Amna Nawaz of NBC News traveled to Pakistan on a grant from the International Reporting Project. She reports on a charity called The Citizens Foundation, which has built 600 schools and enrolled over 80,000 Pakistani students.

Sabatini discusses how globalization, democracy and the search for natural resources are contributing to the increase in indigenous political movements. He also explains who is being effected and how activism is impacting countries across the region.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the children’s television show Sesame Street. I grew up with Sesame Street when my family lived in Kuwait, where we watched the Arabic version, called Open Sesame (Iftah ya Simsim).

The Arabic version included all the characters in the American Sesame Street with a few changes. For example, instead of Big Bird, it had a big, lovable character named No’man. The characters had Arabic names; Bert was Bader, Ernie was Anis and Kermit the Frog was Kamel the Frog.

No Arabic children’s program in the Middle East was as influential as Open Sesame.

Open Sesame had a major influence on me as a human being. It provided me with an alternative way of learning that hardly existed in the Arab world at the time. The show was made up of actors from around the Arab world. Thus, it familiarized us with the different accents that existed among Arabs from North Africa to Egypt, passing by Iraq and the Gulf.

Open Sesame encouraged and promoted sharing, friendship, and cooperation. It taught me about numbers, the alphabet, manners and waiting my turn. To this day, I still remember many songs I learned from the show about how to be a good neighbor, wash your hands and count to ten.

The show lacked the special effects that many children’s shows have now, yet its masterful use of puppets and the always-entertaining music revolutionized children’s educational programming and learning in a region that desperately needed it then — and more gravely needs it now.

Cath Turner of Al Jazeera English reports on Sesame Street’s impact in countries from Jordan to South Africa.

- Mohammad al Kassim

The institution is designed to promote reform and modernization.

Sabina Castelfranco of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English reports from Jeddah.

Now, Pakistan is trying to re-open the schools before winter. Kamal Hyder of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English reports from Pakistan.

The schools in question are run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which also provides aid for Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East. Andrew Whitley, the director of UNRWA’s New York office, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the organization’s position and how the Holocaust is handled in Middle Eastern schools.

The project began in 2002, as kids first entered school in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania - many despite great odds. Several years later, in 2006, Time for School returned to film an update — and now, three years later, travels to check in on our young teenagers who are making the precarious transition to middle school.

Among the highlights: in Afghanistan 16-year-old Shugufa remains in school despite the Taliban’s recent acid attacks on young women her age.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced a pilot program that will introduce mandatory religious studies and secular ethics in Russian schools.

Students will choose between one of four religions — Russian Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism — or courses in secular ethics. The program’s test phase will involve some 20 percent of Russia’s schools, with the stated goal of encouraging morals.

Since the collapse of the officially atheist Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church has been gaining influence, and religious education has sparked protest.

Worldfocus contributing blogger Bruce Chapman, writing at Russia Blog, describes the controversy in Russia and compares it to related issues in the U.S.

A new Kremlin plan to teach students religion or secular ethics is meant to combat the aimlessness of youth.

Perhaps it will — to some extent.

The approach is probably unique — teach what is again the dominant state religion (Russian Orthodoxy) as the one acceptable Christian faith, and also teach — according to student desires — Islam (the religion of a sizable minority, particularly in the South), Buddhism or Judaism, and give the students the alternative of a coarse in secular ethics. It will seem fair to many, maybe most, Russians. It is quite different, obviously, from the “scientific atheism” of Soviet days.

The program will get a lot of criticism, however. First, the most eager evangelists in Russia today are probably the various kinds of Christian pentecostals, and there is a sizable Roman Catholic population in certain ethnic centers. So the government apparently is starting a new struggle with these groups in schools, of all places.

Then arises the question of how smart it is to have Islam taught in state schools. Who is going to teach it? What is going to be taught? Might the government find itself trying to deal with hostile Friday mosque sermons because of the kind of Islam it promulgates in the schools? Where does that lead? How will populations in areas where Islam is a majority faith react to state school classes that offer instruction as well in other faiths?

Regardless, the new Russian model is so jarringly different from what is on offer in the United States that it may be worth careful monitoring by Americans. We no longer provide much at all in schools of the old, slightly Protestant civic religion of yore. The struggle in the U.S. is over whether to allow any expressions of faith in schools, whether in Commencement speeches by students or in after-school religious clubs.

Overall, America has benefited by a general separation of religious instruction and public education, as in other fields. A state religion gets lazy. It becomes synonymous in students’ minds with state politics, which cannot be good.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for students learning more about the religious heritage of their country. If the Russians are erring on one side of that objective, Americans may be erring on the other. If nothing else, comparisons of results should be interesting.

One place where the outcomes may be studied closely is….China.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user wonderlane under a Creative Commons license.

A Hungarian schoolboy.

By 1990, it was no longer compulsory to learn Russian in Hungary. Students celebrated, no longer forced to learn the “language of oppression.” But fast-forward to 2009, and Hungary may be facing a foreign language gap — a 2004 study showed fewer Hungarians spoke second languages than almost any other country in Europe, except Britain. 

Eva S. Balogh is a Hungarian academic and blogger who writes at “Hungarian Spectrum” about the state of language education in her country. 

Learning a language in Hungary

The teaching of foreign languages in Hungarian schools is bad. Very, very bad. As far back as I can remember it was bad. Although my father in the early part of the twentieth century managed to learn German and French quite well in gymnasium, by the time I got to gymnasium it was a hopeless proposition.

Let me recount my own tortuous linguistic journey. Aside from being enrolled in a so-called German-language kindergarten where we learned no German whatsoever, I started studying French in grade five. [...] Although the parochial school I attended was run by a French order (Notre Dame), out of the four parallel classes they taught German in three and French in only one.

Our French teacher by Hungarian standards wasn’t even half bad. The fact that she was a nun stood her in good stead in mastering a foreign language. Because she majored in French she was sent by the order to a French university for a couple of years. So she could at least speak the language tolerably well. However, the class focused on reading and writing, with virtually no conversation. So after three years of French I switched to Russian. That was an interesting experience. I don’t think our teacher knew more Russian than we did. I.e. zero. She was at best a couple of lessons ahead of us. Not surprisingly we learned practically nothing by the end of the year.

[...]With the change of regime Russian was no longer a compulsory language. So students rushed to English, German, and French classes. But who were their teachers? The former Russian teachers who tried to learn English, German, or French with the same poor results as the German and French teachers who had earlier tried to learn Russian.

Today, aside from the lack of experienced teachers, the problem seems to be the same as in earlier times. Students don’t learn to communicate in a foreign language; they can neither speak nor comprehend. They are in the same boat as the Hungarian students who were trying to converse with the Russian soldiers in 1956.

Some people have tried to explain Hungarian deficiencies in learning a foreign language by pointing out that Hungarian is not an Indo-European language and therefore Hungarian speakers find it harder to learn a western language. This is hogwash. Finns manage; the percentage of Finns speaking one or two foreign languages is among the highest in Europe. Moreover, Hungarians find it easier to learn a western language than to learn Finnish whose grammatical structure is very similar to Hungarian. 

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jo Peattie under a Creative Commons license.

Flickr user mallix constructs a Twitter class portrait. Photo under a Creative Commons license.

A draft curriculum review of the British education system calls for primary school pupils to learn how to use Twitter, Wikipedia, blogging and podcasts as part of their school studies.

The proposals also suggest that history topics such as the Victorian era and World War II be given less time in the curriculum. The final version of the review is due out next month.

“The Cowfield” blog rejects the curriculum shake-ups, arguing that technology is over-emphasized:

As a history scholar, I firmly believe more should be done to encourage people to question their pasts, and to connect the present with what has gone on before. The suggestions [in the proposals] indicate that this is no longer a concern for governmental officials. Instead, it seems, we should be encouraging the ‘life skills’ of how to use Twitter, or how to blog.

[...]I really do not think that further use of Twitter, Wikipedia et al should be encouraged. Many people are already moaning that there is too much exposure to the internet and computers, so surely encouraging further exposure should be frowned upon? At a period where we are frequently told of the growing obesity problem, surely placing kids in front of another screen cannot help? I’m still not sure what was wrong with classrooms and books personally.

Several commenters weighed in on the story in response to an article at the “TechCrunch” blog, both in support of and against the proposals:

Wendy wrote: We’re in a post PC era, my four year old uses youtube on my iphone, my 18mth old daughter plays with the bubblewrap app. To them it’s just part of life and nothing special. I’m all in favour of an overhaul to schools curriculum with regards to tech and media however I’m a little skeptical that putting Twitter on the agenda is just the government jumping on a fad. More optimistically they’re just mentioning this to get picked up on the news and there is a more considered well researched programme of change behind this?

Bas wrote: I think children should get lessons in thinking and in information retrieval. Yes, they should still be taught about history, etc. Yes, it’s important they learn stuff that they could need ‘on the spot’ - like calculating skills. However, we can go a little bit easier on drilling the information in - by the time they’re 25, augmented reality will be a fact and not even a luxury. We’ll be able to retrieve information at any time, any place, about almost anything, without even moving our hands to grab our handhelds.

Another British blogger at “Zeitgeist” says it’s “more dumbing down,” blasting the government:

I think the those people in authority are the ones who need educating. Children already know far more about the web than most adults! What is going on? Why does the government continuously insist on getting it wrong? Because getting it right would cost a lot more money, and it would probably take a lot longer than 4 years, and as most people realise the government only see[s] up to 4 years in to the future, they never think long-term.

At the “Twitterati” blog, Josh Crowse comments that the introduction of social media tools into curriculum may have a reverse effect:

Translation: in 10 years, students will have grown to hate twitter and wikipedia, after having to use them as part of daily homework.

Some American schools ban Twitter, including that of Minnesota teacher “Knaus,” who writes in support of the site as a learning tool:

I love Twitter. I use it three ways. I have a Twitter for my classroom that is private, a Twitter for my family that is connected to Facebook, and a school tech Twitter for my teaching and learning in and through technology. Having different Twitters lets me keep my information specific to each topic and I can’t “over Tweet.” I really wish it was unblocked at my school. I think it would be great for my students to use.

Schoolgirls in Manila.

In the U.S., schools in several cities have implemented “cash for grades” programs to encourage disadvantaged students’ achievement in the classroom.

Now, developing countries are testing out cash incentives as a possible method of fighting poor health and education. In the Philippines, the government’s new “Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program” provides cash assistance to poor families that follow human development guidelines. Approximately 4.7 million families in the Philippines, or 27.6 million people, were considered poor in 2006.

Gilberto M. Llanto is a research fellow with the Philippine Institute for Development Studies and holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of the Philippines. He writes at the “East Asia Forum” blog about the new program and its likelihood of success. 

Philippines rolls out cash in return for health and education

A growing number of developing countries have implemented conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, a new intervention funded by donors that seeks to improve the health and education status of mothers and poor children, respectively, and reduce poverty in the long run. The CCT is a targeted transfer program whereby cash is directly transferred to poor household beneficiaries on condition of doing certain activities such as keeping children in school. This intervention rests on the importance given to human capital in stimulating growth and social development.

Recently, the Philippine government has designed its own version called “Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program” (4Ps), allocated a budget and knocked on the doors of donors such as the World Bank for supplemental funding.

The 4Ps will provide cash to targeted poor households on condition of regular school attendance by the households’ children and visits to health centers by family members.

The 4Ps are based on the following rationale:

• Investment in human capital (e.g., basic education, health) leads to long-run poverty alleviation. Early interventions provide much higher returns over the lifecycle, and
• Cash transfers have an immediate impact on the poverty situation.

That poor households—which do not have the means to improve their education and health status—need some form of subsidies is undeniable. That cash transfers provide immediate relief, especially to poor households suffering from hunger and various deprivations, is obvious.

The policy question, however, is whether or not the 4Ps constitutes an efficient and effective instrument for providing subsidies. More importantly, will conditional cash transfers yield the expected outcomes on education, nutrition, and health? Will the expected human capital investment outcomes be realized?

The budgetary implications of this program are staggering and more so if funded by borrowing. In the next five years, the government hopes to transfer cash to 500,000 poor households. It cannot do this, though, without passing the hat to donors since it simply does not have the resources to fund the envisaged massive program of conditional cash transfer.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user hellochris under a Creative Commons license.

A school building in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, bears the scars of war.

The 1992-1995 war in Bosnia left 100,000 dead and divided Muslim, Serb and Croat communities.

Though the U.S.-brokered Dayton peace agreement brought an end to the war 13 years ago, the country remains divided, and officials worry that the peace agreement could soon collapse. 

Nenad Pejic, the director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s South Slavic Languages Service, writes about one source of continued ethnic tension in Bosnia and Herzegovina — its schools. 

Bosnian Schools Teach Reading, Writing — And Division

The other day I was with my 6-year-old daughter at the international school she attends in Prague. She particularly wanted to show me the lunchroom, not because the food there is so good but because the ceiling is covered with the national flags of all of the students who attend the school. Fifty-eight flags, it turns out.

In my home country, Bosnia-Herzegovina, schools are completely different. But before I go into that, allow me to mention that Muslims in Bosnia are now celebrating Eid al-Adha (Kurban Bayram), and amid the festivities on December 8 came word that a mosque in the village of Fazlagica Kula, in the Republika Srpska (the Serbian-majority entity of Bosnia), burned to the ground.

Although the cause of the blaze is not known, there is widespread suspicion in the country that such a thing at such a time could hardly be an accident. Incidentally, most of the Muslim residents of Fazlagica Kula fled during the 1992-95 war and few have returned.

The roots of hatred and intolerance in Bosnia today do not only stem from the traumas of the war. After all, the fighting ended 13 years ago, which seems ample time for any competent leadership to at least begin the process of reconciliation. But this has not happened. Instead, each day, families and ethnically divided schools drive those roots deeper and deeper into the national psyche.

The mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Bosnia conducted a study of 230 schools there and documented an alarming national pattern. Many children are spending hours each day just going to and from school. Not because the more distant school is better, but because their parents want them to study in a school where their ethnic group dominates. In some cases, children even cross international borders to go to an “acceptable” school.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user cristophotos under a Creative Commons license.

Children at a public school in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Since Maoists took office in Nepal in April, the government has proposed a number of reforms — including a controversial statement by Finance Minister Baburam Bhattarai that the government will end private investment in education by 2010 and nationalize all schools.

The country has now imposed a 5 percent tax on private schools in order to better finance rural education. One-third of the country’s 41,000 schools are private and report higher average scores on national tests.

Bhumika Ghimire is a freelance reporter based in the U.S. and writes at citizen journalism portal OhMyNews. She examines Nepal’s taxing system and the controversy over the private school tax.

Nepal: Taxing Education?

In Nepal’s context, the system to collect tax is still very primitive. You can fool the government and not pay your dues for years. There are plenty of big businesses, in heart of capital Kathmandu, who manage to escape every year and yet the government is unable to catch them-forget about taking legal action.

Add to the outdated collection and reporting mechanism, the country is also seriously behind in finding new revenue generating areas. Yes, there is income tax but limited numbers of people earn enough to be in the tax bracket, as for levy on businesses and industries, the chain of corruption runs very strong to actually make a big addition to the national purse.

As a result, every year Nepal loses millions of Rupees. Corruption, outdated mechanisms, tax code fit for a medieval age and lack of enforcement is forcing the country to be dependent on generosity of foreign governments and organizations. It is a matter of national shame.

Enter Maoist leader and Finance Minister Dr. Babu Ram Bhattarai. The man who gave Nepal a “pie in the sky” budget earlier this year, promising big changes has finally done some number crunching, it seems. Dr. Bhattarai has now realized that there is not enough money to fund the dreams he promised, so now he is ready to tax Nepalese to make up for the difference.

First sector to be attacked is education, private education institutions to be precise. The minister wants all private education intuitions to pay five percent “educations tax”. He wants the money to be used to educate marginalized children and those in remote Karnali region of Nepal.

Dr. Bhattarai’s desire to educate marginalized children and those in Karnali is noble. But is taxing private educations institutions the only way to achieve that goal? How about cutting down on government expenditure on frivolous items like good for nothing foreign trips (where the minister’s wife and children also tag along), or letting go hundreds of “yes men” hired by the government just to “return favor?” or maybe the minister won’t mind not getting paid for a year or two while the country is rebuilding.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ah zut under a Creative Commons license.

Giorgio Parisi, a professor at the La Sapienza University of Rome, gives a lesson in front of the Italian Parliament in protest of government education cuts.

Thousands of German students have taken to the streets, demanding smaller class sizes and more teachers. The country’s educational system was criticized by the United Nations in 2006.

The protests are only the latest in a string of demonstrations across Europe that have demanded educational reform.

Over the past month, Italy has seen the largest student demostrations in 15 years — tens of thousands of students and teachers across the country joining to protest a $10.2 billion cut in education and research funds.

The Italian Parliament approved the reforms in a vote last month. Italy’s education system is poor compared to other countries in western Europe.

Blogger “Danielle” outlines some of the cuts and posts images from a protest near her home. Watch a video here.

Blogger “Tim Hedges” defends Italian education minister Mariastella Gelmini, who is behind many of the reforms, arguing that trimming excesses in the system will promote efficiency.

Blogger “Kendra,” an American high school student studying in Italy, writes about the situation at her school, which has gone on strike. She describes the concerns of Italian students.

Educational cuts have also sparked controversy in France, where 11,200 teaching jobs were cut this year.

Blogger “Razvigor” posts an account of a protest in Paris, which featured songs and music.

“Brian’s Education Blog” compares French and British school systems, exploring the pitfalls of education in France.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Andrea Baldassarri under a Creative Commons license.

Children at the Ulug Beg Madrasah in Uzbekistan.

Muslim religious schools, madrasses, have received negative press in the Western world. Colin Powell denounced the schools as breeding grounds for “fundamentalists and terrorists.” Rumors questioning Barack Obama’s childhood schooling in a Muslim madrassa surfaced during the U.S. presidential campaign.

But as Robin Bush writes, madrassas often suffer similar challenges as do many American schools — a lack of funding and quality educators. Bush is The Asia Foundation’s Deputy Country Representative in Indonesia and contributes to their blog, “In Asia.” She writes about the opportunities that madrassas provide and the challenges that these schools face.

Islamic Education as a Vehicle for Human Development

“Human Development” as a concept stands at the center of a vast array of development funding and policy initiatives – and in its broadest sense encompasses indicators of life expectancy, education, gross national product etc.., as well as environmental quality, effective governance, and freedom.  For a full elaboration I refer you to the excellent discussion paper on this topic produced by Hady Amr for the 2008 Doha US-Islamic World Forum.

Let’s look at education, because, when one looks at Islamic schools and Islamic education in the region, one can observe a fascinating dualism:  in many areas, Islamic education is the poorest in quality and serves the poorest demographics; at the same time, there are Islamic schools and institutions that are centers of excellence, which function as a bridge or vehicle for lifting the human development indicators of entire communities around them.

We know that in the predominantly Muslim areas of Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, Mindanao, and Southern Thailand, the vast majority of Muslim students attend public schools – nevertheless, significant percentages of the population do not.  Provision of basic education through Islamic schools (variously called pesantren, pondok, madrasah, sekolah agama rakyat) ranges widely. In Mindanao, 14% of children attend Islamic schools, while in Southern Thailand, up to 80% of Muslim children attend Islamic schools. In Indonesia 10% of children in primary school are educated in Islamic schools and up to 22% of secondary school children go to Islamic schools.

It is also the case that for the poor, very often a private Islamic school is the only chance for an education. In Indonesia, 80% of families who send their children to Islamic schools live under $2/day. At the same time, these schools that educate the poorest of the poor often receive the least support from the government. In Mindanao only 40 out of 2000 madrassah are registered with the government. In Indonesia, 90% of Islamic schools are private – receive neither regulation nor funding from the government. This can lead to the downward spiral of poor quality teaching provided to children who are already disadvantaged, resulting in education that does not provide a stepladder to a better future.

On the other hand, there are some wonderful success stories of model madrassah and Islamic schools in all of the countries of this region, that do receive government and private sector support, that produce test scores much higher than public school scores, and  that are extremely competitive nationally. Islamic universities in Indonesia, for example, were at the forefront of curriculum reform of civics curriculum when Suharto fell and the militaristic state ideology doctrine no longer had to be taught. It was educators at the State Islamic University that stepped into that breach, and developed a cutting-edge curriculum for teaching democracy, political participation, human rights, and basic civics. A recent World Bank report has also shown that test scores from public Islamic schools in the region are no worse, and in some cases a little better than the standard public school test scores. So we see that Islamic schools and Islamic education in Southeast Asia represents both challenges and opportunities for human development among Muslim communities.

See the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Audry H under a Creative Commons license.