunately, those that should remember her, based on dropout statistics, have already forgotten her. While there are those students that are figuratively dying to get out of school, Malala almost died trying to stay in school.

Malala Yousufzai, you may recall, was targeted for wanting females in her country to gain an education. She has become a poster child of sorts for anyone who has ever been denied anything and still stands up for what they believe regardless of the consequences. Her ordeal has Biblical implications with, “He loved us so much, that he laid down his life and died.” Malala did not die, but she has been advocating for females’ rights to be educated since she was 12. At age 15, she was shot by the Taliban as gunmen entered the vehicle she was riding in, shot her, and left her for dead.

Sadly, in America, many students have chosen to forget Malala’s ordeal. However, they did not start this amnesia process when she was shot; rather, they started the process so long before. Taking for granted the free public education available in the United States, the average student has sadly probably never even heard of Malala.

In a blog, Sheikyermami asks this rhetorical question, “Why educate women when they’re meant to be breeding machines?” Okay, if anyone is somewhat offended at this point, just wait; there’s more. The content of this blog further states, “Mohammad said, ‘do not teach women writing, teach them spinning and the sura al-nur.‘”

In America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, girls and boys are indoctrinated with the belief that they can do anything and be anything they want to be. They know this, yet many of the school-age youth still decide to forego educational opportunities. According to www.boostup.org, 1.3 million students will not graduate each year. Furthermore, the dropout numbers are staggering with a rate of 27% in North Carolina and 34% in South Carolina.

On boostup.org website, there are 11 teenagers each with different obstacles that, in America, we term as dropout risk factors. Of these 11 at-risk teens, seven of them are females. Ativia, Tatiana, Sabrina, Ebony, Jeanine, Melanie, Anastasia are each profiled for challenges that have the propensity to keep them from succeeding in school. However, their ordeals pale in comparison to Malala Yousufzai’s never-ending platform of justifiable defiance, which involves seeing to it that females are able to be educated regardless of the Taliban’s proclivity to inflict harm.

According to The New York Times, the hospital bulletin said Malala had been shot “at point-blank range” on the upper left side of her head, with the bullet traveling under her skin without penetrating the skull as it coursed the length of her head, through her neck and into her left shoulder. The shock wave from the bullet “shattered the thinnest bone of the skull,” it said, “and fragments were driven into the brain.”

If Malala went through all of this and still has the zeal to want to learn and see females educated, why are there still dropouts in these United States of America?