Skip to main content

Home/ Teachers Without Borders/ Group items tagged congress

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Teachers Without Borders

The World Congress of Comparative Education Societies, 14-18 June 2010 | Back... - 0 views

  •  
    NEW YORK, 10 June 2010 - The World Congress of Comparative Education Societies begins Monday 14 June in Istanbul. The 5-day meeting will feature two events focusing on UNICEF's Education in Emergencies and Post-Crisis Transition programme.
Teachers Without Borders

Santiago Declaration on the human right to peace - AEDIDH - 0 views

  •  
    The International Congress on the Human Right to Peace, held in Santiago on 9 and 10 in December 2010, concluded with great success with the adoption of the Santiago Declaration on the human right to peace and the establishment of the International Observatory of the Human Right to Peace. The Congress was organised in the context of the World Social Forum on Education for Peace, held in Santiago in December in 2010 and was the culmination of the SSIHRL Global Campaign for the international codification of the human right to peace.
Gwen Stamm

DeclaracioICIP_010610_ang.pdf (application/pdf Object) - 0 views

  •  
    Barcelona Declaration of the Human Right to Peace adopted on June 2, 2010 will be submitted to International Congress in December as part of the World Social Forum organized to celebrate the end the UN Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence. At this time nations from around the world will discuss and adopt the final text of the Declaration to submit to the UN.
Teachers Without Borders

Obama Calls for $60 Billion to Save Teacher Jobs, Fix Schools - Politics K-12 - Educati... - 0 views

  •  
    President Barack Obama called for $30 billion in new money to stave off teacher layoffs-and $30 billion more to revamp facilities at the nation's K-12 schools and community colleges-as he outlined his vision for spurring the sputtering economy in a speech to Congress Thursday night.
Teachers Without Borders

Broken schools breed S.Africa's 'lost generation' - TrustLaw - 0 views

  • Despite pouring billions of dollars into education, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has little to show for its money except for public primary schools regarded as among the worst in the world and millions of students destined for a life in the underclass. "If you don't have an education, you don't have a chance in life," said Netshiozwe, who is unemployed with little prospect of finding regular work. She and her HIV-infected aunt live together and scrape by on about $100 a month in welfare benefits. Nearly half of South Africa's 18 to 24 year olds -- the first generation educated after apartheid ended in 1994 -- are not in the education system and do not have a job, according to government data. Academics have called this group the "lost generation" and worry it will grow larger unless the government fixes a system riddled with failing schools, unskilled educators and corruption that stops funding from reaching its intended destinations.
  • Corruption eats away at money. Teachers are poorly trained and challenged by a constantly shifting curriculum. Schools are often shut by teachers' strikes.
  • Once almost exclusively white, universities now reflect the racial composition of the country with more people from groups disenfranchised by apartheid climbing the ladder with a degree or diploma. But at the same time, the number of people living in poverty has changed little since apartheid ended, with no remedy in sight given the structural problems in education.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This month, the central government said Limpopo, which has recorded some of the country's worst results in standardised testing, had unauthorised expenditure of 2.2 billion rand ($275 million). The province had more than 2,400 teachers on the payroll, including 200 "ghost teachers" who were not in classrooms but were still paid.
  • Hundreds of schools do not have electricity or running water and absenteeism has become such a concern that President Jacob Zuma has begged teachers to show up for classes. A study by graft watchdog Transparency International last year pointed to massive local level corruption resulting in millions of students not having desks, chairs or books.
  • A cosy relationship between the ANC and organised labour, formed in their partnership against apartheid, has hampered apprenticeship programmes.
Teachers Without Borders

Reuters AlertNet - DRC: Where schools have flapping plastic walls - 0 views

  • KIWANJA, 19 July 2010 (IRIN) - It is a sunny day at the Mashango primary school in the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC's) North Kivu Province. That is good news for teacher Dusaba Mbomoya who is holding a geography exam under a roof filled with holes in a classroom where flapping pieces of plastic do duty as walls. Even the blackboard has holes large enough for students to peer through. "When it rains we allow the pupils to go back to their houses," said Mbomoya.
  • Most classrooms are dark and crumbling with limited teaching materials. With the government opting out, Save the Children estimates that parents are forced to finance 80-90 percent of all public education outside the capital Kinshasa, though under the DRC's 2006 constitution elementary education is supposed to be free. Teachers' salaries go unpaid which means parents must contribute to their wages via monthly school fees of around US$5 per pupil. Large families and an average monthly income of just $50 means such fees are entirely unaffordable for large swathes of the DRC population - with serious consequences. Estimates from Save the Children and others suggest nearly half of Congolese children, more than three million, are out of school and one in three have never stepped in the classroom.
  • Save the Children's research shows that teachers' pay is so low and so irregular that many take on other jobs, such as farming, taking them away from their classrooms and students. The situation is particularly bad in North Kivu where hundreds of thousands have been uprooted by years of war. Some like Laurent Rumvu live in camps for the internally displaced. None of his five school-aged children are in regular education.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Ransacked Schools in the area were closed for several months in late 2008 and early 2009 when fighting between rebel soldiers in the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP - now a political party) and the DRC army brought chaos to North Kivu. Children were forcibly recruited from schools by militia groups and the army and students and teachers were shot and abducted, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). Schools were ransacked and many were occupied by either soldiers or IDPs.
  • After the war, he said 120 fewer pupils returned to classes. At Kasasa, CNDP soldiers occupied the school for several weeks, taking books and causing damage. Some pupils were killed during the fighting, and Nkunda said others were traumatized. "Of course the war has had an effect," he said. "Imagine going to school after your parents have been killed." Getting displaced children back in school is a priority for international agencies including the Norwegian Refugee Council.
  • "Education is extremely important to the future of Congo," said Mondlane. "With large numbers of displaced children it is extremely important to invest in education in this humanitarian crisis." "Bad government" Kasasa student Shirambere Tibari Menya, 22, lost four years of his schooling to war. Most recently, he fled to Uganda during the fighting in 2008 and is now close to finishing secondary school. But one obstacle remains - a one-off series of final exams which all DRC pupils must take before graduation. Tibari is confident he will pass and would like to go on to study medicine but says his family does not have the $12 he must pay to take the tests. "I don't accept that I'm going to lose another year, but you can see that we are studying in bad conditions," he said. "For our parents the main activity is to go to the fields, but they are raped and attacked so we have the problem of food and no money. "I blame the government. We are in a bad country with a bad government."
Teachers Without Borders

Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Has Killed 500, Officials Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • about 500 people had died in weekend ethnic violence near the central city of Jos, considerably more than what had initially been reported.
  • The victims were Christians killed by rampaging Muslim herdsmen, officials and human rights workers said, apparently in reprisal for similar attacks on Muslims in January.
  • The head of a leading Nigerian rights group, Shehu Sani of the Civil Rights Congress, said in a telephone interview on Monday that his organization had counted 492 bodies, mainly in the village of Dogo Nahawa.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • League for Human Rights
  • The killings took place in Plateau State near the city of Jos, for years a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence near the dividing line between the country’s mainly Christian south and Muslim north.
  • Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group.
  • Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogo Nahawa. “They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.”
  • Mr. Peter said the attacks began around 2 a.m. and lasted around four hours.
  • One man who was present during the attacks said the killers began firing guns, then poured gasoline on the roofs in Ratt. “We saw the Fulani coming, and they started shooting,” said the man, Yohanna Kudu. “They used machetes to kill our women and children. Some of the children were burned inside the houses.”
Teachers Without Borders

English or Konkani: Goa debates on what to use in schools - Times Of India - 0 views

  • PANAJI: Lawmakers and parents in Goa are debating whether English or mother tongue Konkani should be the medium of instruction (MOI) in schools up to Class 8.
  • "The poor are sending their children to English medium schools because they believe that English will propel them to excel in their studies. Why, even the Chinese are learning English. Parents whose students are studying in (English medium) schools run by the Archdiocese (Church) are agitated. Why is the government disbursing grants only to Konkani/Marathi schools?" Godinho said.
  • As per the education department's policy, schools with English as MOI - which includes several privately-run educational institutions and other schools run by the church in Goa - are not entitled to government funding.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Is Konkani only for the poor to study? Let the parents be given the choice (of deciding which MOI to choose)," Godinho said, with legislators from the ruling Congress backing his demand.
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20 items per page