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Ghana: Make girl child education priority for gender parity – Parents urged

Ghana/Source: https://www.myjoyonline.com

Parents have been urged to place more value on girl child education to help the country achieve gender equality.

According to the Director of Programmes and Projects of civil society organization, Youth Without Borders (YWB), Richard Appau, society also needs to do more to give females the right environment to flourish.

“Women must be empowered and inspired to take the necessary steps in the socio-economic development of their children,” he said.

He was speaking at the maiden edition of the Mafi Zongo Electoral Area Women Rising Summit in the Central Tongu District of the Volta Region.

The event was on the theme: ‘The Role of the 21st Century Women in the Growth and Development of Society.’

The programme brought together over 500 women, chiefs and elders in the district for mentoring.

The summit sought to connect the women to carefully selected mentors from academia and industry to empower and inspire them to take the necessary steps to properly develop their children.

Assembly Member of the Mafi Zongo Electoral Area Julius Karl D. Fieve encouraged mothers to invest more in their children to ensure their adequate development.

He said, “I have come to realize that, beyond infrastructure and social amenities, the only way, we could transform our communities and create a sustainable future for ourselves is through strategic investment in the education of the children of our communities.”

A lecturer at the Ho Technical University, Edem Nerissa Lawrencia Anku, admonished the women to have a vision for their children and play their part in the growth of society.

“You must endeavour to provide all the needs of your children. You have to draw more closely to them so as to be able to understand them,” she said.

Speaking on behalf of the women who participated in the event, Jane Duhoe said they would take the experiences shared by the mentors very serious.

She said, “we were really inspired today for action. We can assure the mentors and organizers of our resolve to push for the development of our children.”

 

Source:

https://www.myjoyonline.com/lifestyle/2018/March-29th/refrain-from-using-cane-to-discipline-children-medical-doctor-advises-parent.php

 

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Sudáfrica: Matric pupils robbed of an education

Por: risingsunchatsworth.co.za/Bianca Lalbahadur/04-04-2018
Angered parents of the pupils said their children were being robbed of an education due to the lack of interest by the Department of Education to employ teachers at the school and in the interim, their children are at a major disadvantage.

Irate and disgruntled SGB members and pupils of Dumisani Makhaye High School in Welbedacht West marched to the Education Board in Pietermaritzburg to demand their basic right to an education after they missed their first quarterly physical science examination due to a lack of proper staff, on Wednesday.

Angered parents of the pupils said their children were being robbed of an education due to the lack of interest by the Department of Education to employ teachers at the school and in the interim, their children are at a major disadvantage.

The only pupils who did not write their exams are those studying physical science.

“Physical science is one of the most complicated subjects that children study at secondary school level and the fact that they were forced to miss the examination is very disappointing and unacceptable,” said the parents.

Speaking to journalists, the chairman of the school governing body, Joseph Jili said, “The reason for the protest was to highlight all of the issues that the pupils have been faced with since the inception of the school.  The school has been left without six teachers and non-teaching staff as well, since early last year.  As a result of this, pupils of matric physical science class had to miss their first exam.”

He added that the principal is doing everything in his power to assist and resolve this issue.

Since the protest, the head of the Department of Education agreed to meet before the next school term to address all of the issues that are being faced at the school.

“The reason why we do not have the staff that the school requires is because the department sent out a new HRM which made it difficult to hire new teachers as there is only one person, who signs off these documents.  Members of the school governing body, and myself included are hopeful that through this meeting, we can establish a way forward for the school and the pupils in terms of their examinations which they were unable to write,” added Jili.

Spokesman of the Department of Education, Kwazi Mthethwa said, “All schools in the district do have teachers that the department of education has provided to them.  The school governing body and the pupils need to address the principal with regards to their issues.  The governing body of the school still needs to be elected.”

Principal of the school, Mr Zwane, was unable to comment on the matter at hand, due to protocol from the Department of Education.

*Fuente: https://risingsunchatsworth.co.za/109965/matric-pupils-robbed-education/

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There is no one-size-fits-all school model: Developing a flexible and innovative education ecosystem

Por: brookings.edu/Stavros Yiannouka and Zineb Mouhyi/04-04-2018

November 2017, at the bi-annual World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Doha, Qatar, we held a roundtable with renowned school innovators from around the world. What was striking was the wide diversity of school models represented at the table. At one end of the spectrum was Mike Feinberg, co-founder of KIPP, a model with a focus on high expectations and building character enforced by a disciplined, structured approach to education. At the other end was Ramin Farhangi, co-founder of École Dynamique, a school in France based on the Sudbury Valley School, which emphasizes on educational freedom, democratic governance, and personal responsibility. At École Dynamique, children are free to organize and use their time as they please. The two schools could not be more different. Yet, by certain terms, they are both quite successful and have other schools emulating their models worldwide. We came out of that roundtable ever more convinced that when it comes to education, there is no one-size-fits-all model.

The latest Brookings report “Can We Leapfrog? The Potential of Education Innovations to Rapidly Accelerate Progress” analyzes 3,000 education innovations from around the world, showing just how effective widely different approaches can be. Yet, governments still search for the oneeducation system that will trump them all and produce the best outcomes for every child. Instead, governments should consider developing a system of different school models that provide opportunities for flexibility. The Netherlands exemplifies this approach, giving all public schools a high degree of independence, so they can define their own curriculum, provided they follow certain standards established by the government.

So, why should governments consider moving from a school system to a diversified system of schools? We believe there are (at least) three good reasons for doing so:

Reason 1: Different students have different needs.
By pursuing a system of schools, governments can tailor individual schools to meet the needs of different sets of students. For instance, although U.S. charter schools have on average not delivered better results than public schools, a growing body of evidence indicates that urban charter schools have had large positive effects on the test scores of disadvantaged students. A likely reason is that charter schools targeting disadvantaged students have devised specific strategies to address their students’ needs—including, longer school hours, higher standards, and emphasis on character development. Each school tweaks these parameters, and others, based on what is appropriate for their particular students. Again, it is important to emphasize that charter schools are one model for giving autonomy to schools.

Moreover, students learn best when their learning is adapted to their context. UNESCO reports that “inadequate understanding of the development context of an education system is a fundamental cause of its irrelevance to geographical and temporal development contexts, its irrelevance to individual and collective development needs, its ineffectiveness for purpose and therefore its poor quality.” In the name of equality, a uniform education system ends up systematically underserving a portion of the population, typically the least advantaged.

Reason 2: A diversified portfolio of schools is better equipped to deal with an uncertain future.
Anyone familiar with basic finance knows that the key to successfully lowering the risk of your portfolio is to diversify it. In a world where our ability to predict is the future is mediocre at best, why should the future of an entire nation bet on a single approach to education? And how is it beneficial for a country to adopt a one-size-fits-all model of education, particularly when this approach is shown to produce very disparate outcomes?

In discussions on how to prepare students for an unpredictable future, we keep hearing “don’t prepare students for something; prepare them for anything.” We would argue the same thing holds true for school systems: don’t design school systems for something; design them for anything. In an era of personalized learning, we wonder whether we can consider personalized schooling as the possible next step forward. A system of schools with diverse options should logically be much more resilient and capable of coping with uncertainty.

Reason 3: A systems of schools would allow for more experimentation and innovation.
For education innovations to live up to their potential of leapfrogging educational progress, governments need to embrace innovations and find ways to incorporate them into education systems. As the Brookings report points out, “By adding an expanding set of options for how to approach education, governments can open up fruitful avenues for leaping ahead that perhaps were closed before.”

“Government innovation” almost sounds like an oxymoron. Indeed, governments around the world are known for their complex bureaucracy, slowness, and risk aversion—not exactly what you would call a good recipe for innovation. However, as seen in Finland and Singapore, for example, governments can enable and embed a culture of change, adaptation, and innovation in the governance of education. This leads to a higher tolerance for risks, failures are controlled and on a much smaller scale. This also allows for a dramatic increase in the number of actors involved in the innovation process, naturally leading to more innovations. Finally, this experimentation process could potentially uncover very effective approaches that could be applicable on a wide scale.

Increasingly, education stakeholders are calling for a flexible, resilient, and innovative education ecosystem, as highlighted in the Millions Learning report by Brookings and in the Learning Generation report by the Education Commission. We believe that in order to have this ecosystem, we need to leave the one-size-fits-all school system behind and embrace a system of schools with diverse co-existing schools like KIPP and Sudbury Valley, as well as schools focused on arts or Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)—all putting the student at the center and following centrally agreed upon standards.

*Fuente: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2018/04/03/there-is-no-one-size-fits-all-school-model-developing-a-flexible-and-innovative-education-ecosystem/

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EEUU: Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky Walk Out: ‘It Really Is a Wildfire’

Por: nytimes.com/ Dana Goldstein/04-04-2018

Thousands of teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky walked off the job Monday morning, shutting down school districts as they protested cuts in pay, benefits and school funding in a movement that has spread rapidly since igniting in West Virginia this year.

In Oklahoma City, protesting teachers ringed the Capitol, chanting, “No funding, no future!” Katrina Ruff, a local teacher, carried a sign that read, “Thanks to West Virginia.”

“They gave us the guts to stand up for ourselves,” she said.

The walkouts and rallies in Republican-dominated states, mainly organized by ordinary teachers on Facebook, have caught lawmakers and sometimes the teachers’ own labor unions flat-footed. And they are occurring in states and districts with important midterm races in November, suggesting that thousands of teachers, with their pent-up rage over years of pay freezes and budget cuts, are set to become a powerful political force this fall.

The next red state to join the protest movement could be Arizona, where there is an open Senate seat and where thousands of teachers gathered in Phoenix last week to demand a 20 percent pay raise and more funding for schools.

The growing fervor suggests that labor activism has taken on a new, grass-roots form.

“Our unions have been weakened so much that a lot of teachers don’t have faith” in them, said Noah Karvelis, an elementary school music teacher in Tolleson, Ariz., outside Phoenix, and leader of the movement calling itself #RedforEd, after the red T-shirts protesting teachers are wearing across the country

“Teachers for a long time have had a martyr mentality,” Mr. Karvelis said. “This is new.”

The wave of protest is cresting as the Supreme Court prepares a decision inJanus v. Afscme, a major case in which the court is expected to make it harder for public sector unions to require workers to pay membership fees. But the recent walkouts suggest that labor activism may not need highly funded unions to be effective. Unlike in strongholds for labor, like New York or California, teachers’ unions in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona are barred by law from compelling workers to pay dues. Yet that has not stopped protesters from making tough demands of lawmakers.

Striking West Virginia teachers declared victory last month after winning a 5 percent raise, but Oklahoma educators are holding out for more.

Last week, the Legislature in Oklahoma City voted to provide teachers with an average raise of $6,000 per year, or roughly a 16 percent raise, depending on experience. Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, signed the package into law.

Teachers said it was not enough. They have asked for a $10,000 raise, as well as additional funding for schools and raises for support staff like bus drivers and custodians.

About 200 of the state’s 500 school districts shut down on Monday as teachers walked out, defying calls from some parents and administrators for them to be grateful for what they had already received from the state.

To pay for the raise, politicians from both parties agreed to increase production taxes on oil and gas, the state’s most prized industry, and institute new taxes on tobacco and motor fuel. It was the first new revenue bill to become law in Oklahoma in 28 years, bucking decades of tax-cut orthodoxy.

In Kentucky, teachers earn an average salary of $52,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, compared with $45,000 in Oklahoma. But teachers there, thousands of whom are picketing the Capitol during their spring break, are protesting a pension reform bill that abruptly passed the State House and Senate last week. If Gov. Matt Bevin signs it into law, it will phase out defined-benefit pensions for teachers and replace them with hybrid retirement plans that combine features of a traditional pension with features of the 401(k) accounts used in the private sector. Teachers in the state are not eligible for Social Security benefits.

Andrew Beaver, 32, a middle school math teacher in Louisville, said he was open to changes in teacher retirement programs, such as potentially asking teachers to work to an older age before drawing down benefits; currently, some Kentucky teachers are eligible for retirement around age 50. But he said he and his colleagues, many of whom have called in sick to protest the bill, were angry about not having a seat at the negotiation table with Mr. Bevin, a Republican, and the Republican majority in the Legislature.

“What I’m seeing in Louisville is teachers are a lot more politically engaged than they were in 2015 or 2016,” he said. “It really is a wildfire.”

In Arizona, where the average teacher salary is $47,000, teachers are agitating for more generous pay and more money for schools after watching the state slash funds to public education for years.

“We’re going to continue to escalate our actions,” Mr. Karvelis said. “Whether that ultimately ends in a strike? That’s certainly a possibility. We just want to win.”

Oklahoma educators are holding out for more than the $6,000 per year raise that was signed by the Legislature last week. CreditAlex Flynn for The New York Times

Mr. Karvelis, 23, said teachers would not walk out of class unless they were able to win support from parents and community members across the state, including in rural areas. But he said the movement would be influential regardless of whether it shuts down schools.

“We’re going to have a lot of teachers at the ballot box who I don’t think would normally go in a midterm year,” he said. “If I were a legislator right now, I’d be honestly sweating bullets.”

With Republican legislators and governors bearing the brunt of the protesters’ fury, the Democratic Party is trying to capitalize on the moment. The Democratic National Committee plans to register voters at teacher rallies, and hopes to harness the movement’s populism.

The teacher walkouts are “a real rejection of the Republican agenda that doesn’t favor working-class people,” said Sabrina Singh, the committee’s deputy communications director. “Republicans aren’t on the side of teachers. The Democrats are.”

That type of rhetoric is a sea change from the Obama years, when many Democrats angered teachers by talking less about core issues of schools funding than about expanding the number of charter schools, or using student test scores to evaluate teachers and remove ineffective ones from the classroom.

“School reformers kind of overshot the mark, and we’re now in a pendulum swing where teachers increasingly look like good guys,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

Republicans, too, he said, should consider pitching themselves as teacher-friendly candidates, perhaps by tying teacher pay raises to efforts to expand school choice through private school vouchers or charter schools.

Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, called the movement an “education spring.”

“This is the civics lesson of our time,” she said. “The politicians on both sides of the aisle are rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.”

*Fuente: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/teacher-strikes-oklahoma-kentucky.html

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How do we improve the region’s health? Education and opportunity

By: DR. RANDY WYKOFF

“If you could only do one thing to improve health in the region, what would you do?” That is a question I have been asked regularly since my family and I moved to the Tri-Cities area a dozen years ago.

When I was first asked this question, my answer was simple and straight-forward. I knew that the major factors impacting our health are our behaviors — smoking, poor diet, lack of physical activity and, increasingly, substance abuse. My advice in those early years was that we needed to change our behaviors, especially as they relate to smoking.

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, and Tennessee has one of the highest smoking rates in the nation. Smoking rates in Central Appalachia, including Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, are much higher than the country as a whole. The cost to the region—in health care, lost productivity and, most importantly, in the incredible devastation of families and communities—is hard to fathom.

Over the years, I realized my initial answer was short-sighted. While smoking, and other unhealthy behaviors, are clearly the major contributors to early disease and death in our country and our region, there are factors that lead people to smoke, to be less active and even factors that lead to substance abuse.

We know people with lower levels of education and less economic opportunities are more likely to smoke, less likely to eat healthy diets and more likely to engage in less physical activity. With that in mind, a few years ago, I changed my answer to suggest the most important thing we could do to improve health in the region is improve educational achievement and enhance economic opportunity.

These two factors, of course, go hand-in-hand.

To get a better job, people often need more education. It takes a robust tax base — which results from a strong economy — to support the types of programs schools need to help students succeed. We know that when they occur together — more educational achievement AND more economic opportunities — people’s health and well-being improve. Importantly, we know communities with greater educational achievement and higher income typically have lower smoking rates, lower obesity rates and more physical activity. They are, in short, healthier.

So many of the challenges facing our region persist from one generation to another. A child’s educational achievement often reflects the parents’ level of education. A child born into a poor family is very likely to remain poor for his or her entire life. Parental smoking is one of the factors that predicts a young adult’s decision to start smoking — and the list goes on-and-on.

The inter-generational cycles of poor health, poverty and lack of education are pervasive and well-documented. With this fact in mind, I have come to believe the most important thing we can do to improve health in the region is launch a concerted regional effort to disrupt the inter-generational cycles that limit the lifetime opportunities of so many children in our region.

With the merging of our region’s health systems, and the desire by both states to assure this merger has a long-lasting impact on the health status of the region, we have a remarkable opportunity to truly impact health in the region.

If we pool all of our regional efforts, and combine them with additional support from the states, the federal government as well as from regional and national foundations, and then apply a laser-like focus on disrupting the inter-generational cycles that significantly damage the children of our region, we have a unique and unprecedented opportunity to dramatically impact the health of this region.

This will require more focus on these issues than is currently anticipated. It will require the many community-service organizations in our region to work together on a small number of high impact priorities and it will require regional businesses to work together toward the common goal of giving every child in this region a better chance at a healthy and productive life.

If all of us work together to assure that, from the time a woman becomes pregnant to the time her child is ready to enter school, both of them have the knowledge, skills and opportunities to live the healthiest, most productive and most rewarding life possible, then we all benefit as our region becomes healthier, richer and more productive.

Source:

http://www.johnsoncitypress.com/Column/2018/04/01/No-1-thing-to-improve-the-region-s-health-Better-education.html

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Japan: Too much of an education could be bad for your future

Japan/April 03, 2018/By: MICHAEL HOFFMAN*/Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp

Poverty comes in many forms but one color: gray.

There is the poverty of the poor, the poverty of the rich, the poverty of the academically under-qualified, the poverty of the academically over-qualified. The poverty of the poor pretty much speaks for itself. The riches of the rich may be deceptive.

The biggest drain on them is education for the kids. Luxuries and pleasures can be sacrificed, but to compromise where the children are concerned is (or is seen to be) to deprive them of the leg-up they need (or are seen to need) to gain a foothold in life.

What high schools are open to graduates of inferior elementary schools? Inferior ones. What universities are open to graduates of second-rate high schools? Second-rate ones. What kind of career is open to graduates of merely ordinary universities? A merely ordinary one. The consequent financial strain can be felt as a kind of poverty.

If it’s true of the rich, how much more so of the poor. The high cost of education is considered a main cause of the sunken birth rate. If educating your children as the economy demands its top tier be educated requires means beyond the average, means beyond you, childlessness might well seem the more responsible option.

There’s education and education. Motives for acquiring it vary. It can be a quest for knowledge or a quest for credentials. The former is problematic. Shukan Gendai magazine tells some cautionary tales.

“Kyoko-san,” 27, studied fine arts. It was her passion. She’d learn the subject, then teach it. Undergraduate school, graduate school, post-grad school. Hard at work on her Ph.D. thesis, she suddenly noticed something: Students graduating ahead of her weren’t getting jobs.

Stupid of her not to notice before! Absorption in your studies can blind you to earthier realities. Panicking, she put aside her thesis and threw herself into job-hunting. Nothing. Universities were over-staffed, the private sector had no room for her. She eventually landed a job at a small small-town rural arts museum. The work is routine and she feels her expert knowledge rotting within her, but at least she can feed herself.

Not every one is so lucky. “Nakamura-san,” 29, is a Ph.D. scientist struggling to repay a ¥6 million student loan on a ¥2 million-a-year salary. The good news is that his employer is a university and his job description includes the word “research” — followed, unfortunately, by the word “assistant,” which translates into part-time status and lab chores far from the cutting edge.

Maybe in 10 years he’ll get an assistant professorship. Or maybe not — in which case he’ll be 40 years old and nowhere. In the meantime, he lives in a ratty ¥40,000-a-month apartment, eats at the university cafeteria and wonders, “How long can I take this?” It’s enough to make the private sector look attractive — but an exploratory foray into it showed that the private sector did not return the compliment. Knowledge beyond a certain range of commercial exploitability, comments Shukan Gendai, is to the private sector the rough equivalent of otaku-hood.

“Takada-san,” 26, is pursuing a doctorate in literature at the University of Tokyo. He’s learning something the great books don’t teach — to wit: “To get anywhere in research you need connections. I didn’t know that when I started. You need to develop relationships with influential professors who can boost your career.

“So, I get involved in academic meetings, I help out at the reception desk, I coach visiting overseas students. … In short, I’m so busy maneuvering behind the scenes that I have no time to study.”

This is ironic, in view of the importance society attaches to education. Arrestingly symbolic, as the back-to-school season nears, is the iconic randoseru elementary school rucksack. The word, borrowed from Dutch, reflects the age and origin of the import, harking back as it does to the early 19th century, when a restricted number of Dutch traders were almost the only foreigners permitted in Japan. They bequeathed to their hosts a few European books, a smattering of the Dutch language, a bit of European science (and a hunger for more) — and the randoseru. Japanese kids have been saddled with it ever since.

It’s no light burden. And it’s gaining weight, as the Asahi Shimbun noted last week. Carrying a full load of books, lunch, gym clothes and whatnot, it can weigh nearly 10 kilograms. The 7-year-old second-grader gamely bracing against its downward thrust probably weighs little more than 20 kg him- or herself.

Why should the venerable randoseru be gaining weight? Because, the Asahi explains, textbooks are. There’s so much to learn! Never more than now, and more and more each year as knowledge, competition, pressure and standards rise. As of 2015, after six years of elementary schooling, an average child will have carried (and hopefully read) a total of 6,518 textbook pages — representing a 34 percent increase in 10 years. Moral education, a new subject swelling the curriculum beginning this year, will add, over six years, an estimated 1,067 pages to the load.

“Higher” education, meanwhile, languishes. “Higher education” used to mean, simply, college. A hundred years ago less than half the population got beyond elementary school, which alone was compulsory. College was for the lucky and gifted few.

Postwar democracy flung open the academic gates. What had been a mark of distinction became more or less a necessity to anyone with white-collar aspirations. Today, “higher education” means — if it means anything — not university education per se but learning for its own sake, and Shukan Gendai’s coverage is not encouraging.

It shows the number of Ph.D. students declining at a rate the declining student-age population only partly accounts for: 14,927 nationwide in 2016 as against 18,232 in 2003.

Philosophy remains a popular university alternative to raw science. Each year brings forth 1,000-odd newly fledged philosophers. They can’t all be professors. Most will have to leave academia and seek their fortunes in the “real world.” As what? Doing what? In an age of post-truth and artificial intelligence, who needs philosophers?

*Michael Hoffman is the author of “In the Land of the Kami: A Journey into the Hearts of Japan” and “Other Worlds.”

Source:

Too much of an education could be bad for your future

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Malasya: Student activism: Higher Education Minister challenged to walk the talk

Malasya/April 03, 2018/By: Haikal Jalil/ Source: http://www.thesundaily.my

The Higher Education Ministry should ensure that students would not face action from their universities if they decide to be involved in politics outside of campus.

Mahasiswa Pakatan Harapan chairman Na’im Brundage said such a guarantee must be given by the ministry if it was sincere in allowing students to participate in political campaigning in the upcoming 14th General Election.

He added that previous disciplinary action imposed by universities on students that were involved in anti-government rallies did not indicate that university students indeed had the right to be involved in politics.

«Taking action against them is a clear indication that students are still not free to involve actively in politics, even when such activities are done outside of campus.

«If (Higher Education Minister) Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh is serious about giving students the freedom to participate in politics, he should ensure that higher education institutions will not take any disciplinary action (against the students),» he said in a press conference at Wangsa Maju today.

Idris on Tuesday had stated that university students were free to join political campaigns outside the campus ahead of GE14.

Idris had said that unlike the time of previous leadership which restricted university students from getting involved, today’s students were free to engage in politics if they had a keen interest in doing so.

Na’im said the recent statement made by Idris was nothing more than sweet talk.

He also issued a debate challenge to Idris over the issue of student involvement in politics.

He said other officials from the Higher Education Ministry were also free to take up the challenge if Idris refuse to do so.

Source:

http://www.thesundaily.my/news/2018/03/31/student-activism-higher-education-minister-challenged-walk-talk

 

 

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