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Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - Tunisia - Protecting children's right to education during unrest in Tunisia - 0 views

  • TUNIS, Tunisia, 23 February 2011 - After his school was attacked three times in two weeks, *Issam, 13, admits he’s afraid. Popular protests in Tunisia started mid-December in the interior regions of the country and led, a month later, to the toppling of the then President, causing schools to close down for two weeks.
  • Since interim authorities have taken over, schools have begun to reopen. Now, after a few days of strikes, schooling is slowly returning to normal. Insecurity, however, remains a concern. Across the country, schools have reported incidents of theft, looting, burning and armed attacks.
  • Most of the demonstrators are believed to be outlaws whose sole purpose is to destabilize the country. On one occasion, according to Imene, they came with knives, sticks and shards of glass. They even locked the teachers in one room and left with the key.
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  • The exact number of schools that have been targeted during the recent unrest is unknown. UNICEF, however, estimates that basic schools have been looted, damaged or stolen in seven of out 23 regions, with serious degradations in Sidi Bouzid, the heart of the revolution, where six primary schools have been looted and partially burnt
  • Beyond the damage to buildings, these events have also left an impact on schoolchildren throughout the country, many of whom have been direct witnesses of scenes of violence. To make sure their children are safe, some parents have decided to keep watch inside the school.
  • UNICEF will be supporting the Ministry of Education in rehabilitating damaged schools, providing psychosocial support to affected children, and promoting opportunities for dialogue and the restoration of mutual trust and respect between students and teachers.
  • In the meantime, Imene is worried. “I want things to go back to normal,” she says. “I have an important exam this year, and I want to pass it.” Both she and her brother are looking forward to the day when things calm down and they resume their daily activities.
Teachers Without Borders

Making vulnerable children come first in Tunisia - AlertNet - 0 views

  • TUNIS, 9 February 2011 – He says he’s 16, but he looks 14, if he is a day. I met him at the fish market in central Tunis, on a weekday, at a time when he should have been in school. Hamza left school two years ago. He says the school principal kicked him out, for no valid reason. According to recent data, 98 per cent of children of primary-school age in Tunisia are entering primary school. Thousands of them, however, drop out every year, although education is compulsory between the ages of 6 and 16. In 2009, an estimated 69,000 children left school.
  • “I would like to sign up for a vocational training class,” he says. “I would still work at the market on my days off so that I can make some money. But I would really like to learn a skill.”
  • Until Hamza really turns 16, the minimum legal age for work, he will not be able to fulfill his wish. The principal at his former school will not give him the school certificate necessary to sign up for vocational training classes.
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  • “Money, or rather lack of it – is most often the cause of the problem,” he says. “Poverty, especially when combined with lack of education or awareness, is a breeding ground for violence, exploitation, deprivations, abandonment and all sorts of abuses against children.”
  • According to Mehyar Hamadi, a child protection officer in the Governorate of Ariana in Greater Tunis, children who left school before the age of 16 and who are unable, or unwilling, to resume their education, usually stay in limbo. Some go to social integrations centers, known as CDIS, where they can learn some basic skills, attend some cultural activities, or learn how to use computers. Most, however, prefer to work, and hide their age to be able to do so.
  • TUNIS, 9 February 2011 – He says he’s 16, but he looks 14, if he is a day. I met him at the fish market in central Tunis, on a weekday, at a time when he should have been in school. Hamza left school two years ago. He says the school principal kicked him out, for no valid reason. According to recent data, 98 per cent of children of primary-school age in Tunisia are entering primary school. Thousands of them, however, drop out every year, although education is compulsory between the ages of 6 and 16. In 2009, an estimated 69,000 children left school.
Teachers Without Borders

Tunisia's Educational System Open for Reform : Tunisia Live - 0 views

  •  
    three-day national conference on how to reform Tunisia's educational system will kick off tomorrow in the Tunisian capital. Experts in education, members of various civil society organizations and political parties, and a high number of parents will attend the conference. The event will discuss the way forward regarding the necessary reforms that the Tunisian educational system should implement. According to Khaled Chabbi, the spokesman for the Ministry of Education, the goal is to "highlight the existing defects from which the current Tunisian educational system is suffering, and review its methodology in light of results learned throughout previous attempts at reforms."
Fred Mednick

ISRAEL: Researchers see Tunisia as a textbook revolution | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angel... - 0 views

  • an Israeli research group suggests Tunisia's was a textbook revolution. Not in the sense that it was a perfect storm or that it followed a certain formula -- no two revolutions are the same -- but in the sense that it may actually have begun in school textbooks.
  • A comprehensive study of the Tunisian curriculum, completed in 2009 and presented before the European parliament, found that education in Tunisia cultivates equality and is much more progressive in teaching tolerance than any other Arab country.
    • Fred Mednick
       
      Incredibly interesting!
  • The material still takes the Palestinian side in their conflict with Israel, researchers found, but not in a way that negates Jews or Israel. Above all, the study found the educational system to have a "profound understanding of equality and democracy."
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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.
Teachers Without Borders

Education failures fan the flames in the Arab world « World Education Blog - 1 views

  • Education is a key ingredient of the political crisis facing Arab states. Superficially, the education profile of the region is starting to resemble that of East Asia. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic advances in primary and secondary school enrollment, with a step-increase in tertiary education. Many governments have increased public spending on education. The 7% of GDP that Tunisia invests in the sector puts the country near the top of the global league table for financial effort.
  • In Egypt, the education group most likely to be unemployed is university level and above, followed by post-secondary. Around one quarter of the country’s male university graduates are unemployed, and almost half of its female graduates.
  • For all the expansion of access and investment in education, the Arab states have some of the world’s worst performing education systems. The problems start early. In this year’s Global Monitoring Report we carry a table showing the distribution of performance across different countries in reading test scores at grade 4. In Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco, over 90% of students scored below the lowest benchmark, indicating that they lacked even basic comprehension.  In fact, these countries held the bottom three positions in a group of 37 countries covered.
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  • The median (or middle-performing) student in Algeria, Egypt and Syria scores below the low-benchmark; in Tunisia they score just above. In other words, half of the students in each country have gone through eight years of school to arrive at a level that leaves them with no working knowledge of basic math. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, over 80% of students fall below the low benchmark. The median student in both performs at around the same level as their counterpart in Ghana and El Salvador – and Qatar is the worst performing country covered in the survey.
  • Why are education systems in the Middle East and North Africa performing so badly? In many countries, teachers are poorly trained – and teaching is regarded as a low-status, last-resort source of employment for entrants to the civil service. There is an emphasis on rote learning, rather than solving problems and developing more flexible skills. And education systems are geared towards a public sector job market that is shrinking, and for entry to post-secondary education. Most don’t make it. And those who do emerge with skills that are largely irrelevant to the needs of employers.
  • Moreover, many Arab youth view their education systems not as a source of learning and opportunity, but as a vehicle through which autocratic rulers seek to limit critical thinking, undermine freedom of speech and reinforce their political control.
  • To a large extent, the protest movement across the Arab States has been led by educated youth and adults frustrated by political autocracy and limited economic opportunity. This has deflected attention from an education crisis facing low-income households in primary education – and from the needs of adolescents and youth emerging from school systems with just a few years of sub-standard education.
  • The Arab states have an unfinished agenda on basic education.  They still have 6 million primary school age children out of school – around 16% of the world’s total. Despite the vast gap in wealth between the two countries, Saudi Arabia has a lower primary school enrolment rate than Zambia. The Arab world also has some very large gender disparities: in Yemen, primary school enrolment rates are 79% for boys, but just 66% for girls.
  • Consider the case of Egypt. On average, someone aged 17-22 years old in the country has had around nine years of education. That’s roughly what might be anticipated on the basis of the country’s income. Scratch the surface, though, and you get a different picture: around 12% of Egyptians have had less than two years of education.
  • High dropout rates from primary and lower secondary school are symptomatic of parental poverty, poor quality education, and a sustained failure on the part of the Egyptian government to tackle the underlying causes of inequality. Adolescents from poor backgrounds entering labor markets without a secondary education are carrying a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, insecurity and marginalization.
  • The political crisis sweeping Arab states is the product of many years of political failure. The aspirations and hopes of young people – who are increasingly connected to each other and the outside world through the Internet – are colliding with an atrophied political system governed by complacent, self-interested elites who are disconnected from the population.
Teachers Without Borders

http://www.ei-ie.org/educationforall/en/newsshow.php?id=1523&theme=educationforall&coun... - 0 views

  • 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?”
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Kenya: Nation Wins Praise for Its Education Budget - 2 views

  • Tunis — Kenya has been cited as one of the best spenders in education in Africa, signalling its commitment to international development goals. An international education conference in Tunis, Tunisia, heard at the weekend that Kenya commits 7 per cent of its total income to education annually, surpassing the continental average of 5 per cent.
  • The figure this year is Sh180 billion, with basic education taking Sh150 billion and Sh30 billion for higher education. As a result, school enrolment has increased by more than 20 per cent in the past five years, putting the country on good stead to realise education for all goals.
Teachers Without Borders

BBC News - UK pupils 'among least likely to overcome tough start' - 0 views

  • The UK performs poorly in an international league table showing how many disadvantaged pupils succeed "against the odds" at school. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has studied how pupils from poor backgrounds can succeed academically.
  • It says that "self-confidence" is a key factor in whether such pupils succeed. The UK comes behind Mexico and Tunisia in the table - with the top places taken by Asian countries.
  • The study from the international economic organisation looks at whether there is an inevitable link between disadvantaged backgrounds and a cycle of poor school results and limited job prospects.
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  • Using science test results from the major international PISA study, which compares the performance of different education systems, it shows that there are wide differences in the levels of resilience.
  • Among countries, South Korea, Finland, Japan, Turkey and Canada are the most successful in terms of poorer pupils achieving high results.
  • But the UK is well below average and at the lower end of this ranking of resilience, with only 24% showing such examples of "resilience".
  • Believing that they are likely to succeed in exams is an important part of how they actually perform. The study argues that mentoring schemes can be particularly beneficial.
  • There is also a link between longer hours in class studying a subject and the improved chances of poorer pupils. It is also says that motivation is important - but in the form of a "personal, internal drive" rather than the promise of a reward or an incentive.
  • "All of these findings suggest that schools may have an important role to play in fostering resilience," says the report. "They could start by providing more opportunities for disadvantaged students to learn in class by developing activities, classroom practices and teaching methods that encourage learning and foster motivation and self-confidence among those students."
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