The link between poverty and education is an old story. Education has always been used as a means to an end and as is the case in South Africa, the end is for education to be a tool to get people out of the poverty trap. To illustrate the poverty trap: if a child comes […]
EFA report
Posted inEquality
Over the last decade, 17 million more children are learning in sub-Saharan Africa
By Pauline Rose Sub-Saharan Africa often hits the headlines for the wrong reasons — and this is just as much the case in education as in other areas. Failure of schooling to keep pace with population growth means that the region is now responsible for more than half of the 57 million children out of school. […]
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 […]