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Having tried and failed to get support from official channels (embassies, NGOs such as Amnesty International, even the European Parliament), he turned to social networking. The week before he was due to start his studies, Ayman posted an article on his blog called “I have a dream” recounting his difficulties with the Israeli authorities in trying to leave Gaza. “It was non-accusatory,” he explains”. I was just asking for the basic right to pursue an education.” He ended the article with the sentence: “I am appealing and calling lawyers, politicians, journalists and all activists for human rights to join the fight for me and my right to the education that I have always dreamed of.” 

“Social networking helped me realize my right to education,” Ayman claims. Following the international mobilization Ayman finally received his permission to travel. He arrived in Spain one week late for class. At the Jaume I University, he is taking several courses on aspects of human rights education, peace education and conflict transformation.  “It is a very healthy environment where I am also being educated in mulitculturality,” he says. “Thanks to these courses I have became more aware about different conflicts taking place around the world.” Ayman also shared first-hand experience with people who have lived in conflict situations. “It assured me that conflicts are the same everywhere, and that humanity is humanity wherever we are.”  

Founded in 1988, the People's Decade of Human Rights Education (PDHRE-International) is a non-profit, international service organization that works directly and indirectly with its network of affiliates — primarily women's and social justice organizations — to develop and advance pedagogies for human rights education relevant to people's daily lives in the context of their struggles for social and economic justice and democracy. PDHRE's members include experienced educators, human rights experts, United Nations officials, and world renowned advocates and activists who collaborate to conceive, initiate, facilitate, and service projects on education in human rights for social and economic transformation. The organization is dedicated to publishing and disseminating demand-driven human rights training manuals and teaching materials, and otherwise servicing grassroots and community groups engaged in a creative, contextualized process of human rights learning, reflection, and action. PDHRE views human rights as a value system capable of strengthening democratic communities and nations through its emphasis on accountability, reciprocity, and people's equal and informed participation in the decisions that affect their lives. PDHRE was pivotal in lobbying the United Nations to found a Decade for Human Rights Education and in drafting and lobbying for various resolutions by the World Conference on Human Rights, the UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Treaty Bodies, and the Fourth World Conference on Women.

Syrian army and security officers have detained and tortured children with impunity during the past year, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented at least 12 cases of children detained under inhumane conditions and tortured, as well as children shot while in their homes or on the street. Human Rights Watch has also documented government use of schools as detention centres, military bases or barracks, and sniper posts, as well as the arrest of children from schools.

“Children have not been spared the horror of Syria’s crackdown,” said Lois Whitman, children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Syrian security forces have killed, arrested, and tortured children in their homes, their schools, or on the streets. In many cases, security forces have targeted children just as they have targeted adults.”

Some of the arrests took place in schools. “Nazih” (not her real name), a 17-year-old girl from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that in May 2011, security forces entered her school and arrested all the boys in her class, after questioning them about the anti-regime slogans painted on the school walls.

What are the implications for children’s development if the age at which they complete their compulsory schooling is 14 but the legal minimum age for employment is 12? Or vice versa? What happens if a girl can legally be married before finishing compulsory education? Will she return to school and develop her potential to the fullest? And who ensures that relevant education of good quality is in place to prevent juvenile delinquency or to facilitate the reintegration into society of children in conflict with the law? These are some of the questions raised in At what age?... are school-children employed, married and taken to court? – Trends over time. Covering 186 State reports over a period of 18 years, this research confirms that States have not yet fully upheld the right to education in their legislation. Nor have they agreed standards for the transition from childhood to adulthood, either domestically or internationally.

KINSHASA, 14 November 2011 (IRIN) - Access to basic education in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains poor, with up to seven million children across the vast country out of school - despite a 2010 government decision to make primary education free.

It said 25 percent of the primary school-aged children and 60 percent of adolescents were not enrolled in classes.

"Even with the announcement of free primary education, parents, many of whom are unemployed and have little means of sustaining themselves, are bearing most of the costs involved in educating their children because of delays in releasing the funds for free education," Ornelie Lelo, communications officer for an education NGO in the capital, SOS Kinshasa, told IRIN.

Educational inclusion relates to all children accessing and meaningfully participating in quality education, in ways that are responsive to their individual needs. The terms ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusive education’ are often used in relation to children with disabilities and/or special needs and emerged partly out of debates to reduce their segregation from mainstream schooling.In recent years, these terms have been used by the Education for All (EFA) movement in relation to all children who are marginalised and excluded from basic education, not just in terms of initial access to schooling, but access to rights within schooling processes. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) identifies inclusion as “…a process of addressing and responding to the diversity of needs of all learners through increasing participation in learning, cultures and communities, and reducing exclusion within and from education.”

According to UNESCO, inclusion “…involves changes and modifications in content, approaches, structures and strategies, with a common vision which covers all children of the appropriate age range and a conviction that it is the responsibility of the regular system to educate all children.”  

In a landmark ruling, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice in Abuja yesterday ordered the Federal Government to provide as of right, free and compulsory education to every Nigerian child.

It submitted that the right to education could be enforced before the court and dismissed all objections brought by the Federal Government, through the UBEC that education is "a mere directive policy of the government and not a legal entitlement of the citizens".

Commenting on the ruling, SERAP's lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana, who filed and argued the case before the court with Adetokunbo Mumuni, said this was the first time an international court has recognized a state obligation to provide legally enforceable human rights to education to its citizens.

HARARE, 7 November 2011 (IRIN) - Poverty, abuse and cultural practices are preventing a third of Zimbabwean girls from attending primary school and 67 percent from attending secondary school, denying them a basic education, according to a recent study which found alarming dropout rates for girls. ''Sexual harassment and abuse by even school teachers and parents, cultural issues, lack of school fees, early marriage, parental commitments and early pregnancies are some of the contributing factors to the dropout by the girl child,'' said the authors of "Because I am a Girl" by Plan International, a nonprofit organisation that works to alleviate child poverty.

According to the Plan International report, the long distances that children in rural areas have to travel to reach school, and the burden that girl children face because they often have to assume the responsibilities of being head of the household after the death of their parents, are other factors contributing to the high dropout rate for girls.

A 2005 government programme of forced evictions, known as Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out Trash), which uprooted some 700,000 people from urban areas across the country, compounded the difficulties of accessing education for girls from affected households. Amnesty International, in its report ''Left Behind: The Impact of Zimbabwe's Forced Evictions on the Right to Education'' released in October 2011, documents the ways in which the evictions disrupted the primary and secondary education of an estimated 222,000 children.

The increased funding has enabled the education ministry to implement a number of projects. The ministry distributed over sh8.8b to the Universal Secondary Education programme to purchase laboratory equipment.

The construction and renovation of 217 secondary schools countrywide started this year. The 217 schools are part of the 1,400 schools which will be repaired under a World Bank funded project. About 4,297 classrooms, 41 administration blocks, 144 libraries, 405 science rooms and 71 staff quarters are to be constructed.

In a bid to improve quality, the P6 and P7 curriculum was reviewed. The new upper primary curriculum is to focus on "what a child can gain from a lesson, other than what a teacher can complete in a syllabus". Illustrations like graphs and tables have been simplified.

Education is one of the hidden costs of conflict and violence. Almost 750,000 people die as a result of armed conflict each year, and there are more than 20 million displaced people in the world. Violent conflict kills and injures people, destroys capital and infrastructure, damages the social fabric, endangers civil liberties, and creates health and famine crises. What is less known or talked about is how violent conflict denies million of children across the world their right to education.

Armed violence often targets schools and teachers as symbols of community leadership or bastions of the type of social order that some armed factions want to see destroyed. Children are useful in armies as soldiers, as well as to perform a myriad of daily tasks from cooking and cleaning to sexual favours. Children need to work when members of their family die or are unable to make a living, and families remove children from school fearing for their lives and security.

profound long-term effects of educational losses among those exposed to conflict.

First, investing in adolescent girls benefits everyone. When they flourish, their families and communities flourish as well. The benefits will go a long way in a girl’s lifetime, and for generations to come.

As One UN, we will support national development efforts to invest in adolescent girls’ rights, health, education, protection, livelihoods. We can no longer afford to exclude the millions of adolescent girls left behind. They are central to the MDGs and we must make them visible in national action plans and budgets. We must improve our data systems to track the change we aspire to see in their lives.

This is because investing in adolescent girls is both the best and smartest investment a country can make. Educated, healthy and skilled, she will be an active citizen in her community. She will become a mother when she is ready and invest in her future children’s health and education. She will be able to contribute fully to her society and break the cycle of poverty, one girl at a time.

Addressing the nation to mark the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 that makes elementary education an entitlement for children in the age group of 6-14 years, Dr. Singh said the States should join in this national effort with full resolve and determination. “Our government, in partnership with the State governments will ensure that financial constraints do not hamper the implementation of the Right to Education Act. “Today, our government comes before you to redeem the pledge of giving all our children the right to education.

“I call upon all our teachers across the country to become partners in this effort. It is also incumbent upon all of us to work together to improve the working conditions of our teachers and enable them to teach with dignity, giving full expression to their talent and creativity.'' He said parents and guardians, too, had a critical role to play having been assigned school management responsibilities under the Act. The needs of every disadvantaged section of our society, particularly girls, Dalits, Adivasis and minorities must be of particular focus as the Act is implemented.

Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said the biggest challenge to the implementation of the Act would be lack of infrastructure and teachers. Bringing children from the disadvantaged sections into the net would also be challenging, he said.

Picture a mother, hunching over a field with a Medieval-style hoe in hand, spending day after day tilling the soil under a beating hot sun - only to retire home to care for her family without electricity or running water.This is not a 12th century image, but a typical working day for scores of rural women in today's developing world, where lack of access to education and technology has forced many to resort to traditional and often painful methods of livelihood.

Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF), a pan- African network bringing together individuals and organisations from 23 countries, is among the key regional groups tackling this issue head on. WILDAF believes lack of knowledge about education rights, specifically among young girls, is one of the main reasons forcing rural people to endure lives of agricultural hardship.

"We want to teach them how to develop projects, from tilling the ground to seeding, all the way through to packaging at an international level so the food will be accepted by everybody in other countries," she said. Agu cited a project where female farmers of moringa – a nutritious African plant – were able to increase the efficiency and ease of production, through simple modern conveniences.

The New York City schools has taken this directive seriously and to heart by creating its School for Human Rights, a combined middle and high school academy that is built around the concept of human rights.

Located in Brooklyn, the School for Human Rights is rare, even for the New York City schools. Its core values are dignity, respect and responsibility, which is the driving force behind its curriculum, how the students learn and the teachers teach, how they treat one another, and the types of adults the New York City schools hope the students become. Human rights are demonstrated to students by how the school meets the educational needs of each and every student; in its practices, such as discipline with dignity; examples given in class, questions raised by teachers, the active discussions, critical thinking and reflection that are part of the project-based coursework; and even in the human rights enriching field trips.

The School of Human Rights is the only New York City schools that integrates an academic and social skills-based curriculum. It even immerses human rights into its extracurricular activities, such as film festivals and workshops with human rights defenders.

Africa’s educational systems are suffering from growing pains.  More students than ever are enrolling in school, but the supply of teachers and infrastructure have not kept up with demand. Educators say about 80 percent of African students are completing primary school -- thanks in part to the push to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. They call for universal primary education by the 2015. John Daniel, the president and CEO of the intergovernmental organization the Commonwealth of Learning, says success is bringing more challenges. SCOPESecondary school students at KwaMhlanga High School in Mpumalanga, South Africa. “The African countries achieved in 10 years what it took many developed countries 100 years to do two centuries ago," he said, "and they don’t have many resources left over to do secondary.”

“Girls who have secondary education … have on average worldwide one-point-eight fewer children than girls who don’t," he said. "That’s a difference of two or three billion to the population of the world by 2050. There is [one educational researcher, Joel Cohen] who says therefore girls’ education is best way of stopping population growth and climate change.”

The Commonwealth of Learning proposes open schools, using new technologies and new ways to meet the needs of school aged children, drop-outs, mothers who want to learn at home and working adults. He said the schools cut costs and save time by using new technologies, including cell phones. Secondary school curricula can be created and shared among schools without costly intellectual property rights.

Malawi struggles to cope GA_googleFillSlot( "AllAfrica_Story_InsetB" ); GA_googleCreateDomIframe('google_ads_div_AllAfrica_Story_InsetB' ,'AllAfrica_Story_InsetB'); Other countries have been less successful. Malawi eliminated its school fees in 1994. But with less than half of Kenya's gross domestic product per person and fewer financial and human resources to draw on, it still faces difficult challenges in providing universal primary education.

As in many other African countries, notes the UN study, "the adoption of universal primary education was triggered by political demands rather than by rational planning processes." Although Malawi had lifted some fees for Standards 1 and 2 and waived primary education fees for girls prior to 1994, the decision to eliminate all fees coincided with the return of multiparty elections that year. The focus, the researchers found, was on increasing enrolment. "Very little attention was paid to quality issues."

One immediate response was to hire 20,000 new teachers, almost all of whom were secondary school graduates who were given only two weeks of training. Plans to provide on-the-job training failed to materialize. Instructional quality declined sharply as the pupil-teacher ratio climbed to 70 to 1.