Teachers Without Borders

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and filmmaker Spike Lee teamed up Monday to urge more black men to consider teaching.

More than 1 million teachers will retire during the next decade, according to federal estimates, and leaders have embarked on a nationwide drive to build a more diverse teaching force. Duncan on Monday took the campaign to Atlanta's Morehouse College, the nation's only all-male historically black college.

Teachers should look more like the people they serve, Duncan said. While more than 35 percent of the nation’s public school students are black or Latino, less than 15 percent of the teachers are black or Latino, according to federal figures. Less than 2 percent of the nation’s teachers are black men.

The school syllabus has been changed to make it relevant to the new Constitution.

Key amendments will start this term in primary and secondary schools with most of the changes being made in social studies, history and government. A detailed directive from the Ministry of Education has been sent to all schools through the provincial and district education officers.

“These changes are to come into effect immediately and the information should be brought to the attention of all schools,” Mr Enos Oyaya, the director of quality assurance and standards at the ministry, said.

KARACHI: Idealism need not fight capitalism because they can work in harmony, is the message of Khadija Bakhtiar, whose ‘Teach for Pakistan’ project aims to place 40 teachers in 20 under-resourced primary and secondary schools in Karachi this year and the next.

Bakhtiar was inspired by fellow students who had worked with Teach for America, a programme that tries to end educational inequity by sending top university graduates to teach in poor neighbourhoods for two years.

Unesco’s senior national specialist for education, Arshad Saeed Khan, has said that the average Pakistani spends a mere 5.7 years in school.

FORMAL approval is being awaited from the Ministry of Education for the reintroduction of Bible study in public schools as part of the existing Religious and Moral Education (RME) subject.

“The purpose of Government’s RME curriculum is to develop knowledge of the diversity of religious beliefs as a source for moral education, while the purpose of CCN’s curriculum is to use the Bible as source for moral education.  This will help prevent the growing threat of moral decay in Namibian society and strengthen Biblical instruction in the school curriculum,” said Kapere.

She told The Namibian that Bible study at schools was done away with in Namibia after Independence, and the main reason for this is because the Constitution classifies Namibia as a ‘secular state’.“To focus on one specific religion would have been objectionable by the other religions,” she said. “Christianity is taught now, but it’s more historical than theological. With the new programme, children will go deeper into what the Bible says.”

The Taliban are ready to drop their ban on schooling girls in Afghanistan, the country's education minister has said.

He told the TES: "What I am hearing at the very upper policy level of the Taliban is that they are no more opposing education and also girls' education. "I hope, Inshallah (God willing), soon there will be a peaceful negotiation, a meaningful negotiation with our own opposition and that will not compromise at all the basic human rights and basic principles which have been guiding us to provide quality and balanced education to our people," the minister added.

Across the country agreements have been struck at a local level between militants and village elders to allow girls and female teachers to return to schools, the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul reports