CTV — An industry-funded program that offers high school teachers a six-day trip to Fort McMurray to “experience Alberta’s oilsands” is being expanded across the country. While the operators of Inside Education say they work hard to ensure their programming offers plenty of balance, others say informing educators about controversial developments shouldn’t be left to those with most to gain from them. Read article
Mail Online – A class of children sit revising for make-or-break exams to get them into the college of their choice. It’s the sort of scene that could be seen in high schools across the world but for one important difference: The pupils have intravenous drips hanging over their desks. The image is taken from footage that claims to reveal the controversial use of the drips to boost pupils’ ability to study at a school in Xiaogan, Hubei province, China. Read Article
AP – Fighting obesity will require changes everywhere Americans live, work, play and learn, says a major new report that outlines dozens of options – from building more walkable neighborhoods to zoning limits on fast-food restaurants to selling healthier snacks in sports arenas. But schools should be a national focus because that’s where children spend most of their day, eat a lot of their daily calories – and should be better taught how to eat healthy and stay fit, the influential Institute of Medicine said Tuesday. Read article
A right to education has been created and recognized by the European Convention on Human Rights and, at the global level, the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights guarantees this right. Despite this edict, education in its broadest, is still not consistently mapped out or provided in even the most developed of nations. For a comprehensive view of world news about Education; its institutions, policies and methodologies read our news archive of 402 articles. CLICK HERE
BBC – Up to 90% of school leavers in major Asian cities are suffering from myopia – short-sightedness – a study suggests. Researchers say the “extraordinary rise” in the problem is being caused by students working very hard in school and missing out on outdoor light. The scientists told the Lancet that up to one in five of these students could experience severe visual impairment and even blindness. Read article
Gulf News – Occupied Jerusalem: The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has banned a high school civics textbook as “unbalanced,” a move critics say is part of a broader bid to shift Israel’s values in a direction that is more nationalistic and less democratic. Officials cited factual errors in the book as the main factor in the decision. But liberal educators say the errors could easily be corrected and that the larger issue is a national struggle to define Israel’s identity. Read Article
NBC – For years, owners of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Mass. have fought in court to keep a disturbing piece of closed-circuit video away from public eyes. The school for developmentally challenged kids specializes in a kind of behavior modification therapy which involves shocking its students with painful electric pulses. Read Article
Nature – Not so long ago, doctoral students were viewed as the galley slaves of the scientific world, spending long hours in the lab for a meagre wage and the promise that three precious letters — PhD — would eventually burnish their name. But that attitude has changed. Recognizing that few graduates spend their entire careers at the bench, research funders and education authorities are reshaping the PhD to train students in non-science skills such as networking as well as research. Read article
KVUE – The University of Texas will be the first school in the nation to provide fluoride-free water fountains. Read article
RT – It seems the Eurozone crisis is set to affect the lives of young people in Spain for years to come, with most struggling to find jobs, and worries over how their country’s new government will deal with up-coming protests. Read article
BBC – Schools in Brazil have started to place computer chips in school uniforms to keep track of pupils and reduce truancy. Some 20,000 pupils in the north-eastern city of Vitoria da Conquista will have microchips embedded in their school T-shirts. The parents will get a text message when their children arrive at school, or if they are late for classes. The authorities say the measure will help teacher-parent relations. Read Article
The Guardian – It is a debate that has raged for years, pitting mothers who follow Gina Ford and her routine-based approach to child-rearing against those who prefer the more laidback ways of Penelope Leach. Now the battle is set to intensify as new research suggests that babies who are fed on demand do better academically than those who are fed on schedule – although their mothers are more exhausted and grumpy. The study shows that babies who are fed when they are hungry – with breast milk or formula – achieve higher scores in Sats tests at ages five, seven, 11 and 14, and that by the age of eight they have an IQ four to five points higher. Read article
Telegraph – A 12-year-old girl is suing her school in Minnesota after being forced to hand over her Facebook password and punished for posts she made on the social networking site. The case has been brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and comes amid growing concern in the United States about individuals’ ability to keep their email and other online accounts secret from their school, employer and government authorities. Read Article
Associated Press – Tens of thousands of students, most of them disabled, are strapped down or physically restrained in school, and disability advocates hope that a new Education Department report detailing the practice of “seclusion and restraint” will spur federal action to end it. The report, compiled and made public for the first time by the department’s civil rights arm, shows that 70 percent of students subjected to the techniques have disabilities. There are no current federal standards on the use of the techniques in schools. Read Article
Reuters – Police in riot gear use tear gas to disperse students demonstrating to demanding better public transportation in Bogota. Read article
Reuters – A Virginia school district backed down from a plan to ban cross-gender dress by students after civil liberties and gay rights groups criticized the measure, and one threatened to sue. School board members proposed the ban in early February, saying they wanted to protect children in the school district in Suffolk, about 20 miles from Norfolk, from killings and suicides tied to bullying in other parts of the country. Read Article
Guardian – Police and protesters fought in the streets of Barcelona on Wednesday as more than 30,000 people joined students in demonstrations against cuts in education spending. Fires were lit in the streets, cars burned and bank windows smashed with missiles as the protests turned violent. At least one bank was broken into and police fired rubber bullets as roads in the city were blocked. Read Article
A right to education has been created and recognized by the European Convention on Human Rights and, at the global level, the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights guarantees this right. Despite this edict, education in its broadest, is still not consistently mapped out or provided in even the most developed of nations. For a comprehensive view of world news about Education; its institutions, policies and methodologies read our news archive of 390 articles. CLICK HERE
NY Times – City school safety agents and police officers arrested an average of five public school students a day last fall, according to new data released by the New York Police Department. The arrest numbers represent a significant increase over those released in November, covering the third-quarter period when few students were around during summer break and a fraction attended summer school. Read Article
Washington Post – Amy and Mark Denicore are headed to a full-blown trial to defend themselves against charges that they violated Virginia law by making their kids late to elementary school too often. The Loudoun County couple was arraigned Monday morning in juvenile and domestic relations court. Judge Pamela L. Brooks set a trial date of March 14. Read Article
Telegraph – The Daily Telegraph has learned that a number of Cambridge teachers object to the substantial gift from the Chong Hua Foundation, which is set to create a new chair of Chinese Development at a new Centre of Development Studies. The post would be occupied by Professor Peter Nolan, who has links to the family of Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier. Read Article
Mail Online – Scotland Yard was accused of hiring out officers for cash yesterday after Richard Branson’s business empire paid for police investigating a massive fraud. The cable television company Virgin Media agreed to fund the Metropolitan force’s overtime bill in an investigation into a set-box racket costing £144million a year. The firm paid police £5,060 following raids which revealed how thousands of viewers were using the boxes to view subscription channels without paying. Read Article
Nature – “We are trying to survive and go along as if nothing is happening,” says Dimitra Thomaidou, a microscopist at the Hellenic Pasteur Institute in Athens. Despite Greece’s financial crisis, optimism was the prevailing mood at last month’s meeting of the Hellenic Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Athens, where Thomaidou coordinated a session. Meeting attendance was at a record high, and chat was full of references to fancy equipment purchases and Greek success in winning participation in European research-infrastructure programmes. But as the financial crisis deepens and university and research spending, already among the lowest in Europe, shrink further, staying optimistic is a constant battle. Academic salaries have been cut by 20% and university budgets have halved since the crisis began about two years ago. Still, money from the European Commission and international grants is keeping the best Greek scientists committed to their work. “It may sound irrational, but we just don’t think we can live without our research,” says Thomaidou. Read article
NEW SCIENTIST – A new front has opened in the battle over US school science curricula. After decades of fighting to keep creationism out of the classroom, US science education advocates are steeling themselves to face a new foe: climate change sceptics.Over the past few years, several US states and local school boards have introduced measures that would mean teachers must include the views of those who are sceptical of a human influence on climate change in science lessons.Three years ago, for example, Texas revised its science teaching standards to require that students “analyse and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming”. The next time Texas purchases science textbooks, this standard could be used to reject books that do not include a degree of climate change scepticism, says Steven Newton, programmes and policy director for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a non-profit organisation based in Oakland, California. Similar measures have been passed in Louisiana and South Dakota. Read Article
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