While driving to school this morning I heard on the news that a school in Limpopo has been without textbooks and teachers since the beginning of the year. The story was framed as yet another example of government inefficiency and an echo from the past when the same thing happened to a few schools in […]
Education for All Global Monitoring Report
Posted inEquality, General
What do good grades mean?
“I find it difficult to answer why the Netherlands is doing so well because what do grades mean? To which countries do you compare?” These are the words of a young teacher, Cees, from the Netherlands. The question he poses is an important one for understanding the complexities in global education. Education is measured according […]
Posted inGeneral
The ‘single story’ about Africa’s education
The danger in writing about the African continent is that one can end up falling into the trap of perpetuating what Chimamanda Adichie refers to as the “single story”; that is, writing about one idea where Africa is a country; a deep, dark and poor country. A place out there the natives are starving and […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The right to education sacrificed in the name of power, war
As a teacher in South Africa, it’s very tempting to navel gaze because of the woes facing education in this country. My temptation is always curbed when I read stories about other teachers who are teaching in the midst of political turmoil in conflict-ridden countries. Like a refugee camp for Syrians in Jordan for example. […]
Posted inEquality
A case for gender parity in education
Until Malala Yousafzai’s story became well-known, I doubt many people considered what it means to be young and female and seeking an education in a conflict-ridden society that has a bias against the education of girls. Recently I read about a teacher from Afghanistan, Nahida, and I realised that in another part of the world […]
Posted inEquality, General
The language of inclusion and exclusion
One of my colleagues recently took down the sign “English-speaking zone” from her classroom wall. She had put it up at the beginning of the year as a way of dealing with the “language problem” in our school. She is a monolingual English speaker who teaches students who speak isiXhosa (and Afrikaans occasionally) and she […]
Posted inGeneral
Why teach in Africa?
Meet Esnart. She is a teacher in Malawi. There’s a bitter-sweet tinge to her reflection about her teaching experience thus far. She was inspired to be a teacher because she “had a teacher that was so good. She loved everyone in class. She wanted to see us succeed in our lessons”. But she also refers […]
Posted inEquality
Turning Africa’s ‘resource curse’ into a blessing for education
By Pauline Rose It is no secret that many developing countries are sitting on a “gold mine”, whether it is gold, or oil, or diamonds, copper or ore. It is also true that natural resource discovery is expected to grow significantly in the near future, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. What is confusing is why, with […]