The quality of education and training provided by African countries has deteriorated since 2014, leaving many of the continent’s growing population of young people ill-prepared to enter the job market, an influential report said on Tuesday.
The African Governance Report 2019, which uses data from the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), the most comprehensive survey of its kind on the continent, found that enrolment and access to education was particularly low in the tertiary sector.
“This has resulted in the burgeoning youth population being faced with increasing struggles when entering the job market,” researchers at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation wrote ahead of a full report due to be published next year. Under 15s now made up the majority age group in Africa, the authors added.
The index rates 54 African nations on criteria such as security, human rights, economic stability, just laws, free elections, corruption, infrastructure, poverty, health and education.
Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese telecoms tycoon who launched the foundation, said it was down to Africans to confront the issue.
“When it comes to education, really we have a problem,” Ibrahim told Reuters. “When you look at the demographics, and you look at the economic growth, you see that we’re actually falling behind.”
Demographic developments are a hot topic in Africa, which, according to United Nations data, is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. The continent’s population is projected to double by 2050, and could double again by 2100, the U.N. has said.
“If you manage to take care of your young people, that is a wealth. If you fail to do that, it is a burden, a threat,” Ibrahim added.
The report said that while African governments had made some progress in improving infrastructure since 2014, on average they were lagging well behind their ambitions.
“African governments have on average not managed to translate GDP growth into economic opportunities for citizens,” it said. “Progress since 2014 runs behind the rapidly growing working age population.”
The report noted more progress in health and nutrition, saying countries were making strong strides in combating communicable diseases and child and maternal mortality rates.
However, providing affordable quality healthcare for all was still far off and the rising spread of undernourishment was a major area of concern, it added.
Researchers also criticized the lack of key data across the continent, which impedes the ability of policymakers to monitor progress, saying vital population statistics had deteriorated significantly in recent years.
Source of the notice: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-africa-education-report/young-africans-face-poor-job-prospects-as-education-deteriorates-report-idUSKBN1WT2K1
Lessons for a gender-transformative early childhood in India
The Delhi government in India recently launched its preschool curriculum for the city’s 10,897 community-based preschool centers. The draft National Education Policy of India, made public in June 2019, dedicates its first chapter to the importance of early childhood care and education and the need to extend the right to education to every child who is three to six years old.
In this video, Samyukta Subramanian, 2019 Echidna Global Scholar, discusses how we must tackle gender inequality in India in the early years through engaging girls, boys, teachers, and parents.
It is in this context that this paper urges the government to ensure that gender sensitivity is embedded in every initiative of early childhood education (ECE) in India from here onward. Based on interviews with mothers of preschool children in underresourced communities and with teachers as well as observations of government-supported preschool centers, this paper builds the current narrative of the preschool child’s ecosystem; notes the lack of gender-sensitive pedagogy in this space; and makes recommendations for what a gender-transformative approach in ECE in India should entail for men and boys, girls and women, so that India can strive for a more gender-equitable society in the years to come.
Source of the notice: https://www.brookings.edu/research/indias-policy-on-early-childhood-education/
Settled academic practices often get reborn with new names
Rick Diguette is a local writer and college professor. In this guest column, Diguette discusses the recycling of educational concepts.
About 30 years ago, social psychologist Carol Dweck and a team of researchers began to study how students respond to failure. Based on her research, she coined the term “growth mindset,” which speaks to the idea that academic ability and intelligence can be developed with positive reinforcement, thereby increasing student motivation and achievement.
Dweck’s book, Mindset: the New Psychology of Success, was a best seller when first published in 2006. Her findings have since convinced many educators that how students think about themselves as learners is just as important as the grades they earn, their standardized test scores, and class rankings.
The opposite of a growth mindset, according to Dr. Dweck, is a “fixed mindset.” Fixed mindset students think success is dictated by their innate abilities. They tend to give up when encountering an obstacle, having decided beforehand they will never succeed at overcoming their inadequacies. Worst of all, students laboring under this mindset typically end up in a Catch-22 situation: lest others judge them harshly, they seek to hide the academic inadequacies that define them as students.
The discovery that we need to think we can succeed if we stand any chance of achieving success isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Two millennia ago the Greek philosopher Epictetus noticed that the way people think about what happens is more important than what actually happens. And it was none other than Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet who observed, circa 1602, that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Nevertheless, since 2006 growth mindset strategies have become a commonplace in elementary and secondary school curriculum.
I recently became aware that growth mindset has now made its way to the precincts of higher education via the University System of Georgia’s Gateway to Completion (G2C) initiative. And a bulletin board on the Georgia State University campus where I teach first-year composition is dedicated to growth mindset mantras like “Mistakes help me improve.” and “I’ll keep trying!”
This reminded me of the well- known children’s story involving a little engine that successfully draws a long train of cars up a steep grade, all the while chanting “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.” Once the little engine crests the hill, the chant becomes “I thought I could. I thought I could. I thought I could.” The moral of the story is that optimism coupled with effort will lead to success, which I’m sure you will agree sounds a lot like growth mindset.
However, this in turn reminded me of Chance the gardener in Jerzy Kosinski’s ferociously black comedy “Being There,” whose every statement―no matter how certifiably unremarkable―is considered visionary in import.
Although there is no question educators should be willing to embrace innovation, a fairly unremarkable concept like growth mindset tends to be too readily accepted as almost revelatory.
What typically happens next is that it gains currency and is quickly added to an already long list of familiar buzzwords like Differentiated Instruction, Student Progress Monitoring, Flipped Classrooms, and 21st Century Skills―one and all new ways of naming settled academic practices.
Most people like me, who actually spend time in the college classroom, are aware that just because a lesson or activity worked well one semester doesn’t mean it will continue to do so in perpetuity. That’s why when it comes to the needs of our students, we must be vigilant, flexible, and open to new ideas that may lead to improved learning outcomes as well as improved retention and graduation rates.
What we don’t need is a new buzzword handed down from on high by the University System of Georgia.
Source of the article: https://www.ajc.com/blog/get-schooled/opinion-education-abuzz-with-buzzwords/X2Lmei4LP67Ne1RcT1lW5I/
Europe/Russia/13-10-2019/Source and Author: www.rt.com
The Russian equivalent of Wikipedia will become a reliable source for “safe,” verified, data without any ideological or political agenda, and could be accessed by 15 million people a day, its creators said.
The ambitious undertaking, which is powered by the Great Russian Encyclopedia (GRE) publishing house, is going to receive 2 billion rubles ($31 million) in state funding between 2020 and 2022.
The nationwide interactive encyclopedic portal is aimed at protecting contemporary knowledge from “erosion” and sheltering online users from misleading information, GRE communications chief, Anna Sinitsyna, said.
With the avalanche-like growth of all kinds of falsifications (including those in scientific, historical, statistical and demographic data) and fake news, generated by some media and private users online, we see it as a particularly urgent task to create a database of safe information (verified by the scientific community).
All the entries on the portal will be of purely scientific and educational nature, “free of any political or ideological agenda.”
The authors of the project plan to attract an audience of at least 10 million people, which would include students, researchers, civil servants, media people and all those interested in reliable data.
But the site should be capable of handling 15 million unique users on a daily basis. For reference, the stats by Mediascope reveal that the Russian version of Wikipedia was accessed by some 2.9 million people per day this July.
At launch, the 80,000 articles from the Great Russian Encyclopedia, which was published by GRE between 2004 and 2017, will make the bulk of the portal’s content. But it will then be regularly expanded with information from other sources.
Registered users would have a chance to submit articles, but they would only be included on the website after approval by the “expert community” of GRE staff and scientists from other organizations.
With it being a national portal, the articles will be presented in the Russian language, but “the translation of the whole database into some other languages is possible on the initiative of foreign partners.”
BRICS nations (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) as well Iran and Cuba could be interested in the project due to the “English-language encyclopedia Britannica not satisfying them due to its obvious Anglocentrism, especially when it comes to history and culture.”
A tender to provide branding and marketing strategy for the Russian encyclopedic portal has just been announced.
Earlier this year, Russia started working to ensure that ‘Runet’ – the country’s segment of the internet – will remain operational despite a global malfunction or a deliberate internet disconnection by the West. There are plans to create a national DNS system to store all of the domain names and corresponding IP numbers.
Conocida por su controvertido trabajo como educadora y humanista, Maria Montessori revolucionó los métodos pedagógicos de principios del siglo XX. Fue, además, una brillante científica, psiquiatra, filósofa, antropóloga, bióloga, psicóloga y feminista, y una de las primeras mujeres de la historia en doctorarse como médico en Italia.
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori nace en la pequeña localidad de Chiaravalle (Italia) el 31 de agosto de 1870. Hija de un estricto militar, crece en una familia burguesa católica regida por normas. A pesar de la oposición inicial de su padre, Maria evidencia una vocación de estudiar ingeniería, para lo que realiza el bachillerato tecnológico a los 14 años, pero luego se instruye en biología y posteriormente llega a ser aceptada en la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Roma, donde en 1896 se graduará como médica. A menudo se cita a Maria Montessori como la primera mujer que obtuvo este título en Italia, pero lo cierto es que, ya en 1887, Ernestina Paper se graduó en Medicina en Florencia y comenzó a ejercer en 1878.
Entre 1898 y 1900, siendo ayudante de la cátedra de psiquiatría,Montessori trabaja por primera vez con niños con algún tipo de trastorno mental, reconociendo el potencial de éstos si son estimulados correctamente. Se marca como reto transformar y cultivar a aquellos niños “in-educables” y que aparentemente representan una carga para la sociedad. Es cuando en Roma dirige la Scuola Magistrale Ortofrenica, donde logra que una clase entera de niños con deficiencias mentales alcance notas por encima de la media en los exámenes oficiales de lectura y escritura. En aquellos años, también ejerce de profesora de higiene en la Escuela Femenina de Magisterio y enseña antropología en la Universidad de Roma.
Influenciada por los médicos franceses Jean Itard y Eduardo Séguin, Montessori reivindica la observación en los niños y entiende que, lejos de imponerles nada, se les debe proveer de ejercicios y materiales para ayudarles a desarrollar sus facultades. Cree firmemente en una educación basada en la libertad con responsabilidad, con límites y estructuras, pero fundamentada en la empatía. Como filósofa, a Montessori le inspira la idea de formar un nuevo ser humano, para así dar lugar a una nueva sociedad fundamentada en el amor y el respeto. La humanista cree que es posible alcanzar y mantener la paz en el mundo si se logra el pleno desarrollo del niño.
El niño, guiado por un maestro interior trabaja infatigablemente con alegría para construir al hombre. Nosotros, educadores, solo podemos ayudar… Así daremos testimonio del nacimiento del hombre nuevo.
En 1907 Montessori abre en el popular barrio romano de San Lorenzo su primera Casa dei Bambini, donde pone a prueba su particular sistema educativo. A pesar de las dudas que genera, especialmente a principios de los años 30 y 40, el método Montessori –basado en el sistema del pedagogo alemán Friedrich Fröbel, que promovía la independencia del niño en la exploración y el proceso de aprendizaje—, acabará siendo aplicado con éxito internacionalmente (a día de hoy, su sistema está implantado en más de 8.000 escuelas privadas y públicas). La libertad y la autodisciplina que promulga, hacen posible que cada niño encuentre actividades que dan respuesta a sus necesidades educativas.
Pionera de los movimientos feminista y pacifista, el trabajo pedagógico al que Montessori dedica su vida será galardonado con la Legión de Honor de Francia, así como con la condecoración honoris causa de la Universidad de Ámsterdam. Además, la educadora es propuesta tres veces para el Nobel de la Paz. Cuando el 6 de mayo de 1952, María fallece en Holanda a los 82 años, establece que en su tumba se grabe un singular epitafio que integra su visión educativa y nos invita a sumarnos a su causa:
Ruego a los queridos niños que todo lo pueden, se unan a mí para la construcción de la paz entre los hombres y en el mundo.
The United Kingdom’s Labour Party has recently made a landmark decision to, if it were to form government, pass legislation that would effectively spell the end of private schools.
In a move the party says would abolish the “privilege of a tiny elite”, private school systems would be dismantled and navigated into the public sector.
The finer details of exactly how this would happen are still being developed.
In the interim, the proposal has raised questions about the necessity of splitting education into private and public streams, going forward.
The New Daily asked Southern Cross University School of Education associate professor (adjunct) Dr David Zyngier for his assessment on how a similar plan could or couldn’t work in Australia.
Nationalise our private schools?
In terms of setting a precedent, how influential is UK Labour’s decision to effectively scrap private schools?
The UK Labour Party has decided if elected to scrap elitist private schools which are confusing called “public schools” in the UK. In the UK these private schools are not publicly funded but have tax deductible status. UK Labour endorsed plans that would abolish private schools by removing their charitable status and redistributing their endowments, investments and properties to the state sector.
Southern Cross University’s Dr David Zyngier. Photo: Supplied
Basically, a nationalisation process, it represents an existential threat to their dominance of the most influential roles in the British establishment. The policy added universities would be limited to admitting the same proportion of private school students as in the wider population, currently 7 per cent. The chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, which represents about 1000 private schools in England, said Labour’s vote was an attack on the rights of parents.
How is the education environment different in the UK to Australia?
In the UK private schools are not directly publicly funded but have tax deductible status. In Australia these schools have DRG status as well as being partially to almost wholly funded through public subsidy by both states and federal governments. British private schools (known as public schools) don’t get any government funding but rely totally on fees raised from parents and donors. They are private businesses, run for profit.
This was also the situation in Australia prior to 1963 with the beginning of what has been termed State Aid to Catholic schools to bring their facilities in their “systemic” or parish schools up to a respectable standard with science facilities and at the same time began the long-term process of providing federal benefits to elitist private schools. At that time some 25 per cent of students were enrolled in private schools in Australia and in 1965 these schools received 25 per cent of all Commonwealth funding. Today private schools receive 75 per cent of all federal funding.
The recent OECD Education at a Glance 2019 shows that Australia is the fourth most privatised country. Whereas countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, Luxembourg spend almost no private money on school education Australia ranks fourth-last in the most privatised school education spending in the OECD before Mexico, Columbia, Turkey, with 35 per cent of students attending private schools whereas it is only 7 per cent in the UK.
In the UK most faith-based schools are part of the public system, as they are in most European countries and Canada. Religious schools (Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh) are public schools and fully funded by the public and do not charge additional parental fees.
In Australia private schools on average receive about $10,000 per student from combined government funding on top of the parental fees which can be as much as $35,000 per student (non-boarding).
According to research by former Productivity Commissioner Trevor Cobbold real funding (adjusted for inflation) for public schools between 2009-2017 was cut by $17 per student (-0.2%) while funding for Catholic schools increased by $1420 per student (18.4%) and $1318 (20.9%) for so-called independent schools per student.
Total real income per public student over that time period fell by $58 (-0.5) but increased by $1888 (17.8%) in Catholic schools and by $2306 (15.1%) in independent schools per student.
It is claimed by conservative commentators that private schools are more efficient in their use of money. Last year 2,558,169 (65%) Australian students attended public primary and secondary schools. Combined government recurrent (non-capital) expenditure averaged $17,531 per student across all states and territories.
In the Catholic and Independent schools this figure was $19,302 including $10,664 of public funding per student, the rest being made up of parent fees. Given recent research finds that public schools (excluding select entry schools) equal or outperform private schools when socio-economic status is considered one must ask why does it take so much extra money to educate private school students? Perhaps it is because the decline in Australia’s performance in international tests over the decade is primarily due to falling results in private schools, the falls being similar in both Independent and Catholic schools.
Can you ever see something similar happening in Australia? Would it be a positive or negative change for the country’s education system?
Study after study indicate that money does really matter in education in disadvantaged communities but not in wealthier ones. Unfortunately, in Australia it seems that most of the additional government spend on education flows to private schools that don’t need this additional money. Any private school that charges fees over the agreed Schooling Resource Standard($11,343 for primary and $14,254 for secondary students in 2019)should immediately lose all publicfunding.
Elitist schools across Australia charging more than $20,000 in fees do not need public money. They will not lose too many students if they need to raise their fees even higher. If private schools cannot meet their recurrent costs, they could voluntarily become public schools opening enrolment to all students in their local area.
Schools charging less than the resource standard should have their public funding reduced gradually by 10 per cent per annum until it is zero. Again, if these schools cannot meet their financial obligations they could be taken over by the state and become as in the UK and elsewhere state-run faith-based schools but still open to all children in their local area. This would be an actual saving of money over time.
What can Australia take away from this plan?
Given the $14 billion the public subsidised Catholic and Independent schools in Australia in 2018, should some private and Catholic schools start to close if their subsidies were removed so that some 5 to 10 per cent of their students were to enrol in public schools there would be no problem integrating all these kids into an equitable multicultural diverse public education system. We would then return to the same situation before the “school choice” phenomenon.
Source of the notice: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/10/05/what-australia-can-learn-from-the-uks-bold-call-to-end-private-schools/
Indonesia’s students are one of the highest groups of technology users according to Cambridge International’s Global Education census. These students are using more technology in the classrooms than in many countries including those that are more developed countries. As a result, they have the highest usage of IT and computer rooms globally at 40 percent. To leverage this growing trend, Australia’s Innovation for Indonesia’s School Children (INOVASI) program has launched multiple technological programs to boost the quality of education across the country.
While Indonesia does have the largest number of technology users, the quality of education is still lacking compared to other countries around the world. Education reform programs run into issues when children are located in remote areas with limited access to newer technologies and when a different language is spoken at home than the one used in the national curriculum. The country also has a massive number of students compared to the number of teachers available, with 50 million students and 3 million teachers located in Indonesia. Education technology would take some strain off of educators and allow more students to be reached using computer programs.
Australia has partnered with Indonesia for several programs to improve education in Indonesia. Along with the INOVASI program, Australia has also funded the Technical Assistance for Education System Strengthening (TASS) program, which helps to increase educator’s knowledge of learning techniques and teaching methods to improve reading comprehension for students. Another platform that is currently pushing for more usage of education technology is Bizcom Indonesia. This article will discuss all three programs to explain the progress that the initiatives have made in Indonesian classrooms.
INOVASI Program
INOVASI works with both Indonesian students and teachers to build the quality of education found throughout the country. The initiative received $49 million from the Australian government and the program will run from 2016 through 2019. The program is currently being implemented in 17 districts across four provinces of Indonesia: West Nusa Tenggara, North Kalimantan, Sumba Island in East Nusa Tenggara and East Java. INOVASI helps to increase the level of education for teachers to create a common standard for education materials around the country. One of the target goals involves developing a problem-driven iterative adaptation, or PDIA, mindset for the teachers. This method helps teachers make learning a more personal experience and reach kids using different methods. The program also incorporates the usage of ebooks so that more children can have access to textbooks in rural areas.
TASS Program
Technical Assistance for Education System Strengthening is a $12 million program being implemented from 2015 to 2020. TASS helps provide aid to the government of Indonesia to focus on improving the educational systems around the country. The program supports legislation that helps to address the lack of quality education in rural areas and the lack of qualified teachers in the country. TASS also works with the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, Ministry of Religious Affairs and Ministry of National Development Planning to increase the rigor and success of education in Indonesia.
Bizcom Indonesia
Bizcom Indonesia, an initiative for businessmen and businesswomen to increase technological innovation, hosted a conference to discuss the progress of education technology in early 2019. The conference focused on the success of EdTech in recent years for the school system, with the main presentation highlighting how the increase in technology is helping to reach more students than before. The main presentation also discussed how some schools were beginning to adopt a “bring your own device” rule, allowing more students to have access to technology in the classroom. Indonesia has one of the fastest-growing markets for EdTech, and the spread of technology will continue to make education more accessible to the masses.
All three of these initiatives help to improve education in Indonesia. With a highly adaptable market for electronics, the country has an easy pathway for including more education technology in schools. As technology usage increases throughout classrooms, the level of education will increase and allow Indonesian job markets to flourish.
Source of the notice: https://www.borgenmagazine.com/improving-education-in-indonesia/
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