Education

Page 69 of 144
1 … 67 68 69 70 71 … 144

Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?

Emily Hanford

By: Emily Hanford.

Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers.

Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn.

It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.

How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science.

What have scientists figured out? First of all, while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There arehundreds of studies that back this up.

Source of the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/opinion/sunday/phonics-teaching-reading-wrong-way.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FEducation&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection

 

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

The birds and the bees

Nayak Paudel

Por Nayak Paudel. 

Sex education has so far been almost non-existent in Nepal’s schools, but there is a growing awareness for its need

Going to school in Nepal, there is a certain section of a certain subject that many teachers and even students shy away from. At the secondary level, under health and population studies, is a chapter about sexual and reproductive health. There have been instances of teachers completely skipping this chapter or asking the students to study it themselves at home. Even when teachers do teach the section, it is limited to biology and spoken about scientifically. Sex education as such doesn’t seem to exist in Nepal.

Sex education isn’t just related to biology and reproduction, contrary to what Nepal’s secondary school curriculum proscribes. It includes all issues related to human sexuality, including human anatomy, sexual activities, reproductive and sexual health, safe sex, sexual orientations, birth control, family planning and reproductive rights.

In Nepal, secondary level textbooks include chapters on reproductive organs, ways to prevent STDs, the use of contraceptives and menstruation. At higher levels, only biology has chapters on reproductive organs, thus, only a science faculty student will have access to it. But, as outlined above, the tendency is to avoid talking about sex, the implication being that Nepali society still feels ashamed taking about such issues and, in many places, it’s still taboo.

Partial sex education, at least concerning biology, reproduction and health, was incorporated into the curriculum with the understanding that sex education is one of the most essential things that students needs to learn to take right decisions. But sex education has also been said to play an important role in minimising increasing cases of sexual violence against women and children.’

Nepal Police data shows that, in the last fiscal year, among victims of rape, 64 percent were girls below 18 years of age. The Nepal Police has thus come up with a campaign to provide sex education through their newly-launched Community-Police Partnership campaign.

“Sexual violence can be minimised to a great extent if students are made aware about it through sex education,” said Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Uttam Raj Subedi, Central Police Spokesperson. “Thus, in our campaign, sex education is a major concern.”

The Nepal government too is attempting to promote sex education in schools and communities through its Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE) programme. CSE covers all aspects of sex education—human sexuality, human sexual anatomy, sexual activity, sexual reproduction, reproductive health, reproductive rights, safe sex, birth control, sexual abstinence along with emotional relations and responsibilities. The government has thus assured that CSE will be included in its upcoming curriculum, beginning from grade one itself, according to Lekha Nath Poudel, Director General of the Curriculum Development Centre at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

“However, not all classes will include curriculum related to sexual education, because we cannot revise the entire curriculum at once,” said Poudel. “Courses including CSE will be added to the curricula of standards one, two and three and then in the higher classes in the first phase.” Poudel, however, mentioned that sex education will be provided to students from all faculties.

CSE, if delivered beginning from the primary school level itself, can help students understand basic but important issues such as ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’. Sex education can also help students identify and protect themselves from abuse. To that end, the government will be partnering with various other organisations to impart CSE.

“To bring a change in our education system at once is difficult and will require a change in policy. Till then, we will be cooperating with international organisations to promote and provide sexual education,” said Baikuntha Prasad Aryal, spokesperson for the Ministry of Education.

The Ministry of Education, in cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, has already been conducting programmes to promote CSE in five districts—Bajura, Accham, Sunsari, Rautahat and Sarlahi. The programme is already helping to raise awareness about sexual health and sexual rights among students in the five districts, claimed Balaram Timalsina, Education Chief at UNESCO Kathmandu.

“At first, many communities refused to attend the programme believing that it was only about education regarding sex and that everybody already knew about it. But later, when they were told about other aspects of sex education, they were keen to learn,” said Timalsina.Private schools, too, are attempting to incorporate some form of sex education into their curriculum.

“We don’t focus on reproductive health because it is already in our curriculum, but we are providing two extra classes every week to students of class 10 and higher regarding emotional attachment with their future partners, which is also part of sex education,” said Father George PM, principal at St Xavier’s School, Jawalakhel. Over a decade ago, St Xavier’s was one of the few schools in the Kathmandu Valley that provided sex education as a separate subject. Now, it appears they have changed focus. “We will be teaching the importance and morals of marriage along with how to bring up children,” said Father George. ‘

A few private schools might be providing extra classes or supplementary sex education but the umbrella organisation for private schools, Private and Boarding School Organization Nepal (PABSON), has not been able to institute an overall programme for all its constituent schools. The organisation, however, applauded the institutions that are providing extra classes on sexual education and has assured mandatory policies regarding sexual education will be instituted in the near future. It has requested other institutions to promote such classes for their students till something formal is enshrined.

“We have been holding discussions over promoting sexual education regularly since sex is mostly hidden in our communities. Sex education is important so we will soon be making plans to provide such classes in every institution under us,” said DK Dhungana, senior vice-president of PABSON.

However, it is not enough to simply institute sex education classes. Teachers need to be trained on how to impart sex education and how to talk sensitively about issues like sexuality, sexual health, orientation, contraception, consent and reproductive anatomy, say experts. They’ve also argued that the government’s recent ban on pornographic content can affect sexual education and awareness among the public.

“Some pornographic content is important for people to acquire knowledge about sexual life,” said sexologist Dr Subodh Kumar Pokharel. “The government should have been clear on the categories of pornographic content before taking such steps.”

Source of the article: http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2018-11-03/the-birds-and-the-bees.html

 

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

Taiwan: Dalai Lama stresses role of education on environmental issues

Noticias

Asia/ Taiwan/ 05.11.2018/ Source: focustaiwan.tw.

The Dalai Lama emphasized the role of education in addressing global environmental issues during a talk Saturday with Nobel laureate Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲), and he asked scientists to take more responsibility to communicate with the public.

In discussing with Lee the challenges and opportunities for a sustainable planet in Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile, the Tibetan leader said he hoped scientists could reach out to the public on environmental issues instead of focusing solely on research.

Though science has provided hard data documenting changes to the environment, people will still be resistant to changing their behavior unless they are made fully aware of the situation around them through education, the Dalai Lama said.

It is therefore important for scientists to have a voice and bring that knowledge into the education system, he said.

The Dalai Lama made the comments after Lee, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986, briefed him about the environmental challenges that humanity is facing and the need to curb climate change.

The Earth is sustaining an extreme imbalance of energy due to global warming, Lee said, explaining that the greenhouse gases produced today have kept incoming solar energy from being reflected back to the universe.

The excessive energy the planet is absorbing is equal to that generated by 350,000 atomic bombs every day, Lee said, and the situation will only get worse as a fast-growing global population that could increase to an estimated 9.7 billion by the middle of the 21st century needs more energy to live.

Global warming has also resulted in more extreme weather across the globe, according to Lee, citing Typhoon Morakot that struck Taiwan in 2009.

The storm, which caused severe mudslides, took nearly 700 lives and wiped out a village in one day, Lee said.

Seeing pictures of Xiaolin village, in which more than 400 residents were buried alive by a massive landslide, before and after the natural disaster, the Dalai Lama seem shocked, asking «same place?»

Lee stressed that climate change is a global problem that needs global solutions, and that from a technological point of view, people must learn to store, transform and share energy from the sun instead of relying on fossil fuels.

«People must go back to nature, back to sunshine,» he said, encouraging people to lead a less materialistic lifestyle.

Lee also mentioned the importance of improving equality around the world to help less developed countries combat global warming.

The Dalai Lama replied that those who are capable should «try to promote poor people’s living standards, their economic conditions, and teach them more practices of contentment.»

Along with other scholars, a group of Taiwanese scientists led by Nobel laureate Lee joined a three-day discussion from Nov. 1 with the Dalai Lama on quantum mechanics in Buddhism.

It was the first time the Dalai Lama engaged in such a dialogue with scientists mainly from the Chinese community.

Source of the notice: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aedu/201811030011.aspx

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

Canada: Wabanaki Collection launched to improve education about Maritime Indigenous peoples

Noticias

North America/ Canada/ 05.11.2018/ Source: www.cbc.ca.

‘We are all treaty people,’ says curator of a portal aimed at better mutual understanding

The Wabanaki were New Brunswick’s first peoples, but David Perley says many students in the province are graduating from high school without knowing much about them.

«My ancestors identify themselves as Wabanaki people,» Perley said.

«In my language, that means people of the dawn.»

The Wabanaki Confederacy was around long before contact with European settlers, said Perley.

«They were dealing with other Indigenous nations, such as the Mohawks and so on. It was always discussing boundary lines, for example, or the need to have alliances against a common threat, political discussions on what they had to do in terms of internal governance and so on.»

After contact, said Perley, «It became a strong confederacy because of the need to have unity in terms of dealing with settler society.»

The director of the Mi’kmaq-Wolastoqey Centre at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton said textbooks make barely a reference to Wabanaki history, let alone the culture and traditions that have been passed down for thousands of years.

The centre has launched a new online resource to try to rectify that.

It’s available to anyone looking for information about Indigenous peoples of the Maritimes.

Perley said the project was spawned by the many requests he used to get — dating back to the 1990s — from students and teachers looking for reliable reference material.

At the time, there was little to be found.

«And especially not any resource that was written by or produced by Wabanaki people — the Wolostoqiyik, the Mi’kmaq, the Passamaquoddy and the Abenakis,» Perley said during an interview with Information Morning Fredericton.

«So from that point on, I thought it was important for us to ensure that teachers have the proper tools to use in the classroom.

The collection includes this film about a contemporary Indigenous justice issue, the wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall Jr. (Justice Denied. 1989 © National Film Board of Canada)

«And also from the Wabanaki perspective, to share information about the history of the Wabanakis — the world views, the traditions and the ceremonies and the knowledge systems and so on.»

The Wabanaki Collection includes some carefully selected historical documents.

«I don’t want to recommend anything that would reinforce stereotypes and misconceptions,» said Perley.

Among the items that have stood the test of time are the Peace and Friendship treaties, documents that date back to the mid-1700s, which set forth mutual obligations of First Nations and the Crown.

One of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action was to renew treaty relationships based on principles of mutual recognition, mutual respect and shared responsibility for maintaining those relationships into the future.

«Within New Brunswick, I am promoting the fact that we are all treaty people,» Perley said.

«We should get to know one another. And we have to have more communications so that we will have a better understanding of one another and respect one another as well.»

The collection includes language apps and other resources for children, including an animated short by Françoise Hartmann that tells the tale of the great spirit Glooscap and how he battled with the giant Winter to bring Summer to the North and the Mi’kmaq people. (Summer Legend. 1986 © National Film Board of Canada)

The collection also includes a number of National Film Board productions about contemporary issues, such as the violent dispute over the burgeoning Indigenous fishery in Esgenoopetitj in the early 2000s.

There are CBC News items, language-learning apps for adults and children, and interactive maps with Wabanaki legends, to name just a few offerings.

Another of the commission’s calls to action is «developing and implementing kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum and learning resources on Aboriginal peoples in Canadian history, and the history and legacy of residential schools.»

George Daley, the president of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association, said that organization hadn’t known the  collection was in the works, but the Education Department has given its seal of approval.

«It is an appropriate resource for our New Brunswick teachers to supplement their curriculum,» Daley said.

Source of the notice: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/indigenous-education-wabanaki-collection-1.4889167

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

A billion youths in Africa will be unemployable

Aliko Dangote

Por: Aliko Dangote. 

It is time for an entrepreneurial and knowledge revolution in Africa. Only a properly educated workforce and entrepreneurial class will have the skills and drive to thrive as new technologies change the nature of work, leisure, the environment and society — and tackle our continent’s most pressing problems.

Many people in Africa and beyond share this view. When French President Emmanuel Macron visited Nigeria in July, he offered a bold prediction: if Africa’s youngest entrepreneurs worked hard and innovated, he said, they would change their countries and transform the world.

Similarly, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg visited a co-creation hub in Lagos in 2016, he was impressed by the “energy” of the country’s youthful innovators — the social entrepreneurs, tech companies and investors who are collaborating to solve some of Nigeria’s toughest problems.

But that energy can go only so far without education.

Indeed, although Macron and Zuckerberg are right to be inspired by Africa’s youth, the entrepreneurial and knowledge revolution that is needed to ensure a prosperous future for the continent can happen only if there is also an education revolution. Simply put, we need to get all of Africa’s children in school, so that the next generation of entrepreneurs has the skills it needs to succeed.

Africa faces huge challenges in reforming its education sector. Although access to education has expanded dramatically over the past 25 years, and more boys and girls are in classrooms than ever before, many young people are still not learning what they need to in order to thrive now and in the future.

If current trends continue, by 2050 about a third of Africa’s one billion youths will lack basic proficiency in maths, reading and other skills and subjects. Millions will be unemployable and unproductive.

Today’s educational shortcomings weaken Africa’s development capacity. According to the World Economic Forum, Africa needs another one million university-trained researchers to tackle its most pressing health, energy and development problems.

But educating those scientists and potential entrepreneurs is an uphill battle. Technology has transformed the modern workplace, but curricula, modes of learning and instruction and teacher quality continue to lag. Even good schools exhibit a gap between the skills students need — such as critical thinking and problem solving — and what they are being taught. Unless such shortcomings are addressed, Africa’s future workforce will be unable to lead the type of change many are expecting.

To be sure, Africa is not facing this challenge alone. According to a 2016 report by the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity (the education commission), where I serve as a commissioner, by 2030, more than 800-million children — half the world’s school-age population — will graduate or drop out of school without the skills required to secure a decent job. This is a global learning crisis and it demands a global solution.

One of the biggest obstacles to improving education quality is financing. Today, only 10% of official development assistance funds education programmes in poor countries. Clearly, that share needs to increase. But even an increase in international funding levels will not be enough to ensure that every child in every school is learning. To accomplish that, we need new approaches to support education and new mechanisms to solicit and deliver financing.

For several years, I have joined colleagues from around the world in government, civil society and the private sector to help the education commission to find funding solutions.

Our big innovative idea is to create an international finance facility for education, which pools donor funds to make it easier to secure loans from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank. It also seeks to help lower-middle-income countries to get credit at favourable rates and avoid the debt trap of high-interest loans. By leveraging $2-billion in donor guarantees, the facility will make $10-billion in grants and concessional funding available to the some of the world’s most challenged countries.

But change needs to start at home. The facility will succeed only if African countries increase their domestic spending on education. On average, the poorest countries spend just 3% of their national budgets on schooling, whereas middle-income countries spend an average of 4%. Our data indicate that those figures will need to increase to 5% or 6% to make a lasting difference. Although investment in physical infrastructure such as roads and railways is critical, investment in young minds is equally or more important.

It costs about $400 a year to educate a school-age child in Africa. That is a fortune for a poor family struggling to make ends meet. But for governments in Africa and around the world, it is a small price to pay to train the creators of future prosperity. After all, as Nelson Mandela said: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” — © Project Syndicate

Source of the article: https://mg.co.za/article/2018-10-05-00-a-billion-youths-in-africa-will-be-unemployable

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

Education in Vietnam: very good on paper

Noticias

Asia/ Vietnam/ 31.10.2018/ Source: www.ft.com.

Good exam results alone will not prepare pupils for the next industrial revolution

The second-year students at Nguyen Hue specialised high school in Hanoi are an unusually motivated bunch.

Entrance exams for university are coming up in a year. Then there is the matter of their parents’ high expectations, competition from other children in this elite school, and the tests of various kinds they are given every week.

“Everybody here is so talented, it makes me feel pressure,” says Nguyen Phuong Thao, 16. Ms Thao wants to become a journalist, but her favourite subject is maths, which she says her parents “forced” her to study when she was small.

“My first goal is to get into a good university in Vietnam,” says Nguyen Tung Chi, another second-year student, who wants to work in marketing. “All the classmates are obsessed with getting good grades.”

Vietnam outperforms neighbouring countries in south-east Asia on education rankings, and does well globally too. Its high test scores contributed to its place in the World Bank human capital index — 48th — the highest rating for any lower middle-income country. It stands out relative to its wealth.

The country spends the equivalent of nearly 6 per cent of its GDP on education — high by global standards, and a greater proportion than most of its neighbours.

Apart from the government’s investment in schools, observers of Vietnamese culture attribute children’s strong test scores to cultural and historical factors. These include the work ethic prized under Confucianism and the need to rebuild the country after the war.

Vietnam’s current generation of under-20s are an unusually large demographic cohort who will be competing for university places and jobs in an economy that is going through major transformation as the manufacturing jobs on which it relies undergo profound change.

“The generation of their and my parents needed to work hard, and they realised the fastest way to develop the country was to study,” says Hoang Kim Ngoc, 24, an English teacher at the Nguyen Hue school.

“The demands of the current workforce are so high,” she adds. “We are going through the fourth industrial revolution, where we not only expect to compete with machines, but we need to control them.”

Pham Hiep, a researcher based in Hanoi who specialises in university education, attributes Vietnam’s strong international test rankings in part to a well-designed curriculum for maths and science. “Shadow education” — extra tutoring in maths and other subjects outside school — is also common, he says.

Another factor, Mr Hiep says — echoing the children at Nguyen Hue school — is intense competition for university places as the country undergoes a demographic boom. “We don’t have enough places in tertiary education,” he says. “The supply doesn’t meet the demand.” The private universities in Vietnam, he says, account for only about 15 per cent of total enrolment, low compared to Vietnam’s regional neighbours, including the Philippines, Malaysia, and China.

There is little doubt that Vietnam’s education system is good at teaching children to do well on tests, especially in maths and science. But is it teaching them to think and reason too? And how reliable are the test scores themselves?

The World Bank’s rankings for Vietnam are based on the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tests, run by the OECD, and involving international tests taken by 15-year-olds. However, one critical observer tells the FT the results are influenced by a sampling issue that makes Vietnam’s results look better than they are because about half of children have left school by age 15.

As the school leavers tend to be poorer and lower-achieving than average, the wealthier and more studious ones who are tested push the overall results up.

“The Pisa sample for Vietnam is skewed, [as] it only includes the richer, higher-achieving kids,” says John Jerrim, a lecturer at University College London’s Institute of Education. “This is a significant part of the explanation why Vietnam does well.” Mr Jerrim says that Vietnam will face a “paradox” moving forward, as improving education means more and more children remain in school.

Its Pisa scores are likely to decline rather than increase. However, he adds, even taking the statistical anomalies into account, “Vietnam probably does quite well compared to other countries with similar levels of development”. The Vietnamese government has been pursuing educational reforms for more than a decade, focused on reducing students’ workloads, boosting private investment in higher education, and improving vocational training.

The results so far have been limited. The children at Nguyen Hue school, while benefiting from some of the best secondary education Vietnam has to offer, have a few cavils of their own. “We focus on how to be a good worker and a good citizen rather than developing our own skills and learning to chase our dreams,” says To Duc Manh. “How we judge students to get a job: [is] not based on who we are, but the test numbers.”

Source of the notice: https://www.ft.com/content/da4387d0-aba8-11e8-8253-48106866cd8a

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »

Rethinking the Purpose of Education

E.J. Hutchinson

By E.J. Hutchinson

If most politicians — on both left and right, “liberal” and “conservative,” Democrat and Republican — could have their way, “education” would mean little more than training docile cogs to enter the “workforce.”

Recall Marco Rubio’s quip three years ago that “[w]e need more welders and less [he meant ‘fewer’] philosophers.” (He recanted earlier this year, realizing that, after all, both are important.)

There is, of course, a great lie at the heart of this point-of-view — one in which employers are complicit — that leads untold numbers of young adults to amass untold amounts of debt in pursuit of a career for which, in fact, a four-year degree is unnecessary.

But there is another, more ennobling way of construing the function of education. Frivolous as it may seem to technocrats, it situates education firmly in much more fundamental questions about ourselves and the world that compel us to pursue knowledge of self and of reality, not first and foremost for the sake of a job but simply because such things are worth knowing, irrespective of vocation.

This way of thinking can be found in the tradition of the Italian humanist Giambattista Vico as interpreted by contemporary philosopher Donald Philip Verene. According to this strand of humanistic reflection, we might consider the goal of education to be threefold.

First, education aims at “wisdom.” What is wisdom? It is, in the opinion of the ancient philosophers Cicero and Seneca, “knowledge of things human and divine.” It is an ordered reflection on the nature of reality in the broad sense. It is reflection on how the parts comprise a whole, and it is knowledge of that whole. Wisdom knows the human arts and sciences, it has some sense of the way those are ordained and arranged by God, and it knows how to tell the difference between the two.

Second, education aims at “prudence.” What is prudence? It is improvisatory wisdom. It is the application of the contemplative knowledge of the whole to the practical considerations of everyday life. It asks, “What does wisdom require of me in this situation?” And it knows how to answer.

Third, education aims at “eloquence.” What is eloquence? It is not flowery speech. It is not purple prose. It is not verbal pyrotechnics. It is the cultivated ability to discuss a subject with intelligence from all angles and comprehensively. It is the transformation of wisdom’s knowledge into human speech. This third aim is not optional, but is demanded by our very nature. For man is a speaking animal, and if ratio, “reason,” compels us to seek the fellowship of other rational animals, no less does oratio, “speech,” compel us to find the company of other creatures as loquacious as we are. Eloquence, furthermore, makes what we have learned available to others and makes it known in a persuasive way.

There is little hope that such a view of education will make great waves with our current educational establishment. It is too impractical, offers few material or corporate rewards, and creates too much potential for thought and the unapproved opinions to which such thought will give birth. Still, perhaps it’s not too late to see that this view is more in keeping with the kind of beings we are — those whose heads are raised from the earth — and is therefore better attuned to our higher aspirations. We are men before we are employees. Perhaps it is time for our educationalists to acknowledge that fact.

Fuente: https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2018/10/30/rethinking_the_purpose_of_education_110301.html

Comparte este contenido:
Leer más »
Page 69 of 144
1 … 67 68 69 70 71 … 144