In the countryside, far from the eyes of the vice and virtue men, families can set up home schooling for girls with the support of village elders and tribal leaders. International NGOs help to fund some of this informal education, often with UN support and some form of official approval. Where outside aid is not available, each child is charged a tuition fee of 25 cents a month which parents pay in cash or in kind. Their teacher had lost his wife recently, and in return for his efforts, the schoolchildrens' parents were cooking for him and his little son and cleaning his house. Teachers in the state system earn so little that the level of education has been dropping.
Students sometimes get no more than an hour or two a day of instruction.
In the informal classes, boys can study the same curricula of Pashto and Dari languages, mathematics, calligraphy, history, geography, Quran and other religious topics taught in the state schools. The alternative textbooks, published in the late 1980s with US academic assistance and reprinted since, recently won the approval of the Taliban authorities and now carry the name of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It keeps them off the streets, and supplements the teaching they get in the government school. Women still cannot attend or teach at universities. In some rural regions where conservative traditions held sway throughout the Soviet occupation, girls are kept away from any form of teaching.