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the war on education .....
Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.
“We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world,” said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as “actually pretty scary, alarming.”
Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life - either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.
When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.- By John Richardson at 23 Apr 2008 - 7:38pm
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kids in war...
"Many of them no longer go to school, many are recruited for violent activities or detained in custody, they lack access to the most basic services and manifest a wide range of psychological symptoms from the violence in their everyday lives."
She said approximately 1,500 children are also "known to be held in detention facilities".
Ms Coomaraswamy found that only 50% of primary school children are attending school, down from 80% in 2005 and only 40% have access to clean drinking water and there is a continuing possibility of outbreaks of cholera.
She called on religious, political, military and community leaders to send one clear message to Iraqi children: "Stay out of violence and go back to school."
Ms Coomaraswamy strongly urged all parties to the conflict in Iraq "to strictly adhere to international humanitarian standards for the protection of children and to immediately release any children under the age of 18 years who are associated with their forces in any way".
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Gus: since the embargo on Iraq in the 1990s, children in Iraq have suffered enormously. To see that schooling has gone from 80 per cent in 2005 down to 50 per cent presently shows that the US are fast losing hearts and minds in Iraq. That US soldiers as young as 19 be killed in Iraq show that the US either trains its recruits mighty fast or that army "cadets' start at 12 years of age, way before one is able to make any "adult" decision (age 25 according to car insurance cover). The major difference between the kids in Iraq and the "cadets" lie in the intensity and the purpose of the brain-washing. The result is the same: "kill"... despite the US soldiers being trained not to be killed in the process, if possible.
Kids are fodder on both sides...
I hate war.