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According to the group's research, Egypt is another story. With school curricula still very much under control of clerics and shaped largely by Muslim clerics and religious authorities, it does not encourage independent thinking and emphasizes war narratives, not peace. While textbooks do urge tolerance to minorities such as the Copts, according to the study, Manor says they have obliterated any mention of historic injustices they have suffered.

Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Belarus and even China should read the study when it comes out, as the data indicate they could be looking at civilian unrest in the near future, too. Jordan and Algeria, where democratization is low but the people's aspirations are likewise, appear to be more stable, according to the study.

However, Aruna Pendse, associate professor with the Mumbai University`s department of civics and politics, supported the move. "Raising the pre-qualification condition (for a primary schoolteacher`s job) may result in children getting quality education," she said.

According to the existing rules, to become a primary schoolteacher one needs to pass the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) exam and then enrol for a diploma in elementary education (DEd).

In a powerful paper on education reform in Pakistan, Sir Michael quotes Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, who said in 1947, “Education is a matter of life and death for Pakistan. The world is progressing so rapidly that without the requisite advance in education, not only shall we be left behind others but we may be wiped out altogether.”

The challenge now is to find that political will – the will to turn more words into concrete changes for the 7.3 million Pakistani children who are out of school – the world’s second-largest population of out-of-school children (after Nigeria).

As the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report noted, Pakistan spends seven times more on the military than on primary education. One fifth of Pakistan’s military budget would be enough to pay for every child to complete primary school.

SNAT blames the government for the economic crisis in a country where the king and the elite enjoy a lavish lifestyle and where expensive celebrations are planned for the King’s jubilee, while two thirds of the population live below the poverty line.

The current system also leaves underfunded municipalities in charge of high school education nationwide. This has starved most schools of resources, while leaving some wealthy neighborhood schools well off. Chile’s small upper class sends its children to private schools or even overseas for their education.

South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.

The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.

World literature will also have greater space in this curriculum.

Anjali Chhabra, education officer at the CBSE in New Delhi told India Real Time that subjects will be taught with a more global perspective. For instance, when it comes to history there will be more space for world history, rather than just Indian history, as is the case in the regular curriculum.

Languages are an important component of the international curriculum. The students are also expected to study three languages, rather than just two. Compulsory languages are English and either Hindi or another local language, as is already the case in the regular curriculum, plus a foreign language. Options could include French, Russian, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

So far, only ten schools across India have applied for the international syllabus.

In a major leap for India’s education system the country’s Central Board of Secondary Education has decided to go international with a brand new curriculum.

Souktel’s services are coinciding with the exponential rise of mobile phone use in the developing world. The United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union reports that there were 360 million African and 310 million Middle Eastern mobile phone subscribers in 2010. These recent numbers are up from just 87 million and 85 million respective subscribers in 2005.

Currently, the ministry of education and Unicef fund 54 "child-friendly" schools across Rwanda, which also provide "best-practice" examples to other schools in their cluster areas. A 2009 Unicef report on the initiative indicates that they have assisted 7,500 disabled children. The government is aiming to expand the programme to 400 schools nationwide by 2012, and has also adopted it as the basic standard for all Rwanda's primary schools.

Ngayaboshya, who worked with Claude, says that his inclusion plan also involved preparing the teachers and the other children at his school through measures such as pinning up Claude's picture in the classroom, talking in class about how disability can occur, inviting the class to contribute ideas that could help to include him, and encouraging Claude's father to visit the school and show teachers simple measures to assist his son.

It took weeks to integrate Claude into school life, but he now gets good grades and is making friends. And he walks over a kilometre every day on his crutches to go to school. Although it is a long way he doesn't mind the journey, and is excited about the classroom. 

Undoubtedly there are complex challenges for disabled learners in Rwanda. These include the lack of awareness among families that children with disabilities can attend school; poverty (poor families might need their children to support them with looking after animals, fetching water or firewood); the effects of the genocide in 1994, including the massacre of thousands of teachers that has reduced their numbers (the pupil-teacher ratio in Rwanda is as high as 60:1 according to HI); and the burden placed on resources by a curriculum shift from French to English as the official language of instruction.

UNICEF’s Accelerated Learning Programme, called Programa de Alfabetização e Aceleração Escolar (PAAE) in Angola, provides a second-chance learning opportunity for literacy, numeracy and life skills for adolescents through a condensed and adapted primary school curriculum, which can be completed in two-and-a-half years rather than the full six years of primary schooling. It thus encourages out-of-school adolescents to complete primary education, come back into the school system and continue to the second level.

“The Accelerated Learning Programme is a critical national strategy of the Government of Angola but what is more important is that this strategy is translated into a second chance and a renewal of hope for adolescents, and girls especially, to continue to learn and develop,” said Paulina Feijo, UNICEF Angola, Education Project Officer.