Greek austerity may be an economic tale but children are the human cost

Many perspectives have been shared about the social and economic repercussions that the current third EU and IMF bailout proposals for Greece may have. The impact of these tough austerity measures is yet to unfold for the country, for the other southern states, or indeed Europe as a whole.

But moving beyond a purely economic lens, there is already evidence about the extent of deprivation and youth unemployment of more than 50% during the past five years of the first and second bailout programmes, meaning that the likely effects of the third are easier to predict, at least for this generation.

The links between poverty and a range of risk factors for child mental health problems and related outcomes is well established. Nevertheless, the reality hit home a few weeks ago when I joined the Children’s SOS Villages in Greece in training their prospective new carers, or “mothers” and “aunts” as they are widely called. These carers work in a similar way to foster carers and residential care staff in other welfare systems. The villages were established in Austria after World War II to care for orphan children and since then their model has successfully spread across more than 120 countries.

Their model may slightly vary, but their target groups are typically children without parents, for a range of reasons, or those who have been abused and/or neglected. Consequently, it came as a surprise to realise the extent of child abandonment (neglect, an inability to care for them or even asking social services to look after them) for predominantly financial reasons since the beginning of the Greek crisis.

The organisation has responded by diversifying its remit in Greece. In the absence of an increasingly stretched health and social care sector, they have now extended their services beyond the traditional villages to support, relieve and prevent abuse and neglect, running eight social centres in Greece’s major cities to help keep families together.

'People in the west live squeezed together, frenzied as wasps in the nest'

An indigenous Yanomami leader and shaman from Brazil shares his views on wealth, the environment and politics.

 

Years ago I met a young Amazonian shaman, or spiritual leader, on his first visit to London. As we went down the escalator into the London Underground I could see he was nervous. All these white people rushing around under the city must be spirits or ghosts, he said. When we emerged, he was himself nearly white, shaken from his cosmological introduction to Britain.

That man was Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, who has since been dubbed the Dalai Lama of the Rainforest and is considered one of the most influential tribal leaders in Brazil. The Yanomami number about 30,000 and occupy a vast territory stretching across northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. They only made full contact with the west in the 1950s when their lands were overrun by thousands of gold prospectors and loggers. After waves of epidemics and cultural and environmental devastation, one in three of all Yanomami, including Davi’s mother, died.

Davi’s experience of white people has been dreadful but he is unusual because he trained not just as a shaman but also worked with the Brazilian government as a guide and learned western languages. In the past 25 years, he has travelled widely to represent indigenous peoples in meetings and, having lived in both societies, he has a unique viewpoint of western culture. With the help of an anthropologist, Bruce Albert, who interviewed him over several years, he has written his autobiography. It is not just an insight into what a Yanomami leader really thinks, but a devastating critique of how the west lives, showing the gulf between primordial forest and modern city world views.

Here, taken from his autobiography and conversations at Survival International’s offices in London, are some of his observations of the rich north and its attitudes to consumerism, cities, wealth and nature. 

On England

In this distant place, the wind does not blow without a reason and the rain does not fall by itself. But the beings of darkness and chaos are closer there. It is very cold. The night lasts a long time. The spirits in this ancient white people’s land are truly numerous. I was seized by such dizziness. Their ancestors did not take care of the forest in which they came into being the way ours did.

On western wealth

Their cities are full of big houses and innumerable possessions but their elders never give them to anyone. If they were really great men, should they not tell themselves that it would be wise to distribute them all before they make so many more? Do we ever hear the white people say: “Take all the machetes and pots that you see?” We people of the forest possess few things and we are satisfied. They are used to greedily hoarding their goods and keeping them locked up. They probably tell themselves: “I possess all these things alone. I am so clever, I am an important man. I am rich!” 

School should be a safe, nurturing place – not a daily nightmare

The stigma of being the poor child in class is far worse today than it was when I was at school 40 years ago. And instead of diminishing inequality, Cameron seeks to increase it.

You never forget them. The children who were marked apart. In our class at primary school, they were called “Bugsy”, all three of them. The children who turned up bedraggled, a bit whiffy and wearing only a rough approximation of school uniform. You’d hear the bolder, more domineering children talking about them. “So-and-so smells.” “So-and-so wears gutties [plimsolls] instead of shoes.” “So-and-so’s Bugsy.”

With some encouragement from their neat, scrubbed peers, these remorseless critics would tease and bully the Bugsy kids. Even if you didn’t take part in the taunting yourself, even if it horrified you, you stayed out of it – not actively contributing to the misery of these pariah children, but safely beyond the exclusion zone that they lived in all the same.

Vivienne Westwood, in her autobiography, remembers such a child in her own class at primary school. “He smelt and his blond hair was so dirty, poor little Edward, that I thought, you know, I would rescue him. So I decided I would do this by announcing he was my boyfriend. (We were six.) He was horrified. I can see him now, pink beneath the grime: the worst day of his life. Everyone laughed at him. And me.”

That’s exactly what it was like. However sorry you felt for those kids, you couldn’t show it. Voluntarily associating yourself with such misfortune was seen as far more foolish than having it imposed upon you by adults. You never heard from them what it was like, being that distinctive sort of outsider, because you never spoke to them. Those children were despised and feared, as if their poverty was infectious.

But this week, more than 40 years on, I finally did hear, first-hand, from children who have to turn up at school under such stress, every day. In a new report, Through Young Eyes [click to download pdf], children in this situation were interviewed by the Children’s Commission on Poverty.

“If your shirt, like mine, has got tags with a different name … they automatically know that it’s handed down from someone else,” said one child. The report says that some state-funded secondary schools have uniforms costing as much as £500. These are schools, surely, that use uniform policy as a way of keeping out the riff-raff.

What do world university rankings actually tell us?

From the “best beaches” to the “best slice of pizza” to the best hospital to have cardiac surgery in, we are inundated with a seemingly never-ending series of reports ranking everything that can be ranked and even things that probably shouldn’t be.

Over the last few decades, schools and universities in many parts of the world have become targets of this ranking mania. Some of these are official, state sponsored rankings, such as those used in various performance-based funding formulas or, in the US, President Barack Obama’s yet undefined plan to rank American universities. Some are unofficial, such as the World University Rankings just released by the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine, or the Shanghai Rankings and US News & World Report ranking of American universities also recently released.

A real measure of quality?

But do all these rankings actually tell us anything substantive about the relative quality of universities? Should US or UK universities be concerned with their slippage in the latest THE rankings? There are 74 US universities on the new list – the most from any country – but this was down from 77 last year, and 60% of American institutions lost ground in the rankings. The UK, in second place, now has 29 universities in the top 200, two fewer than last year.

Do such rankings separate the chaff from the wheat, or the pure from the dangerous, or are they distractions and distortions to achieving a real equality of quality? Are they incentivising universities to perform better or actually inviting cynical “gaming" of the system?

Natural pecking order

Despite the various methodological caveats contained in the small print, in their more positivist moments, the agencies and magazines who produce university rankings contend that rankings do in fact unearth and quantify a naturally occurring pecking order. There is never much difference at the very top. In this year’s 2014-15 ranking, California Institute of Technology retained its top spot, followed by Harvard University in second and Oxford University in third. 

Censorship of books in US prisons and schools ‘widespread’ – report to UN

Free-speech organisations find US government is ‘failing to protect the rights of its most vulnerable citizens’ as popular books – including Shakespeare – are banned from institutions.

There is “widespread censorship” of books in US prisons, according to a report submitted to a UN human rights review, which details the banning of works about artists from Botticelli to Van Gogh from Texan state prisons for containing “sexually explicit images”.

The report from two free-speech organisations, the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship and the Copenhagen-based Freemuse, to the United Nation’s (UN) Universal Periodic Review states that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) lists 11,851 titles banned from its facilities. These range from the “ostensibly reasonable”, such as How to Create a New Identity, Essential Throwing and Grappling Techniques, and Art & Design of Custom Fixed Blades, to what it describes as “the telling”, including Write it in Arabic, and the “bizarre” (Arrival of the Gods: Revealing the Alien Landing Sites at Nazca was banned for reasons of “homosexuality”).

Prisoners in Texas are entitled to be mailed books and magazines, but the titles are checked on arrival against a “master list” of acceptable works. If they do not appear on the list, then it is the decision of the post-room officer as to whether they are objectionable.

“Of the 11,851 total blocked titles, 7,061 were blocked for ‘deviant sexual behaviour’ and 543 for sexually explicit images,” says the report, naming artists including Caravaggio, Cézanne, Dallí, Picasso, Raphael, Rembrandt and Renoir among those whose works have been kept out of Texas state prisons.
“Anthologies on Greco-Roman art, the pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, Mexican muralists, pop surrealism, graffiti art, art deco, art nouveau and the National Museum of Women in the Arts are banned for the same reason, as are numerous textbooks on pencil drawing, watercolour, oil painting, photography, graphic design, architecture and anatomy for artists,” states the submission, with prohibited literary works by Gustav Flaubert, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell, Ovid, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Shakespeare and Alice Walker also on the banned list.

Epidemic of rights abuse fails black kids across the US

As the world grapples with the containment of diseases such as Ebola, there is another epidemic that demands attentive responses, policies, and actions. It is one of grave proportions regarding the violation of basic civil and human rights in black communities across the United States. These violations end all too often in abuse, incarceration, and death.

Recent events in Ferguson after the death on August 9 of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of white police officer Darren Wilson in the suburb of St Louis, Missouri, have brought this crisis into sharp focus.

There is no way to discuss what has happened in Ferguson without addressing systemic structural and institutional racism. This includes the politics of poverty that presents the poor as complicit in their own deaths, missed educational opportunities, and economic ceilings.

In Brown’s case, insinuation and innuendo suggested he had stolen goods from a store and was a “thug”. At the same time, a narrative regarding education developed that labelled Brown as yet another black, unmotivated student.

In fact, he managed to graduate from a high school with one of the highest rates of poverty, unequal resources, and violence in Missouri – all of which contribute to low student achievement, little social mobility and economic stagnation. Often these conditions reproduce cycles of generational poverty that are felt in Ferguson and other poor communities of colour. Despite this, Brown’s family indicated he was headed to college with aspirations of starting his own business.

Attacks on UN schools in Gaza clearly breach international law

The shelling of Jabalia Elementary Girls' School in Gaza on July 30 by Israeli forces was a shocking example of modern military action. The shelling was the sixth time a United Nations school has been struck since the current hostilities began.

Increasingly and tragically, education is at the centre of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza as people flee their homes to shelter in places like schools. It is a cruel reminder that in modern conflicts the civilian population suffers most. The attacks on UN schools have been described by UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon as “shameful”, “outrageous” and “unjustifiable”. A spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said international humanitarian law has been breached.

What is a UN school?

The UN schools in the region are provided by UNRWA, which is mandated to provide services and programmes for: “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1 1946 to May 15 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict” and their descendants

UNRWA operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, providing services to some 5m registered Palestinian Refugees, 40% of who are under the age of 18. Education accounts for more than 50% of the $1.4 billion UNRWA budget, providing basic education aimed at combating the high levels of poverty and unemployment experienced by refugees. UNRWA is funded almost totally by voluntary contributions from donors, but at the beginning of 2014 it had a cash deficit of $65m. The education of each child costs $755 per year.

Vancouver shelter-benches show up London’s ‘anti-homeless’ spikes as how not to deal with rough sleepers

When the management of a block of luxury flats in London felt they had an issue with homeless people sleeping on the doorstep, their solution was apparently to install a set of spikes that were later branded “ugly, self-defeating and stupid” by Boris Johnson.

The Mayor faced criticism himself for not doing more to deal with the growing number of people sleeping rough in the capital – so perhaps he could look to the work of a charity in Vancouver for inspiration.

RainCity Housing, which provides specialised accommodation and support services for homeless people in the Canadian city, has set up instant pop-up shelters that take the form of an ordinary park bench.

During the day, the innovative design simply works as the back support to benches where people might sit and eat lunch or while waiting for a bus.

But at night, the boards fold out upwards, providing emergency cover in what is – like London – a notoriously rainy city.

The dual use of the bench has been highlighted in one of the designs from Vancouver creative agency Spring Advertising. UV letters react with sunlight and read “This is a bench” during the day. At night, a separate set of glow-in-the-dark letters emerge to say “This is a bedroom”, and directs rough sleepers to RainCity’s website.

Academics warn international school league tables are killing 'joy of learning'

Nearly 100 educationalists from around the world sign letter attacking the OECD's Pisa rankings and say the next round of tests should be cancelled.

Read the academics' letter here.

Governments around the world anxiously await the results of the triennial tests of 15-year-olds carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Education ministers pray their nation's youngsters will climb the international league tables. Around half the countries that take part (66 in 2012) have made significant school reforms in the light of the results.

When the latest scores in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), as the testing regime is called, were published in December, England came 26th in maths, 23rd in reading and 21st in science. (The UK's overall performance was similar.) Michael Gove said the results "eloquently" made the case for a more academic curriculum, more rigorous exams, more academies and free schools, and other reforms introduced by the coalition. His junior minister, Liz Truss, went to Shanghai in China, which topped the league tables in all subjects – with Hong Kong and Singapore runners-up – to discover the secrets of its success. Chinese maths teachers have been invited to Britain to give "masterclasses" in teaching the subject.

Now nearly 100 leading educational figures from around the world have issued an unprecedented challenge to Pisa – and what they call "the negative consequences" of its rankings – in a letter to its director, Andreas Schleicher. The signatories include top academics from Cambridge, Oxford, London, Bristol, Stanford (California), Columbia (New York), Ballarat (Australia), Canterbury (New Zealand) and Stockholm universities.

Why China wants African students to learn Mandarin

While China’s dramatic economic and trade impact on Africa has caught global attention, there has little focus on its role in education.

But there are important questions raised by China’s education push into Africa. Why does China run one of the world’s largest short-term training programmes, with plans to take 30,000 Africans to China between 2013 and 2015? Why does it give generous support to 38 Confucius Institutes teaching Mandarin and Chinese culture at many of Africa’s top universities from the Cape to Cairo?

And why is China one of the very few countries to increase the number of full scholarships for Africans to study in its universities, with a total of 18,000 anticipated between 2013 and 2015?

The world's biggest e-waste site

Think your television is recycled when you get rid of it? This is where it is likely to end up... dumping grounds such as this one, dubbed the world's biggest e-waste site.

Once a fertile wetland, this scarred corner of Ghana is now dominated by black plumes of smoke and the acrid smell of burning plastic after becoming the world's largest e-waste dumping ground, littered with unwanted televisions and electronic devices from across the globe.

While most people would expect their electrical goods to be recycled properly, the toxic chemicals inside can make it expensive to do so, making illegal dumping a lucrative business.

Traders from across Europe, the U.S., China and India have therefore reportedly been sending containers of 'Development Aid' or 'Second-Hand Products' to Tema Harbour, the contents of which end up being dumped 20 miles east in Agbogbloshie.

Photographer Kevin McElvaney has now documented how boys and young men make their living by salvaging metals and burning cables to get to the copper inside.

Such dangerous work among toxic chemicals however leads to a range of injuries including lung problems, untreated wounds, headaches and insomnia.

Relaxing zero tolerance in schools could be Obama’s boldest civil rights reform

“Hope and change” may have driven the first presidential campaign for Barack Obama, but many educators and public education advocates have been discouraged by Obama’s education policy.

While the US secretary of education, Arne Duncan, often claims Obama addresses education reform as the civil rights issue of our time, that rhetoric has often been contradicted by policy.

However, the recent government initiative on discipline in schools could salvage the hope that education reform can turn in the direction of better equity for all students. Based on data from the US Department of Education on civil rights, the Obama administration is calling for an end to harsh discipline policies, such as zero tolerance, that “disproportionately affect minorities”.

This introduced policies such as discipline codes that mandate expulsion or suspension for first-time offences (such as bringing a knife to school).

Two trends with disturbing parallels began in the early 1980s during the Reagan presidency: the era of mass incarceration, labelled the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and an era of public education reform that introduced high-stakes exams and accountability measures for schools and teachers.

Mass incarceration and school discipline patterns over the past three decades have disproportionately impacted African American men. African Americans are arrested and incarcerated for drug use at rates much higher than whites, even though African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates.

Reading rehabilitates prisoners: it is not a privilege to be earned

Chris Grayling’s latest reform to the justice system has gone viral as news emerged he had banned prisoners from receiving books sent from outside. A blog piece penned by Frances Cook, of the Howard League, outlined some of the items that prisoners were now to be prohibited from receiving, including underwear (meaning shared pants, worn for months on end) and home-made gifts (making a personalised birthday card from a child into illicit contraband).

The item that most captured popular attention was the banning of the books. This has produced a very strong reaction from writers and novelists. Mark Haddon, award winning author of The Strange Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has described it as malign and pointless extra punishment. And other authors such as Philip Pullman, as well as academics including Mary Beard have given their support to a growing campaign urging the Ministry of Justice to review the decision. There is now also an official petition.

It is important to stress that Grayling has not banned books. The measure means that the right to books will become part of the “incentives and earned privileges scheme”. Extra books are allowed if bought with money earned from good behaviour – but this only occurs when the prisons deem inmates worthy and, even then, they can only be purchased from a specific (government-approved) catalogue.

Pearson to expand low-cost schooling in poor countries

TOKYO -- U.K. education and media company Pearson is expanding its private-school business aimed at developing countries, planning to open 30-50 junior high schools in the Philippines by 2015.

The schools typically charge several dollars in monthly tuition in countries where many families cannot afford the cost of other types of schools. The hope is that Pearson's expertise in running schools will improve the quality of education in developing countries in Asia and Africa, aiding the fight against poverty.

Pearson specializes in the development of educational materials. It is also a major media company and owns U.K. business news publisher Financial Times Group.

If London were Syria: Save The Children campaign releases unsettling video

Bombs rain on Britain in charity video

 

A young girl is shown in close-up blowing out candles on a birthday cake, playing dress-up and asleep peacefully in a car. Then the images become darker, showing disruption, chaos, bombs and panic as Britain descends into a Syria-type conflict and the girl and her family are forced to flee their home in fear.
 

The images are from a startling new Save The Children campaign that imagines what London would be like if plunged into a conflict similar to that in Syria.

The one-and-a-half minute video was launched in the run-up to the three-year anniversary of the conflict, in which, to date, 10,000 children have lost their lives and 2.3 million people have become refugees.

It closes with the words: "Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening."

French Revolution Digital Archive – web site launched -

Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) have just released a vast trove of documents and images from the French Revolution on their new French Revolution Digital Archive website (FRDA).

The site contains both resources for the dedicated scholar and fascinating material for the everyday history buff, from prints depicting the events of 1789 to records of parliamentary deliberations and private letters.

Mandela death: saying goodbye to a global icon

Mandela’s long walk to freedom - his release from prison in 1990. Greg English/AP

How do you say goodbye to a global icon? The answer must be: with dignity and by being true to the values that he fought for. By these standards, we all have done Nelson Mandela a disservice.

The international press corps covered his drawn-out illness because the world cared. But all too often their depiction of South Africa and its future would have dismayed him. Virtually every day earlier this year I was asked by one or other foreign journalist about South Africa’s future when Madiba passes on. Their answer lies in the very question. Can you imagine American political analysts being asked if the US would collapse after Clinton passes on?

Forced student labour is central to the Chinese economic miracle

China has an army of student labour making Apple products, Playstation consoles and other gadgets for the west. The teenagers' stories make upsetting reading.

  Aditya Chakrabortty

Employees at a Foxconn factory in China: the company is among the biggest users of student labour in the country. Photograph: Darley Shen/Reuters

You'll hear a lot of pieties about China this week. As George Osborne and Boris Johnson schlep from Shanghai to Shenzhen, they'll give the usual sales spiel about trade and investment and the global race. What they won't talk much about is Zhang Lintong. Yet the 16-year-old's story tells you more about the human collateral in the relationship between China and the west than any number of ministerial platitudes.