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This article Back to School, Back to Horror offers a good opportunity to compare some lifestyle differences between the invaders vs. the invadees, occupiers vs. occupied. With the security situation grimmer than ever all over the country, just stepping out of one’s house means a serious threat to life.
"God knows how we could send our kids to school this year," Um Mohammed, a mother of five in Baghdad told IPS. "Our financial situation is the worst ever and the prices are way too expensive for the majority of Iraqis to afford. I might have to keep some of them at home and send only two."
The 40-year-old woman shed tears when she started to talk about the family’s financial now compared to what it was before the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
"My God, don’t those Americans have any conscience? We were not rich before, but life was easy and we used to celebrate the school season, watching our kids trying their uniform on and looking at the colourful pictures of their new books," she said.
"The educational system in Iraq is destroyed and we are suffering all kinds of difficulties," said Hassan, a school headmaster in Baghdad who spoke on condition that his last name and the name of his school would not be used. "There will be a shortage of desks, blackboards, water, electricity and all educational supplies – as well as a critical shortage in the number of teachers this year."
Teachers, like other Iraqis, have fled the country because of threats from sectarian death squads. Some were evicted from their areas and moved to others inside Iraq for sectarian reasons.
According to Iraq's Ministry of Higher Education, as of February 2006, nearly 180 professors were killed and at least 3,250 have fled Iraq to the neighbouring countries. The situation has deteriorated severely since then.
Many children in the USA have little more to worry about than studying and socializing, with puberty and various crushes thrown into the mix for older kids. This is enough for any kid to deal with, and many American kids have other concerns on top of these: learning disabilities, bullying, child abuse, incest, family violence, gang violence, poverty, racial or ethnic discrimination, social exclusion, self-esteem issues, eating disorders, pressure to succeed... it goes on. Is it any wonder that kids have a lot on their mind and often experience mental health issues like depression, anxiety, or hyperactivity? According to an Oxfam International report released in July, "92 percent of children had learning impediments that are largely attributable to the current climate of fear."
The report added, "Schools are regularly closed as teachers and pupils are too fearful to attend. Over 800,000 children may now be out of school, according to a recent estimate by Save the Children UK -- up from 600,000 in 2004."
Every day her mother makes her some Bolani (Afghan fast food) and sells each one for 5 afg, almost ten cents.
She is 9 years old and wishes to go to school one day. She wishes that one day they'll have food at home and a schoolbag for her brother. She wishes for the day when he will have shoes on his feet. She is tired.
I asked her if she likes to go to school.
"If I go to school who is going to take care of my little brother and sister? Who is going to feed my mother? We don’t have a home, we don't have food, and we don't have money. That is why I am coming to the street to sell Bolani and earn a little money, to buy food for my family", she answered.
I looked down at her feet in the old torn shoes. Her toes came out and were terribly harmed. She suffers from her long walks to reach this place to sell her bread.
"Look I have no shoes to go to school; I walk 30 minutes to get here. And here I am not comfortable also, because the traffic comes towards me, forcing me to leave this place. At night when I go back home I am tired and I can’t play. So I go to sleep and early in the morning I wake up again and take me and my breads back to this place", she said.
- Every 30 minutes, an Afghan woman dies during childbirth
- 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate
- 30 percent of girls have access to education in Afghanistan
- 1 in every 3 Afghan women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence
- 44 years is the average life expectancy rate for women in Afghanistan
- 70 to 80 percent of women face forced marriages in Afghanistan
Source: IRIN News, March 8, 2007
The nation reacted in horror as students counted their dead by the dozens, all innocent victims of an indiscriminate attack violating the sanctity of the university campus.
Today, it’s Virginia Tech, the site of a horrific mass murder in which at least 33 students are confirmed dead in a shooting rampage by an as-yet unidentified gunman.
In Iraq, universities struggling to operate in the midst of a war zone have been struck repeatedly by bombings, shootings, assassinations, and abductions that have left behind hundreds of killed and wounded, victims and forced thousands of students and professors to stay away, or even leave the country.
On Monday, the same day as the Virginia Tech mass shooting, two separate shooting incidents struck Mosul University, one killing Dr. Talal Younis al-Jelili, the dean of the college of Political Science as he walked through the university gate, and another killing Dr. Jaafar Hassan Sadeq, a professor from the Faculty of Arts at the school, who was targeted in front of his home in the al-Kifaat area, according to Aswat al-Iraq.
In January, Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University sufferred a double suicide bombing in January that killed at least 70 people, including students, faculty, and staff. A month later, another suicide bomber struck at Mustansiriya, killing 40.
Read the rest of the article from Iraqslogger.com.
Nearly 300 000 children in South Africa can't go to school because they don't have wheelchairs, hearing aids, crutches or even spectacles to make their lives easier. (more)
This week, the United Nations 2005 World Summit in New York will address the lack of access to education for the lowest-income families around the globe. Its admirable goal is to achieve “universal primary education by 2015,” through increased international funding and government administration. The educational plight of the world’s poor seems inevitably to result in calls for such responses.
Though the big stick* of government intervention seems like a powerful tool for good, in the field of education its results have been disappointing and suggest that government interference in education is part of the problem, not the solution.
Evidence suggests that free, state-run education has not resulted in anywhere near the universal educational outcomes its advocates have promised. In many parts of the Western world, that failure is still evident after more than a century of concentrated effort, in Africa after many billions of dollars in international aid grants. These are humanitarian tragedies indeed and we must consider seriously the reasons for the failure.
Does the educational failure of the world’s poor reflect the impossibility of achieving lofty educational goals, or does it reflect misguided reliance on public financing and provision? Increasingly, the evidence suggests not that poor families are impossible to educate, but that free, state-run schools may not be the best way to deliver education to them.
Groundbreaking research by the University of Newcastle’s Dr. James Tooley in the slums of Africa, India and China reveals that a perhaps majority of students not enrolled in public schools in these countries are being educated in unregistered private schools, paid for by their parents.
Tooley’s research indicates significantly higher achievement among private-school students even after controlling for factors such as parental education and income. His fieldwork findings also show that when visited unannounced, fewer public-school teachers were engaged in teaching activities than their private-school counterparts were.
A recent BBC documentary provided vivid anecdotal evidence of this when it showed footage of teachers sleeping in African public-school classrooms and chatting on their cell phones, while students were left to their own devices.
Though governments in the developing world do not recognize the existence or contribution of private schools, their value is fully acknowledged by parents, who make great personal sacrifices to pay the tuition. One parent explains, “If you were offered free fruit in the market, you would know it was rotten. If you want good fruit, you have to pay for it. The same is true of education.”
Here in Canada, private schools are equally unsung heroes of education for our poorest citizens. An OECD report released this week reveals that even after accounting for parental education and income, private-school students in Canada do much better on mathematics tests than their public school counterparts. Statistics Canada tells us that 29 percent, nearly a third of children who attend private schools in Canada, are from families with incomes of less than $50,000. This suggests that many poor parents in Canada also value private education, despite the financial sacrifices it requires of them.
In fact, there is reason to believe that private schools may offer lower-income families better value for money than public schools offer taxpayers. Evidence of this comes from Children First: School Choice Trust, a greatly over-subscribed program in Ontario that offers grants to lower-income families. The program pays up to 50 percent of tuition at independent elementary school for 800 children whose household income is less than twice the poverty line. The average household income of Children First families is less than $28,000 while the average tuition of their schools is $4,400, about 56 percent of what is spent per student in the public system.
Why are these poor families choosing private schools that will cost them dearly, when public schools are available free of charge? Some want relief from bullying, others religious education, others cite smaller schools with greater academic emphasis and respect for teachers, while yet others help for a special education need. Each family seems to agree with the African parent’s analogy of the free fruit and that educational value offered by private schools is more than worth their financial sacrifices.
Chinese officials told Tooley’s research team private schools for the poor were “logically impossible.” Like those officials, government bureaucrats* will continue to deny the existence and potential of educational entrepreneurs, despite the cost of their denial to those poor families they purport to serve. And while they do, the admirable UN targets for universal education will prove continually elusive.
My Emphasis
* Note the bogeymen: "big stick of government intervention", "government bureaucrats". Can't you just HEAR the venom dripping from their mouths?
So the other morning, on my TTC ride to work, I noticed something about the ads for Children First: School Choice Trust. Children First: School Choice Trust is Canada's first privately funded program to help families improve their educational choices. Children First offers tuition assistance grants, so that parents who could not otherwise afford it can choose an independent elementary school for their children.
Despite seeing these every day, I had never before noticed this project is funded by the infamous Fraser Institute (cue Darth Vader music). Of course, they have an Agenda. The Fraser Institute wants to discredit the institute of public education. They seek to blame problems with our underfunded public system on the "public" part, rather than the "underfunded" part. Does the educational failure of the world’s poor reflect the impossibility of achieving lofty educational goals, or does it reflect misguided reliance on public financing and provision? Increasingly, the evidence suggests not that poor families are impossible to educate, but that free, state-run schools may not be the best way to deliver education to them.What's that you say? Poor families are not impossible to educate? How very charitable of them to say such a thing. Well, since it isn't impossible to educate the poor, our only other explanation is that public education results in educational failure.
"Once in a whileOn my way to Edmonton for Christmas with my family, nestled in-between pages and pages of advertisements and "shopping guides", I read a good anti-consumerist article in the in-flight magazine.
you get shown the light
in the strangest of places
if you look at it right"
Peter Hirschberg: JERUSALEM, Dec. 18 (IPS) - "A directive by Israel's education minister that all maps in new editions of school textbooks must include the 1967 line that separates Israel from the West Bank has sparked a political firestorm, with right-wing politicians and religious leaders threatening to boycott the books if they are issued."Read the rest
As a teen at Tranquility Bay, you can't call home and are escorted between rooms by Jamaican "chaperones." Talk out of turn and your punishment might be that a trio of guards wrestles you to the ground. "They start twisting and pulling your limbs, grinding your ankles," a student told the British newspaper The Guardian.
Higher education is hardly a monopoly of the righ in America: a third of undergraduates come from racial minorities, and about a quarter come from families with incomes below the poverty line.
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