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- Volume 47, Issue 3, 2012
UN Chronicle - Volume 47, Issue 3, 2012
Volume 47, Issue 3, 2012
The edition focuses on the importance of education, especially higher education, in strengthening a culture of intellectual social responsibility, and on how higher education can help in eradicating poverty, empowering girls and women, strengthening democracies and contributing to sustainable development. UNESCO underscores the current unequal access to education for girls, the marginalized and indigenous peoples. It spotlights the challenges in achieving quality education and stresses the imperative role of proper financing in unlocking the crises. The edition also looks at successful non-governmental models that employ will, vision, and technology to find low cost ways of bringing education to marginalized rural communities.
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Preparing the next generation to join the conference table
Author: J. Michael AdamsThe United Nations Charter represents the most ambitious attempt in human history to unite across borders, secure peace, promote social progress, and forge solutions to the most critical problems facing humanity. As US President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, The United Nations represents mans best organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield.
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Education for all: rising to the challenge
Author: Irina BokovaImagine a school that changes location every forty-five daysa school that comes to the child, instead of the other way around. This is happening on the steppes of Mongolia where the government provides mobile tent schools for nomadic herder communities.
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Unlearning intolerance through education
Author: Saleh Hashem Mostafa Abdel-RazekThe call for a dialogue among civilizations has become one of the critical features of the twenty-first century. The term itself has been used to substitute and rethink the clash of civilizations, proposed by Samuel P. Huntington and adopted by some Western educators following the end of the cold war between East and West.
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Can education be made mobile?
Author: Aleksandra VujicThe right to education is a fundamental human right, since it is a precondition for the fulfilment of other economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights. It enables social mobility and successful competition in the labour market. Its realization means overcoming poverty and living with human dignity. Being universal, interdependent, interrelated, and indivisible, the right to an education offers equal opportunities for all, regardless of gender, economic or social status.
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National identity and minority languages
Author: Kamila GhazaliHow far do we go in implementing language policies into the education system so as to integrate a nations peoples? Nearly all nations identify and determine at least one language as the official language, and some include another as the national language. This is necessary for the obvious reason that a common language would create solidarity and instil a sense of national identity and pride. However, in the pursuit of attaining competence in the language of commodity and enterprise, many minority languages and even cultures are sometimes sacrificed. Studies show that mothers, the primary supporters of education in most families, take pains to raise their children in the school language, rather than their own native tongue. This is to ensure that their children will have a head start as they enter primary or even pre-school.
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Education as a means to promote sustainability
Author: Ben WisnerOne of the myths current today, spread by media events such as Al Gores film, An Inconvenient Truth, is that everyone will be equal in facing the ecological and human catastrophe of climate change. This is simply not true. Clear thinking about climate change and its likely impact on cultural integrity, transmission, and diversity requires that one take note of the glaring differences today among people on the planet.
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Academic impact and education for sustainable development the contribution of black sea region universities
Author: Eden MamutThe Black Sea region has been defined as a cradle of human civilization. Among its past historical riches, the region is home to the Legend of Jason and the Argonauts and their search for the Golden Fleece, and the biblical account of Noahs Ark. Athens, Istanbul, Odessa, Sevastopol, Troy, and Yalta are just a few of the names on the Black Sea coast that have a place in world history.
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Reducing poverty through education — and how
Author: Idrissa B. MshoroThere is no strict consensus on a standard definition of poverty that applies to all countries. Some define poverty through the inequality of income distribution, and some through the miserable human conditions associated with it. Irrespective of such differences, poverty is widespread and acute by all standards in sub-Saharan Africa, where gross domestic product (GDP) is below $1,500 per capita purchasing power parity, where more than 40 per cent of their people live on less than $1 a day, and poor health and schooling hold back productivity. According to the 2009 Human Development Report, sub-Saharan Africas Human Development Index, which measures development by combining indicators of life expectancy, educational attainment, and income lies in the range of 0.450.55, compared to 0.7 and above in other regions of the world. Poverty in sub-Saharan Africa will continue to rise unless the benefits of economic development reach the people. Some sub-Saharan countries have therefore formulated development visions and strategies, identifying respective sources of growth.
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Simplyhelp cambodia a vocational education model of success
Authors: Lotte N. Goede and Donn A. Pulese-MurphyMom Phoeun, who lives in rural Cambodia, lost his father at a young age, and his mother is suffering from chronic illnesses. With cow herding being their only source of income, they could not make enough money to pay for her rising medical costs. Mom Phoeun sought relief by attending the SimplyHelp Tailoring School which had just established itself in his village. By learning a trade and distinguishing himself, Mom Phoeun is now not only able to support himself, but can also provide for the care that his mother desperately needs.
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Civic education and inclusion a market or a public interest perspective?
Author: Jacques L. Boucherin recent years, we have constantly been reminded that we are living in a knowledge economy. Societies that invest most heavily in training their citizens will therefore be in the best position on the global chessboard. Thus, education is being given a new role in the concept of competition. Not only is this concept of competition encouraged within society, whether in the North or South, the implication is that the primary benefit of an education is economic. For this reason, skills which are not specifically related to knowledge are frequently overvalued, often at the expense of fields of knowledge that are considered abstract and useless.
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Who speaks for the poor, and why does it matter?
Author: Nora MckeonThe UN Chronicle has evolved over the past years into an increasingly attentive and inclusive journal. The focus of each number on a specific issue, like climate change or disarmament, makes it possible to examine these questions from a variety of viewpoints. Its contributors testify to its broad geographic outlook. Recent issues have featured articles by academics, UN officials, government representatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and recently, the fanciful innovation of testimony by novelists. What are largely missing, however, are the voices from peoples organizations directly representing those sectors of the population most affected by the issues under discussion.
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