Education

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Time to re-open schools in Eastern and Southern Africa, UNICEF

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Africa/27-09-2020/Author: Beth Nyaga/Source: www.kbc.co.ke

UNICEF has called on governments, parents and teachers across Eastern and Southern Africa to urgently and safely re-open schools, as the costs of continued school closures escalate across Eastern and Southern Africa.

While there are encouraging reports that 13 out of 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa have returned children to classrooms, with an additional four having set return dates, countries such as Kenya – with a huge student population – are still to decide on whether they will reopen schools this year, compounding the threats which out-of-school children face.

UNICEF’s call to safely re-open schools follows scientific evidence which shows children are not super-spreaders of COVID-19, and are the least affected by COVID-19 in the region, with a mere 2.5 per cent of COVID-19 cases attributed to children of school-going age (5-18 years, WHO).

“Much effort was spent at the start of this pandemic reminding all of the dangers of COVID-19 and necessary precautions,” said Mohamed Malick Fall, Regional Director for UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa. “Things have evolved – we now know greater dangers for children lie by being outside the classroom. That message needs to be heard.”

Across this region, of the nearly 65 million children remaining out of school, around one in two are not reached by any form of learning.

Meanwhile, violence has spiked. Across the region, millions of children continue to miss what was their one nutritious meal of the day.

“Seven months into the pandemic, we must be very clear about the gravity of this crisis: we are at risk of losing a generation,” said Fall. “We see lost learning, rising violence, rising child labour, forced child marriages, teen pregnancies and diminished nutrition. A generation of children is at risk, and at the most critical time in our continent’s history.

“We are at a time of unprecedented population growth,” continued Fall. “If this expanded workforce can receive quality learning at school, the potential for increased production could sustain an economic boom to drastically reduce poverty in Africa – where currently 70 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s people live on less than US$ 2/day.”

It can be done. Safely re-opening schools by the beginning of October this year will give scholars a full term and vastly reduce learning losses.

A third term for learners presents the last chance to recoup learning losses for 2020 and avert the dangers of permanent school drop-outs.

Re-opening will also reduce losses incurred by both parents and governments.

Critically, there is growing regional and global practice showing that safe school re-opening can be done with political will and community commitment.

Most countries in Eastern and Southern Africa have seen the rationale of a phased return to schools, starting with exam classes in countries such as Botswana, Eritrea, Eswatini, Madagascar, Somalia, Zambia, and recently Malawi and Zimbabwe.

Bigger countries with larger COVID-19 caseloads and higher student populations – such as South Africa – have reopened schools for all grades since the end of August.

“UNICEF is here to support countries, and share working practices on safely re-opening schools; examples that can be applied to our context,” said Fall.

Source and Image: https://www.kbc.co.ke/time-to-re-open-schools-in-eastern-and-southern-africa-unicef/
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Kenya: Magoha faults individuals who failed to implement laptop project

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Africa/Kenya/16-08-2020/Author: Sarafina Robi/ Beth Nyaga/Source: www.kbc.co.ke

Education Cabinet Secretary Professor George Magoha has faulted individuals who failed to implement the Government’s laptop project that would have salvaged the current situation.

Magoha who was attending the start of a two-day stakeholders meeting on university reforms challenged institutions of higher learning to invest in online classes and address challenges of funding.

It is at this meeting that the Education CS took a swipe at individuals who he says failed to ensure the implementation of laptops for all school-going children which would have come in handy in ensuring learning continues as the nation battles the pandemic.

At the same time, he challenged universities to invest in virtual learning to ensure learning continues.

Magoha also took issue with what he termed as the flawed funding formula for Universities calling on the stakeholders to deliberate on sustainable financing of the institution as opposed to over-reliance on government financing.

He also called for greater autonomy at universities even as he hailed the move by 70 per cent of universities to adopt key COVID 19 measures as advised by the ministry.

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This comes after two days after the CS announced that 3000 private schools are set to benefit from a Ksh7 billion concessional loan from the government to support infrastructural development in readiness for schools reopening in January.

The loan is to be availed at an interest rate of between 2.5 and 3.5% will support areas like installation of ICT systems to ensure learning continues during the phased reopening of schools.

The loan will also be availed at an interest rate of between 2.5 and 3.5% and will be dependent on the absorption rate of an institution.

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To ensure social distancing during learning, schools will be expected to construct extra classrooms with availed funds.

Schools that will get the money will also be expected procure sanitary and hand-washing stations to ensure the highest levels of hygiene.

With schools expected to reopen in January, the government funds are also expected to cater to ICT infrastructure in readiness for a phased reopening.

Source and Image: https://www.kbc.co.ke/__trashed-14/

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Lessons to be learned from Scottish exam fiasco: Protesting can change results… and the SNP are absolutely bulletproof

Damian Wilson

By: Damian Wilson

A plan to downgrade 124,000 school exam results has been reversed in Scotland in the face of a massive outcry. Is this a precedent for unpopular results in future? And how shambolic do the SNP have to be before they lose support?

Timing is everything in politics and no one is more aware of that today than Scotland’s under-fire education secretary John Swinney. After days of protests by school students and teachers, which led to a reversal of the decision to downgrade 124,000 exam results, Swinney faces the humiliation of a no-confidence motion in the devolved parliament.

But it’s not game over for him yet, thanks to the increasingly tight grip the Scottish National Party (SNP) has on politics north of the border.

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, which slammed school doors shut five months ago, exam grades needed some careful consideration to ensure the entire academic year was not wasted.

In Scotland, the idea was to use teacher estimations of final grades which the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) would then run through a moderation algorithm for adjustment, using the previous performances of each particular school.

Even the class idiot could see what was about to happen here: schools that struggled in the past would be deemed to be still struggling, while those that enjoyed success would be considered as continuing on an upward trajectory. The disastrous outcome led to 124,000 exam results being downgraded, affecting 76,000 pupils.

What this looked like to those studying for their all-important Higher – the Scottish equivalent of the A-Levels – was that those pupils in deprived areas were marked down by 15.2 percent on the grades their teachers had calculated, while the wealthiest pupils suffered downgrading of only 6.9 percent.

The student protest signs said it all: “Judge my work, not my postcode.”

A full U-turn on the decision means that teacher estimates of grades will now be used. But for the SNP, a centre-left party that ostensibly promotes social democracy, this is an unnecessary shambles, reinforcing a divisive ‘us-and-them’ sentiment across Scottish society and setting a messy precedent.

No wonder Scottish Labour went for the jugular with its no-confidence motion. But even that is doomed to fail, for which the education secretary will be grateful.

YouGov’s latest opinion poll predicts the SNP is headed for a landslide election win next May, with 57 percent of those polled planning to support Nicola Sturgeon’s nationalists and a massive 53 percent supporting independence.

Both figures are the highest yet recorded by the polling organisation on these issues, and are indicative of the huge support that Sturgeon commands.

While these figures are impressive, it is the support of just six people that will save Swinney’s skin.

The half dozen Green members of the Scottish Parliament have said they will oppose tomorrow’s no-confidence motion proposed by Scottish Labour and supported by the Scottish Conservatives and Lib Dems, and along with Swinney’s SNP colleagues, that will be enough to ensure his survival for now.

And while a successful no-confidence motion can certainly end a political career, it’s the Scottish government’s hugely unpopular approach to deciding upon academic grades which caused the totally avoidable shambles in the first place.

Sturgeon announced on March 18 that schools in Scotland were to shut and were unlikely to open again before the end of summer, so surely there should have been a clear, fair approach to deciding how academic grades would be awarded from that point?

Instead, the horrifically unjust “computer says no” method that was used blew up in the government’s face.

While Downing Street faces its own issues with exam grades and looks set to follow Scotland’s lead in allocating grades, lucky Prime Minister Boris Johnson has managed to sidestep this particular steaming pile of mess that Sturgeon ploughed straight through.

How the SNP ever allowed the SQA to convince them it was acceptable is a mystery, and should form a question on any future politics exams. The claims that a skewed set of results this year would affect results in future years is typical nonsense.

It demonstrates the unhealthy political preoccupation with statistics, even when granting them primacy messes with people’s lives. A school pupil’s successful grades or an uptick on a statistician’s graph?

A second question could look at how despite the obvious unfairness of the botched plan, to which they have now held up their hands, the SNP still manages to thrive on seemingly bulletproof public support.

Class, discuss.

Source and Image: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/497823-exam-results-snp-protests-scotland/

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American university students are coddled, thin-skinned snowflakes, and social media is to blame

Robert Bridge

By: Robert Bridge

The explosion of ‘cancel culture’ and the social justice mindset on college campuses across the US was inspired by social media, where the idea of creating digital ‘safe spaces’ without ‘trolls’ has invaded the real world.

For those born around 1995, this column will likely be filed away under the heading: ‘Aging Generation X-er with No Clue Rails against Evils of Social Media.’ And I suppose there may be some truth to that claim. After all, the greater part of my life – like that of many other people – was spent without access to handheld technologies and the endless apps, add-ons and what-nots. The reason is not because I lived on an island, or was born among the Amish, but because such technologies were not around in my time. In other words, the youth of Generation X was more defined by Alexander Graham Bell than Steve Jobs.

Today, the ‘reality’ for those born after 1995 – the so-called ‘Generation Z’ – is radically different from those born just a decade earlier, since they have had an intimate relationship with the Internet practically since birth. It would be naïve to think this age demographic – many of whom were nurtured on social media – would reach adulthood with the same set of attitudes, values, and worldview as their predecessors. What’s shocking is just how different they really are.

Starting in 2014, just as Generation Z was entering college, a strange new phenomenon began surfacing on campuses across the country. Students, who are traditionally the staunchest defenders of free thought and the least likely to be prudes, began tossing around vague concepts carried over from the internet, such as ‘safe spaces,’ ‘microaggressions,’ and ‘getting triggered.’

A 2014 article in The New Republic shed an early light on this encroaching mentality: “What began as a way of moderating internet forums for the vulnerable and mentally ill now threatens to define public discussion both online and off,”wrote Jenny Jarvie. “The trigger … signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and paranoia about giving offense.”

But instead of adjusting their sails for the approaching tsunami of tears, universities broke with a thousand-year-old academic tradition, allowing the feelings and emotions of misguided adolescents to supersede the wisdom and reasoning of the educators. In fact, the world of academia not only failed to stop the flood, but, due to its own extreme liberal bent, helped to aggravate the strife by blaming the perceived ills of the world on some select bogeymen. More often than not these were dead white guys, members of a clan known as ‘the patriarchy’ that thrives today on its so-called ‘white privilege.’ Thus, college campuses are now riddled with angst and activism to the point that even the rules of English grammar and mathematics have become suspect.

Perhaps the greatest casualty from this radical makeover, however, is the trust that had been cultivated over the centuries between student and teacher. Professors today are hypersensitive to the grim fact that they may lose their job for doing or saying something ‘offensive’ that violates the rules of politically correctness. At the same time, many colleges are now extremely hesitant about inviting controversial speakers to their campus for fear of ‘triggering’ their students and inciting protests.

The intellectual bubble that now encapsulates the college campus mirrors the reality on social media, where users have a strong tendency to mingle with only those individuals who share their worldview. Whenever some annoying outsider with a different opinion attempts to ‘troll’ them, canceling that person and their alternative views is as easy as ‘unfriending’ them. Meanwhile, there is a certain status and feeling of moral superiority that comes from ‘canceling’ some heretic that has fallen afoul of political correctness.

In the 2018 book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’, Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, argue that the digital constructs of ‘safe spaces’ have done far more harm than good.

“Social media has channeled partisan passions into the creation of a “callout culture,” Lukianoff and Haidt argue. “New-media platforms and outlets allow citizens to retreat into self-confirmatory bubbles, where their worst fears about the evils of the other side can be … amplified by extremists and cyber trolls intent on sowing discord and division.”

According to Lukianoff and Haidt, Generation Z’s fierce aversion to controversial and even shocking information means that college campuses have become “more ideologically uniform,” thereby hindering the ability of “scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers” as historically has been the case at university.

The problem with allowing cancel culture to take root on social media and the university in the first place is that American society is now confronted with a mammoth weed on its front lawn. And while most people agree it is a problem, at the very least an eyesore, those who propose solutions risk being canceled themselves.

Last month, for example, 150 public figures, including Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie and JK Rowling attracted anger and ridicule after they signed a letter that called out ‘cancel culture.’ In part, the letter warned that the “restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.”

Not only were these left-leaning signatories extremely late to the game, they themselves have been accused of attempting to silence voices, mostly conservative ones, they did not agree with. Others, like Jennifer Finney Boylan, actually apologized to the mob for endorsing the milquetoast proposals put forward in the letter.

The tragic irony is that Western civilization, which was constructed on the free flow of ideas, is no longer capable of even pointing out problems without attracting scorn and derision. Such a repressive atmosphere, endorsed by ideologues that listen only to the voices inside their own heads, is severely threatening future progress. If this dangerous new tendency is not confronted head on and brought under control, it will be Western civilization itself that eventually finds itself ‘canceled’ due to its inability to evolve.

Source and Image: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/496957-us-university-social-media/

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Covid -19 and a fierce educational neoprivatization in Latin America.

Luis Bonilla-Molina 1 comentario

By Luis Bonilla-Molina

 

T/Celina Castro

 

Since 2015 we have been denouncing the risk that a Global pedagogical Blackout (GPB)  would occur, which would have a concrete expression in the virtualization and relocation of an important part of the teaching-learning processes at home. This trend towards BPB had been announced in various documents from Development Banks and multilateral organizations.

Escalation of the Global Pedagogical Blackout

However, a large part of the pedagogical left dismissed this scenario considering it as unlikely. Being that understanding this reality implied recognizing that we are facing a planetary reset of educational culture, which challenged many of the certainties built in the field of pedagogical alternatives. The most recent publication of the World Economic Forum in Davos “Covid-19: the Great Reset” (July, 2020) confirms the prospective assessments and analyzes that we did years ago.

We always pointed out responsibly that we did not know what the event or mechanism would be, but that the trend of cognitive capitalism in the third industrial revolution pointed in that direction. Covid-19 became the event that created the conditions of possibility for the planetary scale development of the Global Pedagogical Blackout.

The transition from the third industrial revolution to the fourth industrial revolution made this event imminent. This transition involved the consideration, by capital, of the obsolescence of the Newtonian educative machine of the first and second industrial revolutions. Obsolescence determined by the impact of the acceleration of innovation in educational processes.

The health quarantine due to the Covid-19 pandemic forced to generate responses in terms of schooling and education. The educational measures elaborated by the bureaucracies of the ministries of education, were constructed from the appeal to the concept of “emergency”. The real health emergency was used to develop an unusual, dramatic and exclusive turn in education.

The so-called educational emergency served as a pretext for trying to give continuity to school work in most countries, no longer in schools, high schools  and universities but “at home” and by remote mechanisms, most of them codified to the public under the expressions of “virtual home education” and “ university at home”.

The neoliberal paradigm of the educating society

This “new Reality” forces us to reassess the neoliberal educational paradigm of the “educating society”, which landed strongly in the region in the 1980s of the 20th century. This initiative, in the era of the transnationalization of capital and cultural globalization, contemplated the intention of gradually transferring to families, teachers and students, the minimum conditions for the fulfillment of the right to education.

The strengthening of the mechanisms to guarantee the payment of the tuition fees and “collaborations for the societies of parents and representatives” in public schools, served as a Trojan horse to try to burden the families with the costs of maintaining  school facilities,  extraordinary activities, substitute teachers, etc., on the road so that mothers and fathers were assuming the educational responsibility that corresponded to the States.

Increasingly, many of the responsibilities that States had once assumed were transferred to families. This intention could only materialize partially and unevenly in the countries of the region, thanks to the mobilization of the teaching profession, university professors and students; families did so to a lesser extent, trapped by the evaluative culture of educational quality.

The demand for greater contributions to school systems by families was covered up with the functional discourse of co-responsibility to achieve a  quality inclusive education, something that became a functional blackmail for the demobilization of families.

This “notion” of co-responsibility led to a leap in the construction of hegemony, on the need for States to “share” with families the costs of public education. This propaganda operation opened  doors to reforms in national constitutions and education laws that implied a drastic abandonment of the responsibilities of the State, covered up with progressive speeches.

States’ Obligation to Guarantee the Right to Education

From an emancipatory and teaching state perspective, the responsibility of guaranteeing the right to education rests with the National States. In other words, States, among other things, must guarantee :

  1. a) the budget for education be not less than 6% of the Gross Domestic Product or less than 20% of the public budget;
  1. b) there will be an educational legislation that guarantees universal access to schooling and on equal terms, at least, to students of initial and primary education. In some countries this obligation extends to the baccalaureate;
  1. c) study plans and the teaching-learning models be prepared in order to guarantee contextualized learning to each reality, epochal challenges and needs of the population;
  1. d) the necessary infrastructure (school, high schools, preschools, universities) be constructed to guarantee equal learning conditions;
  1. e) Schools, lyceums and universities have all elements, equipment and content inherent in the acceleration of innovation and guarantee that all students have the same conditions of access to these technologies and knowledge;
  1. f) to develop a continuous update of the initial and permanent training of teachers to guarantee the role of the school as a democratizing institution of knowledge among the popular sectors.

Prior to the pandemic, many of these minimum starting conditions were not covered by the national states, which generated resistance, mobilizations and denunciations of the teacher and student movement. The disinvestment in education and the precariousness of the working conditions of the teachers acted as triggers for the neoliberal premise of abandoning the responsibility of the States with public education, giving way to the model of educational society.

We must be careful that the achievement of 6% of gross domestic product  as a minimum level   will not be  used to a large extent neither for the signing of contracts with large technological transnationals in the field of digital educational content nor for the construction of the  base  infrastructure for the transition to the fourth industry revolution.

This would mean ,continuing to reload on families, students and teachers the bulk of the investment in basic technological equipment (computers, laptops, cell phones) and internet connectivity.  I always underline that this is and would be educational privatization and the triumph of the neoliberal paradigm of an educational society.

At the international level, educational neoliberalism increasingly ensured that in many of the protocols of multilateral organizations, the right to education appeared without its free, popular, scientific and secular surnames. Increasingly, in these protocols, there is a commitment to link the private sector to the fulfillment of the right to education, which is nothing more than the transition to the construction of hegemony regarding education as a commodity.

The abrupt transition from a model of face-to-face education in schools to the model of “virtual education at home”, of “home university” and, the fear of deadly contagion, made possible an accelerated abandonment of these premises of responsibility of the National States to guarantee the minimum conditions for the development of the right to education.

Educational Neoprivatization In the Context of the Pandemic

The privatizing trends of education  were  accelerated and escalated to an unthinkable dimension due to Corona virus only months ago. The model of “virtual home education”, of “home university” that has been promoted by educational systems in Latin America has led to de facto privatization. The responsibilities of the States to guarantee the minimum conditions to develop the teaching and learning processes have been abandoned and the logic of educational neoliberalism has been entered.

Now, in the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic,  families , students and  teachers, are who must bear the costs of paying  internet fees, subscribing to private platforms in order  to be able to teach, purchase or repair their computers for making possible  to teach. States ignore their responsibilities using the customary language of the “teaching vocation”, of the “mystique of educators”, to disregard their responsibility.

Many of the educational contents in this context of “virtuality at home” are those that are available on proprietary platforms.  teachers were not trained and are not being adequately trained to work in digital environments, which has implied a series of lacks and problems derived from trial and error, of ” As far as we  encounter,we do “.

The aim is to blame  errors on teachers, making the State an evaluator, expressing the evaluative culture on  teachers, thereby  it can hide that  a brutal educational privatization is taking place.

Conditions in which the teaching-learning processes are developing are unequal and stratifying. Many students do not even have a house to study in a stable way, others do not have a family to support them, most do not have texts or access to  internet, or computers.

School, with its food programs, tried to guarantee that everyone ate at least once a day, precisely to equalize the starting conditions for learning to learn. Measures taken by  ministries of education have been broken in just months, leaving behind  the social conquest of associating the right to education with guarantees of equal conditions to develop the teaching-learning processes.

This “new normal” is being little denounced, on the contrary, in many cases it is occurring with the complicit silence of important sectors of the academy and the bureaucratic employers’ unions. As in any oppression process, resistance makes a difference and today almost a hundred teachers’ organizations in the region, popular educators and critical pedagogues have begun to denounce and mobilize against this reality.

Premium Education for Tech-Savvy.

To make matters even worse, is taking place, a stratification of education under the pretext of a health emergency. Those who have access to computers and Internet, whose percentage does not exceed 50% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean, have the possibility of participating in remote education that attempts to give continuity to the schooling processes, accessing updated information derived to a large extent of their ability to navigate in Internet.

Those  students male and females ,most of them , who do not have access to a computer and  internet, are receiving teaching on television or radio, with content and methodologies of educational television from the sixties of the 20th century,  viewing learning through  a look from the rear-view mirror , not towards the present and the future. This will result in new forms of exclusion.

On the other hand, those who live in areas of difficult access and poor connectivity, with limited possibilities even of accessing a radio signal, are receiving a modular education, a third-level education, which tries to hide that they are being left on the edges of intellectual marginality.

The appeal to contingency and emergency has no justification, when the educational authorities ignored  warnings that we made for five years about an imminent Global Pedagogical Blackout (GPB) and the obligation that States had to prepare for scenarios like these, thinking about educational inclusion and social justice as the first aims.

School will Never be what it was

This reality cannot make us take conservative refuge in trying to return to the conditions that existed before the pandemic. The school, high school and university that we had in February 2020 did not represent the aspiration of the popular and critical sectors regarding what a liberating and emancipatory education should be.

It is then about understanding and working in a renewed way for a new free, popular, democratic, secular, scientific and face-to-face school that claims tradition and pedagogical knowledge accumulated over decades, but that it be also  capable of connecting with the new, the emerging in the key of anti-capitalist resistance.

Alternatives

Certainly the worst that can happen is that a child or teenager bes disconnected from the school system. The fact that we consider necessary to give education as an urgent remedy,   by television, radio or modules, does not prevent us from realizing that this is entailing a new stratification, with a clear sense of class.

It is the poor,  working women,  the  working class,  peasants, who live in conditions of marginality in  neighborhoods, who are being most affected by the ongoing educational neo-privatization and  stratification of schooling determined by access to computers and connection to Internet.

Alternatives to this situation are at the epistemic level and in the organization for resistance. In the foreground, the surprise and feeling of vertigo that the quarantine by Covid-19 has caused in broad progressive sectors leads us to affirm that the urgent thing is to clarify what is happening and the immediate horizon of neoliberal oppression.

The second  one, is to claim that experiences of pedagogical groups in schools, high schools and universities emerge strongly as a very powerful practice to advance collectively, from grass roots , in understanding what is happening and developing anti-capitalist resistance.

Third, to strengthen the unity of the combative teachers unions and unions, with the movements of popular educators and critical pedagogues to jointly elaborate a route of conjunctural and strategic actions. It is time to invent so as not to err.

 

Source: the author writes for OVE

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South Africa warns of coronavirus ‘storm’ as outbreak accelerates across continent

Jason Burke

By: Jason Burke. 

New Covid-19 cases in Africa up 24% in a week after months in which it appeared to have been spared the worst

 Mourners in personal protective equipment carry the coffin of a Cape Town taxi driver who died of Covid-19. Photograph: Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty

South Africa’s health minister has warned of a “storm” arriving and pleaded with the country’s 58 million inhabitants to change their behaviour to slow the spread of Covid-19.

Zweli Mkhize said South Africa was still following an “optimistic” curve, with the peak of the outbreak likely to be lower than predicted, but warned that within weeks there could be a shortage of beds to treat Covid-19 patients, particularly in the country’s most populous and wealthy regions.

“It’s no longer a matter of announcing numbers of confirmed cases. We are now at a point where it’s our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, close friend and comrades that are infected,” Mkhize said.

South Africa has registered 225,000 cases of Covid-19, of which 107,000 have recovered and 3,600 have died.

After months when the continent appeared to have been spared the worst of the outbreak, African countries are now recording an accelerating spread of the disease.

John Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said new cases were up 24% in Africa in the past week. “The pandemic is gaining full momentum,” he told a virtual news conference from Addis Ababa.

As of 9 July, Africa had 512,039 confirmed Covid-19 cases, with 11,915 deaths, data from governments and the World Health Organization showed. Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Algeria accounted for 71% of infections.

There are fears that a lack of testing and a reluctance among some states to share information has hidden the true spread of the virus on the continent.

In Nigeria, authorities, fearing the economic toll of the pandemic, have in recent weeks relaxed restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of the virus. Confirmed cases in Africa’s most populous nation passed 30,000 on 8 July.

South Africa was widely praised for its early response to the pandemic, which included a strict lockdown and a major programme of community screening to find outbreaks of the virus. However the test and trace strategy has been hindered by a lack of crucial supplies and, although the lockdown is acknowledged to have bought time, the number of daily new cases has soared from about 1,000 in mid-May to 8,800 on 8 July.

Most new cases have been in Gauteng, the richest and most densely populated province, where widespread anxiety has been fuelled by poor communication about local strategies to fight the outbreak.

The provincial government was forced to clarify statements suggesting that more than a million graves were being dug for victims of Covid-19. “We understand that the subject of death is an uncomfortable matter to engage in, however, ensuring that there is adequate burial space in the province, unfortunately, forms part of the reality government must contend with in the battle against Covid-19,” the Guateng health department said on Twitter.

It is often difficult in the disadvantaged neighbourhoods found in many South African cities to follow recommendations on social distancing and handwashing. “What can I do? I wear a mask but we are so crowded here. I have to travel in [communal] taxis and then we do our best but we are all pushed in,” said Lucy Ndlovu, a resident of Alexandra, a Johannesburg township.

Communal taxis in Kenya advertise coronavirus safety.
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 Communal taxis in Kenya advertise coronavirus safety. Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

In Kenya, cases are also surging, with more than 8,000 reported infections and 164 deaths. Officials said earlier this week that the school year was considered lost because of the pandemic, and primary and secondary pupils would return in January.

George Magoha, the education minister, said that the curve of Covid-19 infections was expected to flatten only by December.

International flights to Kenya will resume next month, although most countries in Africa are keeping air traffic bans in place.

Governments are trying to balance the need to protect weak healthcare systems from being overwhelmed and allowing hundreds of millions of people to earn their livelihoods.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has estimated that nearly 50 million Africans could be driven into extreme poverty by the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. The AfDB said that between 24.6m and 30m jobs would be lost this year because of the crisis, with Nigeria seeing the greatest rise in poverty.

Late last month the International Monetary Fund forecast that GDP in sub-Saharan Africa would shrink by 3.2%, and that incomes would drop to levels last seen in 2010.

In South Africa, government analysts have estimated potential job losses from the pandemic could reach 1.8m, with central bankers anticipating an economic contraction of almost a third in the three months since the lockdown was imposed in late March.

In Sudan, a combination of spiralling food prices, inflation, and job losses as a result of the effect of Covid-19 is having a devastating impact, aid agencies say. The lockdown measures designed to prevent the spread of coronavirus have disrupted markets and cross-border trading, crippling livelihoods and pushing up prices. Cereal prices have tripled compared with last year and are about four times higher than the last five-year average.

Arshad Malik, Save the Children’s country director, said some families could break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan only with water, as there was simply no food.

“Even before this pandemic, families were reeling from the effects of decades of conflict, underdevelopment and a weak economy. Now their lives have become even harder. Our team is meeting more and more parents every day who are struggling to put food on the table for their children,” Malik said.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/09/south-africa-warns-of-coronavirus-storm-as-outbreak-accelerates-across-continent

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India: Mixed reactions to new education policy

Noticias

Asia/ India/ 04.08.2020/ Source: www.aa.com.tr.

Politicians and academics are divided in India about a new National Education Policy [NEP] 2020 that was approved last week and replaces a 34-year-old National Policy on Education (NPE).

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet approved the policy Wednesday “making way for large scale, transformational reforms in both school and higher education sectors”.

The policy mentions teaching up to at least grade 5 in the mother tongue or regional language and a focus on “curriculum to integrate Indian culture and ethos at all levels.”

However, there are mixed reactions regarding the new policy.

“On the whole, my sense about the policy is actually it contains many sensible suggestions. The apprehensions like BJP is bringing this policy and it could be saffronisation of education … fortunately this policy is not all about that. I think it is a step forward because many sensible things are there. At the same time I remain deeply skeptical about its implementation by this regime,” Yogendra Yadav, a former academic and national president of political organization Swaraj India told Anadolu Agency, referring to earlier fears that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party may bring some right-wing Hindu policies to education.

Professor Najma Akhtar, Vice Chancellor of New Delhi based Jamia Millia Islamia, termed the policy “ground-breaking.”

“The higher education in India will now be holistic and multidisciplinary with a shared focus on science, arts and humanities,” she said.

But Pankaj Kumar Garg, a teacher at a college affiliated with New Delhi University and also convenor of Indian National Teachers Congress, said there are many problems in the policy.

“They are encouraging foreign universities to come to India. You need to improve the ranking of local universities. By allowing foreign universities to operate in India on their own norms is permitted in FDIs [foreign direct investment] in education sector,” he said. “Use of technology in New Education Policy would deprive marginalized and economically poor sections from education as they don’t have proper resources required for online education.”

“The policy has advocated major reforms in education, but as always, the devil lies in the details, and we will see how to get the NEP 2020 translated to action on the ground, true to the spirit of the reforms envisaged to empower the students in the country, to discover and fully develop their unique potentials,” Rupamanjari Ghosh, Vice-Chancellor of Shiv Nadar University in Uttar Pradesh was quoted by local news agency Press Trust of India.

Indian ethos

According to the policy document, the NEP “envisions an education system rooted in Indian ethos that contributes directly to transforming India, that is Bharat, sustainably into an equitable and vibrant knowledge society.”

“The Policy envisages that the curriculum and pedagogy of our institutions must develop among the students a deep sense of respect towards the Fundamental Duties and Constitutional values, bonding with one’s country, and a conscious awareness of one’s roles and responsibilities in a changing world,” it said.

Many organizations affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)- powerful Hindu far-right group and ideological inspiration for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have welcomed the NEP saying their suggestions were included, including remaining in India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development.

Two such outfits are Bharatiya Shikshan Mandal (BSM) and Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas.

“Almost all the things which were suggested by Bharatiya Shikshan Mandal have found place in NEP. We have been demanding renaming the HRD [Human Resource Development] ministry to education ministry and cultural ministry. They have changed the name to the education ministry,” Shankaranand BR who is All India Joint Organising Secretary, BSM told Anadolu Agency. “The NEP – 2020 would prove itself an instrumental in making Bharat Aatmnirbhar. The political independence we got on 15th August 1947 but the academic independence we got on 29th July 2020”.

He said the inclusion of «Bharatiya knowledge system, thrust for language and culture, will imbibe the values of life, constitutional values and life skills in new generation.»

“We welcome the policy. There is an integrated approach in the policy and It has talked about the development of students from all sections of the society. It has stressed on local culture, local skills, and traditional arts. Local, state and national has been combined. It has been inculcated in this. The biggest demand of ours was to change the name of the ministry, which has been done. There is also focus about promotion of Indian languages,” Atul Kothari, national secretary of the Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas told Anadolu Agency

India’s Samajwadi Party (SP) claimed the objective of the new policy was to “implement the RSS agenda.”

«The objective of the new education policy announced by the centre is to implement the agenda of the RSS. According to this agenda, the curriculum will now be presented in a special colour to mould the new generations,” SP President Akhilesh Yadav said in a statement, according to the Press Trust of India.

Indian politician and Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Sitaram Yechury said, “Bypassing Parliament, ignoring opinion of state governments and rubbishing opinions of all stakeholders, Modi government is unilaterally destroying our education system,” he said.

‘Shining example’

Modi said the framing of NEP 2020 will be remembered as a shining example of participative governance.

“I thank all those who have worked hard in the formulation of the NEP 2020. May education brighten our nation and lead it to prosperity,” he tweeted.

“Respecting the spirit ‘Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’, the NEP 2020 includes systems to promote Indian languages, including Sanskrit. Many foreign languages will also be offered at the secondary level. Indian Sign Language (ISL) will be standardised across the country.”

Source of the notice: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/education/india-mixed-reactions-to-new-education-policy/1930132

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