Reuters AlertNet - DRC: Where schools have flapping plastic walls - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Extreme Makeover of UFS - Times LIVE - 0 views
Beyond Teaching to the Test | IREX - 0 views
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Yet despite its overwhelming success with exams, China’s education system still lags in a number of areas, not the least of which is its ability to teach analytical thinking. Focusing almost solely on preparation for benchmarking tests and entrance exams, the Chinese classrooms I visited in my previous work in China offered few interactive learning and problem-solving opportunities, and student-led extra-curricular activities remain relatively rare. Students I encountered in both rural and urban areas of China were often extremely bright, yet many struggled to verbalize their own opinions or respond to questions that probe beyond the factual level.
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Students I encountered in both rural and urban areas of China were often extremely bright, yet many struggled to verbalize their own opinions or respond to questions that probe beyond the factual level.
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The program’s innovative curriculum provides a fresh departure from conventional lecture-based learning, yet it also builds upon the requirements of Chinese university entrance exams to ensure buy-in from students and teachers who know their success depends on exam performance. Within the collaborative atmosphere of these student newsrooms – in which student writing is not graded by the teacher, but is critiqued in peer discussions – students are gaining a rare opportunity to be a part of a cooperative and interactive learning environment and to voice their own opinions about issues in their community.
What I saw in Haiti - UN - 0 views
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But as President René Préval emphasized during my meeting with him, we must be thinking about tomorrow. Haiti, though desperately poor, had been making progress. It was enjoying a new stability; investors had returned. That will not be enough to rebuild the country as it was, nor is there any place for cosmetic improvements. We must help Haiti build back better, working with the government so that today's investments have lasting benefit, creating jobs and freeing Haitians from dependence on the world's generosity.
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Haiti's plight is a reminder of our wider responsibilities. A decade ago, the international community began a new century by agreeing to act to eliminate extreme poverty by 2015. Great strides have been made toward some of these ambitious "millennium goals," variously targeting core sources of global poverty and obstacles to development -- from maternal health and education to managing infectious disease. Yet progress in other critical areas lags badly. We are very far from delivering on our promises of a better future for the world's poor.
Poverty News Blog: World Vision on the differences between the last two earthquakes - 0 views
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Aid group World Vision has weighed in on the differences between the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.
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“Haiti was concentrated and that led to the challenge of tons of aid and hundreds of aid workers being sent into a small zone,” he said. “This quake off the Chilean coast has potential to reach remote areas and thus it will be extremely difficult to assess the number of deaths and amount of damage, but we can expect that children and families will have taken the brunt of it.”
MediaGlobal: Hunger the common enemy of all Millennium Development Goals - 0 views
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While the UN report showed that progress has been made in many areas, the world is still falling short of meeting the MDGs, and the presentation at the World Affairs conference offered great insight as to why hunger is such a deciding factor on achieving the these goals.
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“Hunger is the common enemy to all [the MDGs].” It makes sense that the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty is the first MDG, as none of the others can be accomplished without this. Children will have to work rather than go to school if their families are starving, and good nutrition is essential to reducing child mortality and improving maternal health. Drugs to treat malaria and HIV will be ineffective if the patient is famished, (think how many drugs instruct to take with food), and women cannot be empowered and support themselves if they have nothing to eat. For these reasons and more, hunger is the central roadblock to achieving the MDGs.
HaitiAnalysis.com Haiti's Earthquake Victims in Great Peril - 0 views
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According to a February study by the Inter-American Development Bank, the cost of physical damage from Haiti’s earthquake ranges from $8 billion to $13 billion. It says, “there are few events of such ferocity as the Haiti 2010 earthquake.”
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The study looks at natural disasters over the past 40 years and concludes that the death toll, per capita, of Haiti’s earthquake is four times, or more, higher than any other disaster in this time period.
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The Partners In Health agency estimates some 1.3 million people were left without shelter by the earthquake. The majority of those people still do not have adequate emergency shelter nor access to potable water, food and medical attention.
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UNICEF - Afghanistan - UNICEF Regional Director highlights challenges for girls in visi... - 0 views
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UNICEF is working to increase the numbers of girls in school by supporting the training of female teachers and setting up child-friendly classrooms. Mr. Toole visited female students at Herat Girls High School to see such efforts firsthand.“To see such a big number of girls who are enthusiastic about becoming teachers, doctors or engineers is extremely encouraging. Their protection is among our key concerns in this country where early marriage and the denial of access to education for females is still deeply rooted in the society,” said Mr. Toole.
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“Especially in high-risk, difficult to access areas, UNICEF is promoting community-based schools,” said UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan Catherine Mbengue. “We set up community management committees for each school, discussing with them from the onset the importance of girls’ education and their role in making it happen.”Afghanistan has seen an improvement in the number of children – including girls – who are enrolled in school. Today about three quarters of boys and nearly half of girls of primary school age are enrolled in primary school. While this is a drastic increase from the 42 per cent rate for boys and 15 per cent rate for girls in 2000, the gender gap remains wide.
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A total of 613 school incidents were recorded from January to November 2009, a frightening increase from 348 incidents in 2008. Insecurity is pervasive — with continued threats and direct attacks against schools, health centres and humanitarian workers.
Singapore School Trials iPad as Textbook Replacement -- NTDTV.com - 2 views
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With the goal of changing teaching and learning in its classrooms, Singapore's Nanyang Girl's High School has replaced its textbooks with iPad tablet computers.
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"We found that it was a very good personal learning device, extremely mobile, light weight and it is easy to use. I think if you talk to the girls you will realize that they practically don't need training. I think if anything, the joke is the teachers probably taking a little bit longer time in getting used to it. So it seemed to be a device that was just the thing that we were looking for and we were glad that it came out and so we grabbed the opportunity to use it."
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According Singapore’s Ministry of Education, there’s only one primary school and three secondary schools in the country that are giving the iPads a try.
IRIN Africa | CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Idris Gilbert, "Teaching is my passion but to e... - 0 views
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N'dele, 21 February 2011 (IRIN) - With literacy and school-enrolment rates among the lowest in the world, the continuing fighting between local rebel groups is putting even more pressure on CAR’s fragile education system. Years of displacement have caused the collapse of school attendance. Destroyed or looted facilities are still being rebuilt and the recruitment of teachers in areas affected by violence in the North is extremely difficult, leaving humanitarian aid organizations battling to providing basic education.
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“I decided to stay in the village anyway. I was trying to keep regular lessons with the children in school though the situation was so fragile a lot of people had left. Many of them never came back.
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“Since I left I haven’t been under contract with the government any more. However, I decided to carry on with teaching in rural areas, even though I am not paid for it. Teaching is my passion but now to earn some money I have to cultivate people’s land.”
Extremist books withdrawn from Saudi schools - 0 views
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The Saudi Ministry of Education issued a resolution to withdraw from the libraries of public schools several books seen as inciting violence and prohibited book donations without prior approval. Books accused of having a negative impact on school students like the writings of leaders of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood like Sheikh Hassan al-Banna, the group's founder, and Sayyed Qotb, one of the group's most leading thinkers, the London-based al-Hayat newspaper reported Tuesday. There are people who support the circulation of those books. Some even print them and distribute them for free without taking into consideration the grave consequences on the students Former MP Dr. Mohamed al-Zulafi The ministry announced its plan to conduct regular visits to school libraries to ensure that those and similar books are no longer available for students.
U.N. Task Force Pushes for Investment in Teen Girls - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views
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Risk of sexual violence, limited access to education, and health issues such as HIV/AIDS and forced female genital mutilation/cutting are just a few of the obstacles adolescent girls face in developing countries, yet these girls are the key to the future and the eradication of poverty, stress experts at the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
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Children "face grave vulnerabilities and grave challenges as they make the transition towards adulthood," he added. The U.N. Adolescent Girls Task Force, which organised a panel on the issue Friday, is comprised of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the children's agency UNICEF, the newly-launched U.N. Women, and several other U.N. entities.
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In countries where the majority of the population is extremely young, such as Malawi, investing and empowering adolescents through education is critical to the country's development. The median age in Malawi 17 years old, and 73.6 percent of the population is below the age of 29, noted Janet Zeenat Karim, head of the Malawi delegation to the U.N.
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Pakistan declares 'education emergency' « World Education Blog - 0 views
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Kicking off a campaign aimed at making March “the month that Pakistan talks about only two things: education and cricket”, a government commission has painted a damning picture of the country’s education system, whose poor progress towards global learning goals has been documented in the Education for All Global Monitoring Report.
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the Pakistan Education Task Force says the country “is in the midst of an educational emergency with disastrous human and economic consequences.”
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The report quotes the 2010 Global Monitoring Report’s finding that “30% of Pakistanis live in extreme educational poverty – having received less than two years of education.”
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South Korea: Kids, Stop Studying So Hard! - TIME - 0 views
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On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.
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South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.
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There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."
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In Japan, parents try to go on: 'My child should come home to me' - CNN.com - 0 views
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"I'm not OK," she says, still smiling as if she's talking about the weather. "Of course I'm not. But I have another son." Naganuma's other son, eight-year-old Koto, is missing. Koto was at Ishinomaki Okawa Elementary School the day the tsunami hit. The 108 students, as they'd practiced before, evacuated when the earthquake struck, says Naganuma.
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The students had no idea the tsunami was coming. Out of the 108, 77 are presumed dead or missing. Koto is among the missing, his body still not recovered. "Ran saw the tsunami," says Naganuma. "His brother is not coming home. So I think he understands. I can see he's pretending to be happy, so we don't worry about him."
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From blanket to blanket, families recount their own losses. But it's the deaths of all the children at the elementary school that pains this community most. At the elementary school, young fathers dig with shovels alongside rescuers. The school is a shell, its inside gutted by the force of the tsunami.
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Tolley tells schools to toughen up on bullying - Education - NZ Herald News - 0 views
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Minister of Education Anne Tolley has reasserted a Government order for secondary principals to toughen up on school bullying.
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The meeting followed a government letter being sent to every school board expressing concern over recent reports of extreme bullying
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