Girls in School: The “Girls’ School” Genre at the New Frontier

Abstract

In April, 2011, the news hit the wires that Greg Mortenson, the author of the celebrated Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools,had not described his adventures building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan with full accuracy. Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools are both feel-good memoirs that chronicle Greg Mortenson’s heroic travel exploits in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment to bring learning to Muslim girls. In a number of TV exposé s and other mainstream outlets, including a dialogue with Jon Krakauer on Sixty Minutes,Mortenson’s credibility was interrogated: evidence had surfaced that his stay in the village of Korphe, and his promise to build a school there, did not directly follow from his failed attempt to climb the Himalayan mountain K2 in 1993 and getting lost on the descent as he had written, and he was not really kidnapped by the Taliban.¹ Krakauer is explicit about the questionable accounting practices that Mortenson practiced and later claimed as but instances of a naï ve guy who suddenly and miraculously finds himself at the head of a large business enterprise, unawares. Not only did many of the members of the CAI charity’s Board of Trustees resign due to Mortenson’s inadequate reporting of expenses—for example, he was using expensive private jets to travel to speaking engagements—but also money that was collected from schoolchildren in the United States to pay for “teachers’ salaries, student scholarships, school supplies, basic operating expenses” (41) was not spent in these designated ways.