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The ministry of Education has announced that the school curriculum currently under review will be ready by March next year.

Minister of Education Dora Siliya says a team of experts will formulate the new syllabus once the review of the curriculum has been concluded.

the school curriculum is being reviewed to incorporate entrepreneurship and Information Communication Technology-ICT- skills.

According to top officials of the state education department, government is all set to effect thorough changes in the curriculum of primary and upper primary education in accordance with the Right to Education Act (RTE). Instead of the current curriculum which focuses more on writing answers, the new syllabus will focus more on activity-based learning.Outdated subjects and chapters will be removed and more informative and knowledgeable ones will be added.

Almost 350 teachers from all over the state will be trained and eventually will be given the responsibility of suggesting changes

THE Federal Government has said that the old Senior Secondary Education curriculum will be phased out in September, 2011 to give way for the implementation of the New Senior Secondary Education curriculum developed by the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC).

A group of South African Indian teachers have asked the Education Ministry to recognise five Indian languages Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati and Telugu as optional third language in the school curriculum. The five main mother tongues of South African Indians will die out completely in 50 years if they are not taught as formal school subjects, the teachers said.

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.

While many parents and other Japanese welcome the government's move to provide English education at an early age, some experts are concerned that most teachers are being forced to venture into uncharted waters with little preparation. In addition, devoting just one period a week to English won't be near enough to nurture children's language ability.

Japan has lagged behind its neighboring countries in introducing English lessons at an early age, and its impact is obvious in various statistics.

TOEFL data for 2004-2005 put Japan next to last in Asia, with an average score of only 191 points — just one point higher than North Korea. Afghanistan exceeded Japan by seven points, while Singapore had the top score at 254.

PANTNAGAR, India — The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches.

But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And they pursue independent projects — as when fifth-grade students recently interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral presentations.

Nagla and 1,500 other schools in this Indian state, Uttarakhand, are part of a five-year-old project to improve Indian primary education that is being paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro. Education experts at his Azim Premji Foundation are helping to train new teachers and guide current teachers in overhauling the way students are taught and tested at government schools.

About 20 000 pupils from primary and high schools in Cape Town marched in the city centre to mark Human Rights Day and to demand equal rights and access to education. Led by Equal Education, an NGO advocating for equal education rights, the pupils marched to demand minimum norms and standards for school infrastructure in terms of Section 5A of the South African Schools Act.

They demanded that Motshekga provide adequate classrooms, a laboratory, a library or media centre, a computer centre and sports field for each school. Textbooks for every child in every subject, training and decent pay for teachers and the eradication of the more than 400 mud schools in the country were also among the demands made by the pupils and the organisation.

“Sometimes we have to go to libraries in Delft and Khayelitsha because the library in Mfuleni does not have enough books with the information we need or there are just too many people there,” said Msebenzi.

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.”

Almost half of the world’s population – nearly 3 billion people – are under the age of 25. They are often marginalised and deprived, with poor access to education. But now young people in Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen are calling for genuine opportunities to design their future.

“In the past we had civic education as part of our system, but it was taught under a totalitarian regime and therefore nobody was really interested,” said Ms. Elbadawy. “The ministry of education should consider reintroducing this subject again in a more interactive way so people will be interested.”

“The new education system needs to be tailored to the 21st century” he said. “Children in underdeveloped countries need to be brought up to speed with the latest developments in technology, industry and new media.”

SANTIAGO, Jul 1, 2011 (IPS) - "Today we need structural changes; we need to move towards a new model of education in Chile and to sit down to talks that include all of the concerned parties," said Camila Vallejo, one of the leaders of the student movement that has the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera up against the wall.The conflict over education broke out once again in mid-June, with occupations of public schools and universities and street protests, to which the government has responded with harsh crackdowns.

Lest history repeat itself, Ontario has laid the educational groundwork for a new generation of students who appreciate the perils of interest rates and debt, and know the real cost of borrowing money.The province’s Ministry of Education has released comprehensive teacher guidelines that identify places in the Grade 4 through 12 curriculum where financial literacy can be inserted into classes as varied as mathematics, computer science and native studies.

More than a third of students who start teacher training are still not working in state schools six months after courses finish, it was revealed. Figures show just 62 per cent of students end up in state education as others either drop out of courses, shun the teaching profession altogether or get jobs in private schools. It comes despite the fact that graduates are eligible for Government bursaries of up to £9,000 a year to train as school teachers in England.

Out of 39,103 students who started training that year, just 71.5 per cent were in teaching six months after courses finished. Around 11 per cent failed to complete courses on time and a further 17.4 per cent were not in teaching, although some may have secured jobs after the six-month cut-off.

“We know that we need to improve retention rates - that’s why we are reforming initial teacher training so that more time is spent in the classroom with a focus on the core skills a teacher needs, and ensuring there’s a better link between training and employment,” a spokesman said.

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Student protesters who have snarled Chile's universities and high schools with weeks of strikes and demonstrations called Monday for a national referendum on their demand for free and high-quality education.The students also want teachers to join them Tuesday in a nationwide strike, and plan to march again without police permission down the capital's main avenue. When they marched last week, nearly 900 protesters were arrested.

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?

Indian education has often been criticized for focusing on rote learning rather than problem solving. Experts say the curriculum in most schools is outdated and disconnected from the actual world.

Randeep Kaur, education adviser at Plan India, a New Delhi-based children’s organization, said most Indian students learned only with the aim of scoring marks but never with the intention of understanding and enhancing their knowledge. “How many of them (students) can actually make use of what they had learned?” she asked.

The new program of study, called the CBSE-i will put less emphasis on methods such as memorization and greater focus on developing analytical and communication skills.

"The percentage of people who speak French fluently is about 5%, and 100% speak Creole," says Chris Low. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote It's like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold” End Quote Michel DeGraff Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT "So it's really apartheid through language."

He argues that French should be taught in Haiti as a second-language - after children have learnt basic literacy skills in Creole. "Learning to first read and write in a foreign language is somewhat like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold, and the blindfold is never taken off," he told the BBC World Service.

No matter which indicators you pick, Haiti has an appalling record on education. One recent report rated it as the third worst place in the world, after Somalia and Eritrea, to go to school. Continue reading the main story A brief history of Haitian Creole It emerged towards the end of the 18th Century as slaves from Africa began mixing African languages with French Lots of the vocabulary comes from French, but the grammar is quite different Spelling was standardised in 1979 A law called the Bernard Reform was introduced in the early 1980s, designed to boost Creole in schools The 1987 constitution states that French and Creole are both official languages in Haiti It's estimated that about one-third of children never enrol at primary school, and only about one in 10 complete secondary school.

Despite recent economic development, Angola remains a society deeply scarred by the still-recent civil war. The conflict caused massive internal displacement and refugee outflows, along with the collapse or destruction of key agricultural, health, education and transportation infrastructures, limiting the government’s ability to provide basic public services. This has resulted in a series of barriers to children enrolling and remaining in school.

Children living in emergencies or post-conflict contexts are often excluded from schooling or start school late. Their educational progress suffers and they lack the necessary tools for learning, leading them to drop out of school.

Many of today’s adolescents in Angola were born during the prolonged civil war and missed several years of schooling or never had the opportunity to attend primary school at all. These youth often do not fit in the primary school setting, and classrooms are already crowded with much younger children.