Malala Yousafzai survived a gunshot to the head from the Taliban in retribution for her passionate activism about education for girls starting when she was just eleven. She started a nonprofit to promote and enable education for girls, including those threatened by the Taliban in her native Pakistan. She won a Nobel Prize at age 16. She’s spoken to the UN. She’s traveled the globe to speak with world leaders. She’s also declined to speak with world leaders when it would conflict with her high school class schedule, which is why her grades are better than yours.
Even after winning a Nobel peace prize, with glittering invitations to speak to presidents across the world, education activist Malala Yousafzai always had one priority: her schoolwork.
And the Pakistani pupil’s dedication to her studies has paid off, according to her father Ziauddin Yousafzai, who tweeted that the 18-year-old had achieved six A*s and four As when the GCSE results were released on Thursday.
With her grades, and probably a few letters of recommendation and good extracurricular activities, she’s likely to get into Oxford — her first-choice school — with little difficulty. From there, she’s likely to continue to inspire millions, lead positive change, promote full education for girls, build schools in war zones and refugee areas — you know, same old same old — and I suppose maybe learn to row, since I hear that’s a big thing there.
She plans to remain in the UK for the remainder of her education. “I want to get my education — a good university education. A lot of the politicians have studied in Oxford, like Benazir [Bhutto, who Malala states is her role model]. My dream is to empower myself with education, and then it is a weapon.”
(In all seriousness, this is both awesome and not at all surprising, so congratulations and wow and best of all things to her.)
(Oh, also, she has a movie coming out in October, He Named Me Malala, so that’s another thing that she’s done while still getting top grades.)
Of course, this raises a question: Did Ziauddin Yousafzai first look at her grades and say, “Six A’s? Why aren’t they all A*?” and then pretend he was kidding before she could start crying? Because I’m pretty sure all dads are required to do that.