MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS ago, Huangdi Neijing, a classic Chinese medical text, identified obesity as a disease caused by eating too much “fatty meats and polished grains”. Until a generation ago, such a diet was an extravagance beyond imagination for all but the elite. But the Chinese waistline has since expanded, and at an alarming […]
GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND German-speaking Switzerland have an education tradition that sets them apart from most other countries.
Children tend to get out of school at mid-day instead of late afternoon. Secondary schools are divided into three types. The basic one prepares for technical apprenticeships and vocational training. The middle one teaches skills such as book-keeping. And […]
MANY PARENTS who picked up their children from Park View School, Birmingham on June 9 took home something else too: an official report excoriating the school. Ofsted, England’s schools inspector, had downgraded the largely Muslim institution to “inadequate”, saying it has failed to protect children from extremism.
A few months ago, Birmingham City Council received a […]
According to official sources on May 2, a Chinese kindergarten principal and an education official were dismissed over a child sex abuse scandal in northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the latest in a slew of such cases in China.
The principal of a Haojiaqiao township kindergarten in Lingwu City, and the director of security at the […]
OF THE 658 schools in Chicago, only 126 are charter schools — publicly funded but independently run and largely free of union rules. Fifteen more are due to open this year. More notable, though, is that four of the most recently approved charters are in areas where the city recently decided to close 49 public […]
ALMOST ONE IN five of the world’s central bankers has been educated at a UK university, according to a report that stresses the “soft power” that Britain gains from educating the world’s elite. It calls on the government to commission research on how British education affects the UK’s influence globally. It would like to see […]
GOETHE UNIVERSITY Frankfurt, established in 1914 as Frankfurt University, was the creation of a Jewish philanthropist and owed much of its growth to Jewish support and academics. But under the Nazis, a third of its staff and students were forced out. The infamous Nazi scientist Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for […]
THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA has a message for people in other countries who might consider coming to its universities to study: “It’s not all snow and ice here!” At least, that’s one of the messages Canada is sending out on websites and social media networks and in other types of marketing in a relentless bid […]
ACROSS THE RIVER from the congested metropolis of Manaus, nothing but dense green forest lines the banks of the River Negro in the Brazilian Amazon. Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas and host city to England’s opening match against Italy in the forthcoming Fifa World Cup, is an urban oasis surrounded by more […]
A MOTTO OF PEKING University, one of China’s leading academic institutions, is “freedom of thought and an all-embracing attitude”. But in recent months it was not all-embracing enough to allow Xia Yeliang, an outspoken economics professor, to keep his job. Economics was not the subject on which Xia was most forthright. He was a signatory […]
CHINA’S INFAMOUS UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE exam, known as the gaokao has long been subject to criticism. Admissions are based solely on the points scored in one exam, and the need for rote memorisation does little to foster creative minds. Now Beijing has taken its first tentative steps towards reforming the system.
LAST YEAR WAS NOT A VINTAGE YEAR FOR the university of Central Lancashire’s attempts to gain a foothold in overseas markets. In November it emerged that it will lose up to £3.2 million (Rs.32 crore) in the collapse of its planned Thailand campus. The university set up a joint venture company with the president of […]
UNIVERSITY GRADUATES IN NORTHERN Sri Lanka, which is recovering from decades of civil war, are looking at a sparse employment landscape with few opportunities on offer. “Those from the north face a much more difficult time than those from elsewhere in the country. New jobs are very difficult to find,” Rupavathi Keetheswaran, government agent for […]
SCHOOL IN THE TYPHOON-AFFECTED areas of the Republic of Philippines (pop. 97 million) are slowly reopening and thousands of students are resuming classes after the category 5 storm struck the island nation last November. Millions of children have had their education disrupted due to school buildings being severely damaged or used as shelters for survivors […]
YASMIN WAS AT HOME AFTER A DAY AT work at Al-Baath University in Homs, Syria, when she heard that one of her students had been shot and killed. Yasmin’s life had been dominated by Syria’s civil war since unrest began in 2011. Syria’s higher education system is in meltdown. Students and academics have fled the […]
As more people around the world start to study Mandarin, China’s education ministry has revealed that much work still needs to be done teaching the language at home. Last month it announced that 400 million Chinese, nearly a third of the population, are unable to communicate in Mandarin, and that many more cannot speak it […]
At a time when you might have expected to hear the youth of Brazil chanting about the nation’s football team, they called out “vem pra rua” — “come to the street” — an invitation to protest against corruption, police aggression and poor public services. At the peak of the Confederations Cup competition in June, a […]
Just months after Quebec had at last emerged from waves of violent student protests over higher education funding, the prospect of another divisive row looms after the provincial government announced plans that would force secularisation on staff working in higher education. The separatist government of Pauline Marois — whose election as premier last year finally […]
Power among the world’s leading universities has shifted further eastwards, with mainland Europe suffering the worst losses, show the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2013-14.
In general, this year’s tables are marked by their stability: the California Institute of Technology holds on to top spot for the third year in a row; the same institutions make up […]
It sounds as uncontroversial as apple pie. Teach for America (TFA), a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1990, places young ‘corps members’ at schools in poor areas to teach for two years. Recruits work in 35 states, most are fresh out of college, and they learn mainly on the job. Fair enough; but TFA has many […]
Russell group member the University of Exeter (UoE) is to cut the intake of foreign students into its business school following concerns over their academic quality — a move that may be followed by other UK institutions. Fifty-four percent of students in UoE’s business school are from outside the European Union — above the figure […]
As recent headline-grabbing resignations by two federal government ministers attest, the issue of academic plagiarism is a higher-profile matter in Germany, and with bigger political stakes, than almost anywhere else. Both defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who quit his post in 2011, and Annette Schavan, the minister for education and research who departed from chancellor […]
Purges may be what political junkies are talking about, but for Chinese families the big issue is homework. As children across the country returned to their classrooms in September, the education ministry has put forward plans to decrease the amount of pupils’ homework.
The ministry’s proposed guidelines, issued on August 22, ban written homework for every […]
A new report has highlighted the major challenges facing Iraq’s universities as they struggle to forge international partnerships and adopt robust systems of assessment, evaluation and quality assurance. It draws on the results of a three-day conference organised by the New York-based Institute of International Education in collaboration with its Scholar Rescue Fund.
More than ever before, universities are being measured against not only national competitors but also rivals from around the world. There are already a number of well-established global university league tables, which are generally based on research power.
Then there is the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project, a scheme run by the Organisation for […]
Youths in northern Nigeria’s Borno state, where many members of the radical Islamist group Boko Haram (BH) have been arrested in recent weeks, are increasingly joining vigilante gangs to pass on the identity of BH members to the military-police Joint Task Force (JTF) following a string of deadly attacks on schools, according to vigilante groups […]
Five pioneering international students who risked life and limb to reach England before going on to become the architects of modern Japan, are being celebrated by a University College London (UCL) event.
The story of the so-called ‘Choshu Five’, a group of Japanese noblemen who studied at UCL 150 years ago, is testimony to the transformative power […]
Both relief and tears greeted the results of France’s school-leaving baccalaureat exam on July 5. With breathtaking efficiency, the entire country’s exam papers were corrected and marked within just two weeks. Founded in 1808 by Napoleon, the bac is an entry ticket to university as well as a yearly national ritual, which opens with a gruelling compulsory four-hour philosophy […]
Jiao Yizhou, a 17-year-old student at Jiangsu College for International Education in Nanjing, hopes to study environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. Like many applicants to university, however, he is anxious about the entrance tests and essays involved. He says he knows that some Chinese students cheat on their applications, […]
Western universities based in Qatar are not expecting any major shake-ups under the country’s new emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, despite what is said to be his preference for Arabic — rather than English-language — instruction at university level.
Tamim was handed power over the gas-rich Gulf state on June 25 by his 61-year-old father, Hamad […]
For the second consecutive year, South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology heads a list of the world’s top 100 universities under 50 years vintage. The UK’s “plate-glass” universities have lost ground.
Founded in 1986, Pohang — better known as Postech — retains its top spot in Times Higher Education’s second annual 100 Under 50 Rankings, comfortably […]
In parliament, the press and the academy, France is bitterly divided over whether its universities should be allowed to teach courses in English. However, recent findings show that the use of English is widespread in French higher education, suggesting that the intense debate has been overtaken by events.
On May 28, the French National Assembly passed […]
The first massive open online courses (moocs) on the UK-based Futurelearn platform will go live in autumn and are being developed for use on mobile devices, the company’s chief executive has revealed.
Simon Nelson says he believes his company, which has 21 UK university partners signed up to offer free online courses, will gain an advantage […]
Located in the heart of high-tech silicon valley, San José State University is a combination of early 19th century red-tiled Spanish Revival-style architecture and modern, shiny research, teaching and library buildings. It is also at the centre of one of the biggest debates in US higher education, thanks to an experiment that is combining conventional […]
In 2006, Michael Shattock, visiting professor at the Institute of Education, University of London, travelled to Ghana to advise what was probably the country’s most prestigious institution.
What he discovered at the University of Ghana, he says, was “absolute chaos”: it had 151 separate bank accounts, up to 10 students sharing a bedroom and not even […]
“Fly-in, fly-out” academics are a source of frustration for Chinese students taking UK degrees in their own country, a new report says. Around 38,000 students in China were studying for qualifications taught by a total of 70 British higher education institutions last year, either through a branch campus, partnerships with Chinese universities or via distance […]
When a fresh face enters a vice chancellor’s office, a revised strategic plan invariably emerges from under the door a few months later. But the University of South Australia’s new vice chancellor David Lloyd has decided to break with this closed-door tradition and instead host a giant 48-hour online brainstorming conversation about university strategy with […]
So gruesome was the injury to Kevin Ware’s leg that most media outlets declined to show it. Not often does a young man’s tibia break clean through his skin in the course of a college basketball game. Yet Ware urged his University of Louisville team-mates to carry on without him, which they did, winning the college […]
When Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of Blackstone Group, a private-equity firm, announced in Beijing on April 21 the establishment of a $300 million (Rs.1,650 crore) scholarship programme in his name for study in China, it was further testament to the nation’s place as a new centre of gravity in the world. China’s pull on corporate […]
Cricket, boarding-house names reminiscent of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts and ancient and peculiar customs are among the hallmarks of Britain’s leading private schools. Now they can be found in Singapore and Kazakhstan. As the domestic market softens, some of the most famous names in British education are building far-flung outposts.
Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ (IIT Madras) Centre of Excellence for Road Safety (CoERS) has launched a landmark ‘Data Driven Hyperlocal Intervention’ (DDHI) programme to .....Read More
At least five people, including three children, were killed and several others injured in a suicide attack on a school bus in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan .....Read More
