I was walking across the biggest library in Montreal and took the time to observe all the people reading, writing and searching for books. So i really wonder why African countries don't have the same idea of sharing one space for knowledge purpose? I never had the chance to visit a public library in Egypt beside having to reach an University campus. When are we going to understand that we are doing it wrongly? Egypt's college have been on a strike for more than a year and my young cousins are simply chilling around. The same question can be applied on why we don't apply technology in the education. Here is a pure exemple of application that are used by many universities in North America:
What about us? Papers and pens still...? Advanced countries reached a level where you don't need to present yourself in the universities when you have distance courses..
There are no solutions that fit all, just different methods that produce different outcomes.
I see no problems with the Angolan government building entire cities and not giving space to privates, because that will anyway build the society they envisioned for the country.
I remember watching an old documentary about Indian kids singing a national song about how the population increase will decrease the quality of life overall. The song and school initiative contributed alot to slower the population increase.
Just pointing out (again) that this graph is completely meaningless because the WEF education quality ranking is literally based on the opinions of businessmen. We know SA education quality is bad and there ARE other studies showing how bad it is e.g. TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) - where SA ranks second worst after Ghana. I am continuously shocked at how everyone pulls out this ranking to show how bad education is in SA including our own opposition party (DA), in order to criticise the ANC when it is literally completely meaningless in assessing quality of education. All you can say from this ranking is that maths and science education in SA does not match the skills expectation of SA businesses, which is itself an interesting but completely separate result.
Even from looking at this graph alone... who actually believes Kenya has better education quality than Poland?
Egypt is not as bad as South Africa, but all African needs an absolute reform of education.
In DRC for example, we need to drop that foolish French system....where if you fail French or Math claases, you are forced to repeat the whole academic year incuding all the classes you passed/ :nuts:
2. wE NEED TO GET RID OF fRENCH AS THE aCademic and official language as a whole. language schools are there for those interested im French or Enhlish...Id actually ban French altogether. useless language and of very rude people.
Lingala and Swahili shall be the official languages.
And finally, the education must be focused oon Technical and business... Majors like Psychology, Political Science, must be banned and should only stay as classes, not majors.
African needs Engineers, technicians and Business managers the most.
Egypt is not as bad as South Africa, but all African needs an absolute reform of education.
In DRC for example, we need to drop that foolish French system....where if you fail French or Math claases, you are forced to repeat the whole academic year incuding all the classes you passed/ :nuts:
2. wE NEED TO GET RID OF fRENCH AS THE aCademic and official language as a whole. language schools are there for those interested im French or Enhlish...Id actually ban French altogether. useless language and of very rude people.
Lingala and Swahili shall be the official languages.
And finally, the education must be focused oon Technical and business... Majors like Psychology, Political Science, must be banned and should only stay as classes, not majors.
African needs Engineers, technicians and Business managers the most.
SA's primary education quality is certainly not the worst. SACMEQ is the closest you can get to comparing the quality of primary school education between SA and other African countries. SACMEQ IV results will probably be out sometime this year or next.
SACMEQ III Grade 6 Maths teacher content knowledge. South Africa in red.
Distribution of SACMEQ III Math Scores for Primary School Students in Select Countries
The problem is that South Africa spends billions on education, yet still importing skilled workers when the country has a chronic unemployment...Obviously there is something very wrong with it public education.
DRC's literacy rate stands at 70% despite facts that parents have been paying for their kids education 100% from when you start school to finishing college in last 30 years...Im certain it would have been at at least 85% if it was not for the 2 decades of wars.
Obviously, once the country gets is no longer a failed state, I mean where the Central Gov can takecare of the basic education (primary and , Secondary education). and have a nd reform the higher education to scientific focused education.
Tho the reform must include education in Local laanguages, Swahili and Lingala considering these are the supreme languages in the country where in every other sector of life are the languages spoken and used..
For example, Congolese music is just stories being told in local languages....Muvies and Comedy/talk shows on TV or Radios are all in local languages....so its extremely important to make the education be in local languages...This wa, Book Writers, publishers and researchers this is true promotion of education....Its not my option, its what developed countries do and developing countries as well. like Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam etc..
And actually this minimizes braindrain....I think its foolish that Africans be allover European languages when education makes a lots of sense in native language for comprehension.
BLACK youth are regressing and have lower educational levels and occupational status now than 20 years ago, indicating a "cocktail of disaster" for the future, according to a new report on youth published on Monday by Statistics SA.
Together with very high youth employment (35.9%), regressing educational outcomes mean that SA’s black youth could be trapped in poverty in perpetuity.
Statistician-General Pali Lehohla, speaking a briefing in Cape Town said the findings showed that black youth "are unemployed, they are involved in crime, they are hungry and they are not educated," which painted a distressing picture for policy makers as it showed that their interventions had failed.
SA has also not turned its fast-growing youth population — knows as the youth bulge — into an advantage as other societies had done before it, as it failed to educate the youth and enable them to become valuable human capital. The growth of the youth population was now tailing off with population growth just over replacement levels.
"This is a cocktail of disaster for the future. It also means that we have failed to harness the demographic dividend. We had a youth bulge but that was not translated into human capital. It suggests a very difficult future," he said.
Unemployment among youth — which includes people from 15 to 35 years old — rose slightly from 34.2% in 2009 to 35.9% in 2014.
While black and coloured youth have regressed in their educational achievements, whites and Indians have made progress. While absolute number of black and coloured students attending university has increased, the proportion of those who complete a degree as a share of the population has dropped. For whites and Indians this has gone up.
ANC is even worst than most other SSAn parties...How can it spend billions and still get no skilled workers and the youth keeps on being useless in the crime heaven....seriously this is worst than the rest of Africa.
The situation in SA is what happens when institutionalised racism takes place for such a long time. And a minority holds almost all of the country's wealth.
It gives too many of the black south africans a ceiling where they feel there are limits to what they can achieve in their own homeland. It will take at least another 2 decades likely more to see the situation improve.
If people dont see that they can achieve as much as other groups in their own country then education is viewed as pointless.
A new programme of free secondary school education has started in Ghana.
This was a key campaign promise of President Nana Akufo-Addo who was elected last year.
The 400,000 students entering secondary school this year will also receive free textbooks, meals and other benefits.
The aim is to reduce the number of children dropping out of school.
Primary school education is already free in Ghana.
A BBC correspondent in Ghana says there is concern about how the cash-strapped government will fund the programme and whether the increase in students will lead to a deterioration in the quality of education.
The education situation in DR Congo is alarming, with 7.4 million children out of school across the country. Despite this, only 4 per cent of humanitarian funds have been received for education, 9 months into the year.
“The dire education funding situation puts many children at risk of illiteracy, and puts them at a disadvantage for finding future employment for generations,” warned Celestin Kamori, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) education programme coordinator in DR Congo.
Over the last two decades, DR Congo has experienced new and recurrent conflicts that have forced more than 3.8 million people to flee their homes. At least 684,000 of these are school-aged children.
“When children are displaced they are forced to suspend their education, or drop it all together. This disruption to their development hinders their personal progress, and has detrimental effects to the socio-economics of the entire country,” explained Kamori.
The effects of a lack of education are most acute in DR Congo’s Kasai provinces. Since August 2016, the intensifying violence in Grand Kasai province has displaced 850,000 children and left over 900 schools destroyed. The schools that are open are being used as shelter for displaced families.
Conflict has been detrimental to other parts of the country too. In Kalemie town in Tanganyika province, out-of-school rates among displaced children from 6-11 years are as high as 92 per cent - an increase of 76 per cent over the course of the year.
Despite progressive reforms in countries such as Ghana, students across Africa still face steep barriers to a truly comprehensive education. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated that 88% of children and teenagers will enter adulthood without basic literacy, owing to low investment in schools and teacher training.
ACCRA – As the school year began this September, there was welcome news for Ghana’s nearly half-million students entering high school: President Nana Akufo-Addo had fulfilled his campaign promise of free secondary education for children nationwide. He swore not only to do away with admissions fees, but also to provide free textbooks and meals, the cost of which had often remained a barrier for the poorest students.
Unfortunately, despite progressive reforms like these, students across Africa still face other steep barriers to a truly comprehensive education. In Ghana, for example, poor and rural children are unlikely to reap the full benefits of their new access to secondary education.
Thousands of primary school teachers in Nigeria's northern Kaduna state are to be sacked after failing the exams they set for their six-year-old pupils.
State governor Nasir El-Rufai said 21,780 teachers, two-thirds of the total, had failed to score 75% or higher on assessments given to pupils.
He said 25,000 new teachers would be recruited to replace them.
Mr El-Rufai made the comments at a meeting with World Bank representatives in the state capital, Kaduna.
"The hiring of teachers in the past was politicised and we intend to change that by bringing in young and qualified primary school teachers to restore the dignity of education in the state," he was quoted as saying by Nigeria's Daily Trust newspaper.
Mr El-Rufai said problems with pupil-teacher ratios across the state would also be addressed.
He said some areas currently had one teacher for every nine pupils while in other areas the ratio was one to 100.
Better education – Kenya’s history lesson for South Africa
Recent evidence that four out of five South African children in Grade 4 cannot read for meaning has been (yet another) wake-up call for South Africa’s education system. ‘Weak governance’, everyone knows, is a key part of the problem. But what does ‘weak governance’ mean?
In the 2007 standardized tests for sixth graders conducted by the Southern (and East?) African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ), Kenya’s average score was 557 points – well above South Africa’s average of 495 points, and only marginally below the Western Cape (the top performing province) score of 560 points; at the poorer 25th percentile, Kenya (with a score of 509 points) outperformed the Western Cape (496 points). These results were achieved notwithstanding higher levels of poverty, average per pupil expenditures which were one fifth of South Africa’s, a cadre of teachers who were no better trained, and (when compared with the Western Cape) a relatively messy bureaucracy.
Once the socio-economic influences on educational outcomes are taken into account, Kenya’s 2007 (and earlier) outperformance is even more remarkable. South Africa is among the countries below and to the right of the 45 degree line in the figure, which underperformed in SACMEQ relative to their socio-economic characteristics. Countries above and to the left of the line are over-achievers; Kenya stands out in the figure as far and away the most over-achieving of the countries participating in the 2007 SACMEQ assessments.
What seems to have made the key difference in Kenya are the ‘softer’ dimensions of governance. Dr. Ben Piper, a seasoned educational specialist, and long-term resident in Nairobi, put it this way:
“What one sees in rural Kenya is an expectation for kids to learn and be able to have basic skills….Exam results are far more readily available in Kenya than other countries in the region. The ‘mean scores’ for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and equivalent KCSE at secondary school are posted in every school and over time so that trends can be seen. Head teachers are held accountable for those results to the extent of being paraded around the community if they did well, or literally banned from school and kicked out of the community if they did badly.”
Nigeria school food scheme revolutionising education
Free meals programme has fed nearly seven million pupils in about 40,000 schools and changed the nature of education.
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