The extraordinary scenes in Rome after the death of Pope John Paul II disguised the problems that his successor, Joseph Ratzinger — now Benedict XVI, the sixth German pontiff — will face in becoming the spiritual leader of one-sixth of the world’s population: 1,1-billion people. The wave of affection shown for the old pope a fortnight ago was a message the cardinals may have misunderstood.
A high school in Suffolk, eastern England, has become the first in Britain to ban girls from wearing skirts and order them to switch to uniforms with long trousers. The decision by Kesgrave High School, near Ipswich, was reached after warnings were ignored and hemlines crept up to ‘in-appropriate†levels. The new policy will come […]
The South African Certification Council (Safcert) is on its way out: there’s a new engine ready to drive the yearly Senior Certificate (SC) system, and its name is Umalusi. Peliwe Lolwana, chief executive oficer for Safcert, describes the new organisation as the ”guardian” of standards for the general and further education sectors, which includes schools, […]
As professor of modern history at Cambridge university and one of Britain’s leading experts on the Nazi period, Richard Evans has made yet another contribution to the Nazi canon with his newly published book The Coming of the Third Reich, the first in a trilogy on Nazi Germany. But with libraries teeming with thousands of […]
Sitting in the teachers’ lounge in Al Huda High School in the wealthy Al Jadriya district of Baghdad, history teacher Abstam Jassom says she will tell her students: ‘Americans are occupiers. They only want our oil.†Then, a few minutes later, she changes her mind. ‘We have seen what the old regime did – the […]
The future of early childhood development (ECD) is one focus of a recent independent analysis of the 2003 national education budget. Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) researcher Russell Wildeman draws attention to the phasing out of the ECD grant this year. The scale of ECD’s focus is vast. ‘Approximately 40% of young children […]
Lemmer was relieved this week to hear from government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe that the Zimbabwean election was a ”credible reflection” of the will of its citizens: for a while back there he was worried it might have been rigged. But this credible reflection does suggest an incredible deflection on the part of the South ÂAfrican government.
The words of Tupac Shakur and Big Rube have joined those of F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck in English classes in one the toughest areas of Los Angeles. Students on the verge of dropping out have been encouraged to stay by classes that allow them to analyse and criticise the lyrics of their favourite […]
It’s the year 2076 and the Mars transporter is nearing the end of its six-month journey to relieve the inhabitants of the planet’s space station. A warning bell sounds. The oxygen supply has failed and the crew have five minutes before their organs inflate and their blood begins to boil. Steve is expected to fix […]
Once hailed as the pride of Africa, Zimbabwe’s education system has been engulfed from top to bottom by the country’s political and economic crisis. The University of Zimbabwe, once the prestigious pinnacle of the system, is now finding it almost impossible to keep functioning. Meanwhile, in schools teachers have been beaten, forced to attend ‘re-education […]