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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.

Yet the top 20 percent of state schools - which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding - enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.

When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources," the report on the study noted.

many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid's "Bantu" education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in 1994 when a new democratic government came into power.

"The focus needs to be on teachers' development," said Cembi. "We've had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers."

n recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.

Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.

The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that 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.

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.

The Android 2.2-based device has two USB ports and 256 megabytes of RAM. Despite hopes for a solar-powered version — important for India’s energy-starved hinterlands — no such option is currently available.

India, after raising literacy to about 78 percent from 12 percent when British rule ended, is now focusing on higher education with a 2020 goal of 30 percent enrollment. Today, only 7 percent of Indians graduate from high school.

Southern Sudan ranks second to last when it comes to primary school enrolment, with almost 1.3 million children of primary school age out of school.

For the girls, the situation is even worse. Only around 8 per cent of women in Southern Sudan are literate, giving it one of the lowest female literacy rates in the world.

“When we first began, there were hardly any girls in the classroom, maybe two or three,” she said. “But now, in a classroom of 60, [there] would be 27 to, sometimes, half” of the class composed of girl students.

“The teacher-parent associations are getting stronger,” she said. “We really need to create community awareness.”

Canada also has the weakest record on teaching national history that the council could find it its review of school curricula in other countries. Most Canadian provinces require only one high school course in Canadian history, and they tend to put a very regional lens on the material.Canadian schools are doing an especially poor job of history education when compared to American ones, said Jeremy Diamond, a director for the Historica-Dominion Institute.“We don’t start young enough, we don’t make it a priority, and we have a generation of young people who don’t know the essential things we as Canadians should know about our history,” he said.

The Canadian Council on Learning says there needs to be more school-industry partnerships, like those in part of Central Europe where there are a number of apprenticeship options available to high school students. In Canada, however, a bottleneck occurs as students struggle to find placements in their area of training.

It also recommends that Canada set up a national French-language teacher training college, “in order to preserve and enhance bilingual education.” Canada is facing a shortage of French-language teachers, both in the French school boards outside Quebec and for French immersion programs.