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ALMOST three quarters of year 9 schoolboys admit to "covert bullying", according to a world-first Australian study. The survey of almost 800 Victorian students found 72 per cent of year 9 boys and 65 per cent of year 9 girls had engaged in covert bullying, such as spreading rumours or excluding other children.Lead researcher, Professor Sheryl Hemphill, said it was surprising to find more boys than girls engaging in this type of bullying."Covert bullying was always thought to be predominantly done by girls, but our figures show for the first time that boys are actively engaging in this behaviour," she said.

Education authorities in Australia rolled out on Friday an anti-bullying Web site that offers to children and parents fact on bullying and tips on how to deal with it.

The Bullying No Way! Portal features a choose-you-own adventure game that teaches student ways to deal with bullying and offers moderate for a where the kids could talk about their problems with fellow children. It could be found at www.bullyingnoway.gov.au.

The Web site, which was launched by the Council of Australian Education Ministers, will also make available an iPhone app called Take A Stand that will grant students access to information about bullying and ways to deal with the school problem.

Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, only about half of Haiti’s school-age children were enrolled in classes, a glaring symbol of the nation’s poverty.

more than 3,000 school buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed or damaged. Hundreds of teachers and thousands of students were killed, and officials are questioning the safety of the remaining buildings after violent aftershocks in recent weeks, making the goal of Haitian education officials to reopen many schools by April 1 seem increasingly remote.

Children staying in the camps face trials beyond laboring in the streets. Health workers in the camps are reporting a rising number of young rape victims, including girls as young as 12. Alison Thompson, an Australian nurse and documentary director who volunteers at a tent clinic on the grounds of the Pétionville Club, said she had cared for a 14-year-old girl who was raped recently in the camp. “The entire structure of the lives of these children has been upended, and now they’re dealing with the predators living next to them,” Ms. Thompson said.

Take, for example, the history syllabus. After a full quota of compulsory schooling, Australian students will be none the wiser about the origins and central tenets of liberalism: the basics of individual rights, representative democracy and the market economy, and the importance of civil society. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are the absolute fundamentals of Western civilisation. And they are missing from the national curriculum.