Any day that the thought police don't come around to thrash her with a steel cable counts as a good day for Gulghota Hashimi.

"When the Taliban came, they beat me up," says the soft-spoken but evidently iron-willed mother of two young sons. "My boys were screaming and crying."

Hashimi is referring to the cabal of fundamentalist clerics and their acolytes who tyrannized this country from 1996 till 2001, especially the dunderhead thugs from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue who patrolled the streets here, ensuring that men wore beards, women wore burqas, no kites flew and nary a girl attended school.

But Hashimi is a teacher.

She taught prior to the dark days of the Taliban. She continued to teach, albeit clandestinely, even after the Taliban came to power and promptly outlawed formal education for girls. And she teaches now.

In fact, she is a principal – and not just any principal.

The school Hashimi now runs was set up to provide an education to the girls and women who could not go to school while the Taliban regime was imposing its stern and suffocating rule.

The school occupies a two-storey, yellow-stucco house in the Parwan-e-dou section of the capital, employs 20 teachers and daily attends to the dreams and ambitions of 263 girls and women, ranging in age from 13 to 35.

"This year, we have our first class of 11th-graders," says Hashimi, whose appearance is an appealing blend of modern and traditional. She wears a black headscarf over a long brown-and-black sweater and a pair of black slacks.

"They enjoy all the subjects, but they especially like computers."

There are just three antiquated machines in the school's computer room, and there is no Internet connection. None of the teenage students interviewed by a visiting reporter possesses an email address or has ever heard of either Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake – not necessarily a bad thing.

"This is the first time I am hearing that name," says a momentarily flummoxed 18-year-old named Nikbakht Arafi, who currently stands at the head of her Grade 7 class.

The name in question: Madonna. "I like classical Indian music," Arafi says.

Physical space is at a premium here, too. On a recent weekday afternoon, 31 girls and young women – all in Grade 9 – are crammed into a chilly space that might suffice as a cloakroom in a Canadian school.

Heating of a sort is provided by tin-pot, wood-burning stoves, the usual equipment in Kabul, where winters are cold and central heating is unknown.

Despite such shortcomings, demand for a spot at the school in Parwan-e-dou easily outstrips supply, because there are vast numbers of older girls and younger women in this country who now require an accelerated approach to education owing to the interruption of their lives caused by the Taliban.

"We have stopped taking new students because we don't have the budget," laments yet another of this country's seemingly unlimited supply of courageous women, in this case a thoroughly modern-looking Afghan-American by the name of Hassina Sherjan.

"Unfortunately, we won't be able to take any more."

Sherjan is the guiding spirit behind the school at Parwan-e-dou and a network of similar institutions scattered around Afghanistan. She had the vision – and she continues to find the ways, the means and the money to bring that vision to life.

She also has a story of her own to tell.

Born in Kabul, Sherjan fled the country with her family in 1978, not long before Afghanistan was invaded by what was then the Soviet Union, the beginning of an ultimately disastrous occupation that lasted nearly 10 years.

A teenager when she left, Sherjan lived for the following two decades in the United States, where her mother and two brothers dwell still. But her Central Asian homeland eventually exerted an irresistible pull upon her soul.

In 1995, when Afghanistan was trapped in a brutal civil war as various factions of what were known as the mujahideen fought for power, Sherjan left her comfortable life in America and travelled to Pakistan to visit the teeming Afghan refugee camps burgeoning there.

"It changed my whole life," she says of the experience. "I had this urge to come back. I had a very difficult time living in the U.S. after this, talking about remodelling kitchens and so on."

Back in the States, she launched a non-governmental organization called Aid Afghanistan and began to raise funds for her homeland.

Four years later, with the Taliban now firmly in control of the country, Sherjan returned for a time, hoping to do something about this inhuman edict, this ban on formal education for women.

Plan A was to persuade the Taliban to permit her to open a girls' school legally.

Plan B was to open a girls' school by any means possible.

"All the teachers were out on the street, begging," says Sherjan. "I'd see all these cute little girls with their backpacks, with nowhere to go."

Fast-forward to Plan B.

She found five teachers whom she could trust, and together they established a kind of school.

"I had $3,000 with me. We set up these classes in their homes."

Like similar projects of resistance, the schools established by Sherjan operated in deep secrecy, but they were sometimes betrayed by Taliban spies – with horrifying results.

Hashimi, now principal of the school in Parwan-e-dou, was by no means the only renegade teacher to suffer a vicious beating at the hands of the Taliban and, like many others, she still has health problems as a result.

But, even after that first beating, Hashimi was not deterred. She stopped teaching in her own home and promptly started teaching in someone else's.

"I bought sewing machines," she says, "so we could pretend these were sewing classes. But it was really a school."

The students who benefited from such courage and ingenuity – and who displayed no little amount of courage themselves – will forever be in the debt of people such as Gulghota Hashimi and Hassina Sherjan.

Many others, who were not able to attend school at all while the Taliban held sway, are benefiting now.

In December 2001, just weeks after the Taliban government was ousted by the U.S.-led invasion, Sherjan returned to Afghanistan to stay, accompanied by her husband at the time, Omar Samad, who is now Afghanistan's ambassador to Canada.

"When I arrived here, it was like the day after an atomic bomb," she says. "Everything was boarded up. All this life that's going on now, it wasn't here then. There was nothing except beggars in the street."

Immediately, Sherjan set about establishing schools for females whose education and lives had been put on hold during the six years the Taliban controlled Afghanistan.

Requiring an intensive program of study, these girls and women also feel far more comfortable being with students closer to their own comparatively advanced ages.

Sherjan found funding, mainly from the Danish embassy in Kabul.

Now, five years later – and with funding about to run out for purely technical reasons – some 3,000 Afghan women are studying at eight schools that Sherjan has set up around the country.

The students include Mastura Samatzoda, who at 35 is attending Grade 9 at the school in Parwan-e-dou, where she stands eighth in her class. She returned to school two years ago, not long after the premature death of her husband. She does not comment on whether those two events were in any way related.

"I wanted to come back to school," is all she will say.

What other reason does she, or anyone, need?

Meanwhile, Sherjan is beginning to wonder whether it is not a mistake to focus solely on girls and women, while ignoring the young men of Afghanistan. They were permitted to attend school during the Taliban years but their formal training was restricted to the teachings of the Qur'an. In other respects, they might as well have received no education at all.

Such men – unemployed, shiftless, resentful – are now prime recruiting material for the Taliban fighters waging a guerrilla-style insurrection aimed at regaining power, a ghostly struggle fought with human bombs and other acts of terror.

"These are the ones who are really the target for the Taliban," says Sherjan. "They don't have any purpose. They are lost."

She has drawn up a proposal to establish special schools for these alienated young men and is now looking for sources of funding for those programs, as well as for the existing schools for girls.

"Men have even bigger problems," she says. "It's not the women who are becoming suicide bombers."