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The political upheaval in Côte d’Ivoire is taking a heavy toll on education, especially in the north, illustrating starkly the devastating impact conflict can have on learning opportunities – and the vicious circle in which conflict and education can become trapped.

A teacher described his school in Abidjan, the commercial capital, as much better than others in the city: “There are around 63 students per teacher – that’s a small class; it’s considered good. But there are no tables, no chairs, sometimes there’s no light. Sometimes students take it in turns to come into the classroom to sit on the few chairs.”

This year’s Global Monitoring Report focuses on other ways in which education failures can stoke conflict – such as perpetuating prejudice instead of promoting tolerance, and failing to pass on the skills that children need to escape poverty. The report lays out practical steps that governments and the international community can take to make sure that education builds peace rather than fanning the flames of war.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an international event that draws thousands of people to exchange views on globalisation, human rights and workers’ rights. A special focus in this year’s forum has been African issues, in particular developments in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the lack of action on development and poverty in Africa.

Participants agreed that unions in western Africa must pursue their efforts to urge governments to take appropriate political measures for quality education. They expressed their concerns about how it could be that countries with limited natural resources, such as Cape Verde, Mauritius and Tunisia, were among the best performers in education, while the richest countries in the region justified their bad performances with budgetary restraints.

“There is no doubt that child labour is part of the daily reality in Africa. Despite the legal tools existing to fight it, including governments signing relevant international conventions, the questions is why nothing appears to be happening?”

Decades of political violence in northern Central African Republic have caused widespread destruction and displacement. The educational sector has been badly affected by a dire shortage of teachers and adequate physical infrastructure. For thousands of children, classes take place not in solid buildings of brick, but in rudimentary “bush schools”.

“Needs are huge and funds insufficient. More appropriate infrastructure as well as qualified teachers are needed. Because of difficulties in the conflict-affected areas of the North, disparities in terms of access and quality are deepening,” Farid Boubekeur, chief education officer with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in CAR, told IRIN.

For about 200 pupils of the primary school Ecole Ouande, in the Linguiri Village of the M'Brès Sub-Prefecture in the northeast of the country, lessons are conducted under a big tree with five pupils sharing each wooden desk.

MUMBAI: Becoming a primary school teacher will get tougher. Beginning from next academic year (2012-2013), the state government is making passing graduation compulsory for those aspiring to be educators.

Admitting that with change in education system such as virtual classes, e-library, internet learning and other hi-tech education methods, it is a need of the hour to change the decade old rules and qualification needed to take up the job of required a teacher. But, the minister refused to reveal details of the department plans on the issue.

Some teachers have supported the move, while few have objected it. "Raising the qualification limit for becoming a primary schoolteacher will not help in improving the quality of education. There is need to change their mindset of teachers in view of Right To Eductaion (RTE)," said Ramesh Joshi, who heads Brihanmumbai Mahapalika Shikshak Sabha, the largest BMC teachers` union.

DAKAR (AlertNet) - Some 800,000 children in Ivory Coast have missed out on school since the outbreak of violence following last year's disputed presidential election. In the western regions of Moyen Cavally and 18 Montagnes, where fresh fighting erupted on Tuesday, some 180,000 children are losing out on their education and most teachers have been absent since November. "We know from experience that when children’s education is disrupted in a situation like this, they are less likely to go back to school once the crisis is over," said Guy Cave, Ivory Coast country director for Save the Children.

Nearly 45,000 of those who have fled their homes have sought safety in Liberia. But aid groups say the thousands of children who have crossed into Liberia cannot attend school there because of language and curriculum differences.   

Simmering political tensions among secondary and college students supporting different sides in the deadlock have led to fights. About 4,000 students have seen their books, schoolbags and other study materials destroyed by fellow students.

CAIRO - Fatema Salah said her students had never sung the Egyptian national anthem quite the way they did Sunday, the first day back to school for most Cairo pupils. Before, they shuffled through the morning ritual, heads down and sleepy. This time, standing in the school's shady courtyard for the first time since the revolution, they belted it out.

"Today, everybody sang loud," said Salah, principal of the Dar El Tarbiah School, a secondary school in central Cairo. "It was real. Many of them were in [Tahrir] Square themselves. They are very proud."

But with the pride, nervousness remained. Nearly half of Salah's students were absent, and across the city thousands of families ignored the reopening of school, which had been anticipated as a step toward post-revolution normality.

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.

the Pakistan Education Task Force says the country “is in the midst of an educational emergency with disastrous human and economic consequences.”

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.”

With millions of children out of school and one-fifth of teachers playing truant, Pakistan faces an "education emergency" that costs the economic equivalent of its flood disaster every year, a new campaign has warned.

One in 10 of the world's out-of-school children live in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that last year spent just 2% of GDP on education.

The number of children absent from primary school – seven million – is roughly equivalent to the population of its second largest city, Lahore.Half of the population is illiterate and progress is painfully slow – at present rates the government will not deliver universal education in Balochistan, the largest province, until 2100.

One thing that the riots in London and other cities last week taught us is that young people want to have their say, and want to be listened to. The removal of citizenship education from our education system takes away one of the few ways the state can provide this.

Instead of doing away with such vital forms of education, we should be starting it earlier and making it compulsory for all. Some primary schools teach the basics of voting or other areas of citizenship as part of personal, social and health education, or perhaps because they have a school council, but this largely depends on the enthusiasm and time commitments of senior management or staff. Yet these younger pupils can often be the most engaged and enthusiastic as they are the most idealistic, and what is politics if it is not the constant striving for the realisation of our various ideals?

BOUAKÉ, Côte d’Ivoire, 9 March 2011 – Since last November’s disputed presidential election, many schools in Côte d’Ivoire have remained closed. There are now nearly 800,000 children waiting to get back to learning.

The impact could be long-term. “This school year is seriously disrupted and if children cannot go to school during a crisis, they are more likely to drop out and never return even when the crisis is over,” said Save the Children Country Director Guy Cave.

The effect of the school closures can be seen around the country. In Bouaké, a city in central Côte d’Ivoire, the streets are filled with children who – faced with nowhere to learn – sell goods to earn a little money and help support their family.

Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers. “It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another. The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the West who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional languages such as Spanish or German.

China’s rapid economic rise is gradually translating into a greater presence in European and U.S. classrooms, from a very small base as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

From a marginal position 15 years ago, Chinese has imposed itself as the fourth major language behind French, Spanish and German, which, on current trends, it will overtake by the end of the decade.