Go To School!

January 7th, 2008 by mas | Filed under Education & Skills, Society & Issues.

The blurb about this films says “Across India 192 million children between 6-14 years of age across 1.1 million are not going to school. This film for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Universilisation of Elementary Education) is a kind of promotion of going to school. The film “catches the moment when children all across India from Kashmir to Kerala wake up in the morning and run to go to school” “
I just thought it was a cool film!

While on the subject of education I would like to make a quick defence of UK schools. I was reading yesterday about the UK Youth Parliament (and other “leading Childrens Organisations”) campaign to improve sex education in schools. I can’t say that I disagree with a desire to improve any of the education available across all subjects - but I do think something doesn’t add up correctly when it appears as though the education system is being blamed for the sexual behaviour of young people. Surely the first port of call for tackling this would be parents?!

More info about the “Backlash over sex educations failings” here

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Tim Davies 10 months ago 1 point
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On sex education in UK schools:

I'm not sure the education system is being blamed for causing the problem.

But it is culpable for failing to educate young people to be equipped to make informed decisions about their sexual behaviour.

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digitalyw 10 months ago 1 point
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Rightly or wrongly the headline in the Times suggests that its the education system 'failing'.

In my opinion if my (fictional) daughter becomes pregnant or contracts a sexual disease at age 14 I would regard that as my failure (& hers) - I certainly wouldn't be marching down to her school and demanding an explanation!

In the Times article it quotes the Terrence Higgins Trust, states: “These figures may go some way to explaining disproportionately high rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections in this country.”

Something I was reading about HIV education programmes in Africa last year has an interesting parallel to this - the Author of the HIV article made a case that HIV Awareness was not the issue in his particular area - he said people were very aware of HIV and how it was contracted - the issue was they didn't care or that it wasn't high on their priority list! The society they lived in was a high risk society and 'life is cheap' - therefore until there could be a cultural shift he felt there was unlikely to be much of a change in peoples behaviours & so the education element would only ever have a limited benefit.

Seems to me this is similar for sexual behaviour for teens in the UK - I find it hard to believe that children in this country are not generally aware of the effects of having unprotected sex - whether they get this info from school or not! Yet still they do it! Perhaps like the HIV argument there are other factors that need to be 'sorted' before education can really have an impact - high on my list of suggestions would be parental responsibility.

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