Weekly Global Education News | February 25, 2018
Update on issues affecting teachers, children, and schools around the world
Parents of abducted Nigerian girls plan to join Bring Back Our Girls campaign
Islamist militant group Boko Haram is suspected to have kidnapped scores of girls […] from a school in Dapchi village, Yobe state. Most are thought to be teenagers.
It would be the largest mass abduction since Boko Haram took more than 270 schoolgirls from the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014, sparking an online campaign that went viral and spurring several governments into action to try and find them.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas students give legislators a civics lesson
If we want to make it harder for people to buy guns, a new kind of standoff is necessary. Change, it seems, can only come from student-led civil disobedience. The youth will teach us adults how to convert the endless gun debate into actual legislative change, and that kind of education needs to be lived out in the real world, not from the safety of textbooks. Students are taking their demands for gun control to the streets, halls of Congress and courtrooms — on their own terms.
School Shootings Put Teachers in New Role as Human Shields
“You know, if I go through my college transcripts — master’s degree, doctorate courses, all that — I know for sure there are no courses that say: ‘Shooter on Campus 101,’” he said.
And yet, he said, “I want to go back. I want to go back to my kids. I want to go back to my classroom. I want to see the kids, I want to teach the kids — and that’s the bottom line.”
See also: Resources to help children in the wake of a school shooting and How to Help Children Heal After Tragedy Strikes
Fresh threats loom over 720,000 Rohingya children ‘cast adrift, trapped in limbo’ — UNICEF
Rohingya children are facing threats either from severe weather approaching Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands are sheltered in squalid, overcrowded refugee camps, or by ongoing violence in their Myanmar homeland […]
German scheme eases refugee teachers back into class
English teacher Alaa Kassab believes her education saved her life and, after she arrived in Germany as a refugee from Syria, she was keen to get back into the classroom to pass on her language skills to the next generation.
Thanks to a pilot scheme aimed at preparing newly arrived teachers for jobs in German schools, she is once more in front of a class.
Books are essential to solving the global learning crisis
Last year, the UNESCO Institute for Statistic published alarming new estimates of the number of children that aren’t achieving the basics in reading and maths.
It showed that 387 million children of primary school age do not achieve minimum proficiency levels in reading. Disturbingly two-thirds of these children, some 262 million, are in school. There is now a broad consensus that this is a tragic waste of both human potential and financial resources.
See also: One World, Many Languages
