How US schools are putting the fun back into science
United Nations Millennium Development Goal of granting every child access to primary education is not being met in the case of those with disabilities, report says.
Camp for high school girls aims to combat stereotypes about coding and encourage more to study computer science. Those who try it find it empowering.
Government of British principality wants pupils to have "space and the time, within the school curriculum, to consider fundamental issues of faith and of citizenship and of the meaning of freedom"
Sixteen-year-old Emi Kingan from Canadian International School has completed a two-week expedition to Canada's High Arctic with 112 other youths from around the world.
Newly approved institution will focus on solutions to global warming, but before it can consider how to do that it needs to reinvent the science museum.
At 16 years of age, Nagirasia Lengima is already a mother of two. But parenthood doesn't stop her from indulging in her latest passion: school. Like a growing number of girls from nomadic communities in northern Kenya, Lengima is defying cultural prejudices - and climate pressures - by getting an education at a mobile school. Run by non-profit groups, the schools bring learning to girls whose families are forced to move around the region to survive. In Laisamis village, Marsabit County, at a school run by the Nairobi-based development charity Adeso, it is Lengima's turn to demonstrate what she has picked up from the morning session. After playing around with some numbers on the chalkboard, she elicits cheers from the 59 other pupils in the class as she produces the answer with a double stroke.
Most US high schoolers from affluent backgrounds will finish college; few from poor backgrounds will join them. Scholarship funds that slash the cost of tertiary education or make it free have increased enrolments dramatically.
According to the UN, 58 million children remain out of school and 781 million adults are illiterate.
US grants patent for low-cost means of authenticating supplies of body-strengthening medicine tiepi shihu.
This is graduation season, and there are lots of good tales of perseverance out there. But it would be hard to top the story of Doreetha Daniels. You know how some people take some time off between high school graduation and the start of college? That's what Daniels did. And last Friday, Daniels, who lives in California, was due to receive her Associate of Arts degree in social science from College of the Canyons. Not bad for a 99-year-old whose high school years ended almost eight decades ago.
The installation of a sleeping pod in the University of Manchester library in Britain follows hard on the heels of the University of East Anglia's sleep room, and no doubt heralds a new era of beanbags, futons and chaises longues popping up on campuses across Britain. But does this mean we are finally caring about our students' sleep, or is it an indication that students are now so chronically sleep-deprived that universities are having to provide for those who cannot get through the day without napping? The cognitive benefits of a nap are well documented, most notably in Dr Sara Mednick's book Take a Nap! Change Your Life. We know that as little as six minutes' sleep can not only sharpen thinking, but also improve memory, mood and mental flexibility.
ICHK Hong Lok Yuen has raised HK$142,000 towards building new schools in Nepal, which was hit by two devastating earthquakes. Parents, staff and students raised more than HK$100,000 in just one day. Students held a dress-down day, giving cash donations to wear their own clothes to school.
Eleven-year-old Karim can barely lift the axe, but he's putting his family first. "I can't go to school as my family needs to eat, so I work with my father and my brother instead," says Karim, who lives in a camp in northern Syria near the Turkish border. In nearby Lebanon, in a makeshift camp in the agricultural hinterland of the Bekaa Valley, another boy chops wood under the watchful eye of his grandmother. In harvest season, many boys and girls in the camp work at farms for as little as HK$15 a day, says Abu Mohammed, the camp warden.
Every morning Su Wai Phyo wakes before dawn to do something that was banned in Myanmar until recently: study politics. The 23-year-old is one of a handful of students taking part in a new political science diploma for postgraduates at the University of Yangon - a course that would have been unthinkable under the country's military junta.
About six months ago, our four-year-old daughter began complaining of being afraid to be alone at bedtime. She told us she was afraid of monsters in her closet and under her bed. We were unable to convince her otherwise. In fact, the more we talked to her, the more her fears grew to the point where she was becoming nearly hysterical at bedtime.
Reading is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in some form for hundreds of thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech etched into our neurones. The earliest writing emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and telephone boxes.
The mainland's health commission has ordered local governments to review whether public health facilities are prepared to handle Ebola cases.
A wild boar has become the ultimate media critic, savaging a Japanese television cameraman sent to cover its rampage through a city’s streets.
