Malala Yousafzai, who is seventeen years old, and Kailash Satyarthi, who is sixty, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday morning—for, in the committee's words, "their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education." 
 
 Satyarthi, who is Indian, is a man who has fought for children for decades; Malala, who is Pakistani, is a child, and a fighter herself. There was some thought, ahead of the announcement, that Malala, as she is known, would be awarded the prize alone. She is more famous than Satyarthi. Two years ago, gunmen from the Taliban got on her school bus and shot her in the head, shattering her skull—an attack she answered by becoming one of the world's clearest voices for girls' education. Satyarthi has survived physical attacks, too, and has led raids on factories that hold small children as bonded laborers. His group, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, has set up schools where those children can be set on a different path. According to press reports, he has worked directly with more than eighty thousand children, and has fought to change the conditions and chances of hundreds of thousands more. Satyarthi has also addressed the role of Western consumers who buy rugs woven with small fingers, helping to set up a labelling system, called Goodweave. Both of these people deserved the award individually. The combination of the two laureates gives it a nuanced character—and a different kind of power than if it had gone to either of them alone. 
 
 It is past time to stop seeing Malala as simply the girl who survived, as a symbol. (The Times called her a “global emblem.”) She is a girl who leads: who addressed the United Nations on her sixteenth birthday; who amazes Jon Stewart and asks Barack Obama about drones. (Watch her U.N. speech for a view of her matchlessly inspiring presence, and also for her words against violence.) She was so young when the Taliban set out to assassinate her. The gunmen targeted her—they shouted her name—because she had written on a blog for the BBC about how girls should go to school. They shot and injured the girl she was sitting with, too. In the days that followed, hundreds of people lined up outside the hospital where doctors were trying to save her, offering to donate blood. She would eventually be brought to a Pakistani military hospital and then airlifted to Birmingham, England, for specialized surgery. Looking at what Malala has accomplished since the day she got on that bus, one can imagine, someday, people lining up outside a polling station, to vote for her. 
 
 The threats against Malala have not ended; they simply haven't silenced her. She is not only a witness whose story warms our hearts. She is an activist, and soon will be an adult, who will, one hopes, also make some of her casual admirers uncomfortable by asking for more than wonder at her bravery. She is a compelling speaker and an adept organizer. The worst insult to Malala would be to regard her as nothing more than a child performer for peace, kept in a moment we want to keep hearing about. 
 
 Satyarthi is not Malala's babysitter: he is her counterpart. The committee said, in its announcement, that it "regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism." If the committee had bypassed Malala, as it did last year, one suspicion would have been that it was afraid of positioning the Nobel as a rebuke to the Islamic world alone. Perhaps some element of that was at work, but if so, the solution is a valuable one. Here, again, complexity adds strength to the committee's message. The struggle for the rights of children is not just a matter of feeling sorry for the people of this country or that; it is a common interrogation. There is plenty of complicity—and we are not exempt. Satyarthi also has an economic mission that challenges the West. What does it mean to set up a factory in a country where children don't go to school, or to buy clothes without looking at the labels? For that matter, in the United States, what does it mean when children are pulled into the criminal-justice system and not treated as children at all? Whose children are all children? 
 
 The Peace Prize has often been broadly understood; children’s rights fits well into its mandate of increasing understanding between nations. It’s not only an abstract matter, though. War takes children out of school, whether they are refugees, as in Syria, or targets of attack, like the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. Children who have no other options are also likelier recruits for war. The economic exploitation of children is also raw abuse, backed up by coercion and often violence. (Satyarthi, in a speech, described a factory where “if they tried to run away, they were hanged upside down on trees and beaten with stones.... Many of them had been burned with cigarettes.”) School is a rebuke to war; so is caring about the futures of other people’s children. 
 
 One point that the Nobel committee, in its citation, somewhat underplays is the question of gender. The announcement mentions Malala's particular commitment to girls' education, but the framework is children as children. Whatever its words, though, this should be a prize that is also about gender, because the exploitation of children is tied up in gender issues, too. Satyarthi's work has also included campaigns against child marriage. 
 
 The Nobel committee has given an award to a seventeen-year-old, the youngest Peace Prize laureate ever. In one way, that is an act of faith about what and who Malala Yousafzai will become—not only about who she has been. (In her case, it might be less of a gamble than giving the prize to a President who has just been elected.) Any award for children—to children—is a bet on a future that one can't quite predict, but which might be better. That's just as it should be. ||||| Story highlights Malala Yousafzai would have been the youngest recipient of any Nobel Prize 
 
 She is modest, saying getting it now would have been early, as she wants to work for it first 
 
 She would like to be Pakistan's Prime Minister, so she can spend more on education for all 
 
 After the Taliban shot her, the world and powerful leaders rallied around her cause 
 
 She was a contender, at least in hearts and headlines. 
 
 At 16, Malala Yousafzai would have become the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, if she had been awarded it Friday. In addition, she would have been the youngest winner ever of a Nobel Prize in any category. 
 
 Instead, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded it to the international chemical weapons watchdog that is destroying poison gas stockpiles in Syria -- the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. 
 
 Malala apparently feels like the OPCW deserves it. A message went out on a Twitter account representing her to congratulate the OPCW and thank it for its "wonderful work for humanity." 
 
 The activist from Pakistan, who has stood defiant against the Taliban in the face of death since age 11, has become a global figurehead for a girl's right to an education. 
 
 A year ago, an Islamist militant shot her in the head. It looked like she would die. This week, headlines cheered for her to win the peace prize. 
 
 She was modest about her own prospects of winning and felt receiving the prize at this point in her life would be premature, she told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an interview that airs Sunday at 7 p.m. 
 
 "I think that it's really an early age," Malala said. 
 
 But there's always later. She wants to do more to earn it first. 
 
 "I would feel proud, when I would work for education, when I would have done something, when I would be feeling confident to tell people, 'Yes! I have built that school; I have done that teachers' training, I have sent that (many) children to school,' " she said. 
 
 "Then if I get the Nobel Peace Prize, I will be saying, Yeah, I deserve it, somehow." 
 
 The comment drew warm laughter from the audience. 
 
 Malala for Prime Minister 
 
 Despite her diffidence with regards to the peace prize, Malala is very ambitious. 
 
 "I want to become a Prime Minister of Pakistan, and I think it's really good. Because through politics I can serve my whole county. I can be the doctor of the whole country," she said. 
 
 But greedier politicians be forewarned. If Malala held the highest office in the land, the money would probably not flow into the pockets of cronies or pork barrel projects. Her political ambitions seem to stop short of personal gain. 
 
 "I can spend much of the money from the budget on education," she told Amanpour. It appears that becoming prime minister is a means to the end she has dedicated her life to. 
 
 Malala has accomplished much for education in her short life, which she has imperiled to do so. 
 
 The Taliban didn't want girls to go to school. They banned it in 2009 in her native Swat Valley, which is when Malala's plight and her activism began. 
 
 Her father, a teacher who ran schools for girls, taught her that she was stronger than what or whom she feared. 
 
 She kept going to school and speaking out for education, and she wrote an anonymous blog for the BBC about her harrowing experiences. The Taliban came by on house raids, and she had to hide her books. 
 
 Her country honored her with the National Peace Prize in 2011 for standing up to them. 
 
 Her defiance enraged the militants. 
 
 The assassin 
 
 A year ago, on October 9, 2012, they sent a gunman after her, while she was riding home from school. He stopped the improvised school bus and stepped inside. 
 
 Malala recalled the moment of terror to Amanpour. 
 
 "He asked, 'Who is Malala?' He did not give me time to answer his question." What happened next may have been a bit blurry for her, but her best friend Moniba later told her. 
 
 Malala grasped Moniba's hand tightly and pushed hard against it. She was silent, Moniba told her, as the gunman opened fire at near point-blank range. 
 
 "He fired three bullets," Malala recalled. "One bullet hit me in the left side of my forehead, just above here, and it went down through my neck and into my shoulder." 
 
 It left behind lasting damage to her ear drum and facial nerve. 
 
 "But still if I look at (it), it's a miracle," Malala said. 
 
 She is alive and smiling with no major brain or spinal damage. 
 
 Emergency surgery in Pakistan saved her life. She was flown to the UK for further treatment. 
 
 World cause 
 
 While she recovered, the world rallied around her and powerful leaders, from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, rallied to her cause. 
 
 She has already partnered with the United Nations on a program to promote global education with the motto, "I am Malala." 
 
 This week, marking the anniversary of her shooting, she published her memoir under the same title. On Wednesday, the Pakistani Taliban threatened to attack any bookstore that sells it. On Monday, they threatened to kill her again. 
 
 She may not have won the Nobel Prize on Friday, but the European Parliament awarded her the Andrei Sakharov Prize on Thursday for standing up to an oppressive power. 
 
 And a Nobel could still be in her future. Committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland in Oslo told CNN that she could be in the running in years to come. 
 
 She already knows what she would do with the prize money. 
 
 "A Nobel Peace Prize would help me to begin this campaign for girls' education," she told Amanpour. 
 
 In the long run, Malala plans to hold out for an even bigger award. 
 
 "But the real call, the most precious call, that I want to get and for which I'm thirsting and for which I want to struggle hard, that is the award to see every child to go to school, that is the award of peace and education for every child. And for that, I will struggle and I will work hard."
– While Slate's Joshua Keating argued previously that the Nobel Peace Prize should go to no one this year, he's not about to begrudge Malala Yousafzai, who was named a co-recipient today. The 17-year-old Pakistani activist is certainly worthy, he writes at the website. Just one thing, though: Can we please do away with the "irritatingly smug and condescending" coverage of her being "the bravest girl in the world," he asks. It's a disservice to her, and it belittles what she's up to these days. The good news is that the poise she has shown on the world stage, along with her willingness to challenge leaders including President Obama, suggests that she "isn’t going to let herself be reduced to a cuddly caricature." Which is the way it should be, observes Amy Davidson at the New Yorker. "It is past time to stop seeing Malala as simply the girl who survived, as a symbol," writes Davidson. "She is a girl who leads." Consider that death threats against the teen have not stopped, but nor have they silenced her. "The worst insult to Malala would be to regard her as nothing more than a child performer for peace, kept in a moment we want to keep hearing about." She became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize today, but it's as much about her future as her past. Click for Davidson's full post, or for Keating's full post.