Group Work Discussion (Amanda / John / Greta / Ryan)
What aspect of Education for All has your group concentrated on for this project? Use the comments section of this post to discuss your group's work, research and findings and your opinions about the topic(s) you've been studying.
My group has worked on the topic of how war effects education. In some ways it is one of the hardest topics, because it's not just how war itself effects education, it's also how war effects governments, economies, the people, and how all these also in turn effect education. We had 5 major headings under War; Governments, Child Soldiers, Illiteracy, Weak Economies and Starvation. Illiteracy ties into education more than the others, and starvation ties into the economies. We've discovered many things that you might deduce yourself; that the more fighting in a country (in, not by) the worse the standard of education, the better the economy the better the standard of education, any country with child soldiers has a lower education standard, countries with high illiteracy have a lower education standard, military regimes or unstable governments have lower education standards, etc. That bit wasn't hard to figure out. The hard thing about our topic is fixing all this. In some ways, nothing short of making a universal peace pact will solve our topic. My idea for this project was to use four case studies, all of which are on the intense end of the war and education scale. From these countries, we would find the common global problems that other countries have. Now, we have to find a solution to what we found. It isn't a good start. The problem is, war weakens economies, strengthens governments (this is usually a bad thing) and causes a lot of loss of life. Civil war is even worse; governments are weakened, economies plummet, education halts, a victory on either side results in a loss of life for your country. So, in order to completely solve problems in education relating to war or violence, we have to end war. There are things we can do to help, but there isn't a complete solution. Whenever you try to solve something, you need to solve something else too, and education is no exception. You need to fix economies, governments, and prejudices, the three hardest things to fix in the world. In my next post I'll talk about solutions, but I haven't met with my group for two days, so I'll talk to them first.
My group has been studying the topic of war and its effects on education. We have also studied the sub topics of child soldiers, different forms of government, etc. In order to study these situations we each chose a country that is behind in education. We read articles about these countries, wrote summaries, and came up with lists of problems, plans and detailed solutions. For my country I chose Afghanistan. The articles that I have read about education are eye-opening to say the least. After learning about how the Taliban's regime effected education it is obvious that government and or politics has a great effect on the success of a nation's educational system. Through learning about Afghanistan I have also learned how poverty and the recruitment of child soldiers can effect education as well. Once we got a good grasp on the problems we decided to write our plans and solutions. One of the biggest problems we have had to solve with solutions is where to get funding. Although this group work has been challenging at times I think it has been a great learning experience.
John, I'm writing this post in response to your post. I agree that the issues you describe are difficult to solve, difficult, but not impossible. I don't know too much about economies or how to fix them so I am afraid I can be of no help on that topic. As for governments, a good government that will serve the people will most likely arise from an educated people who know what they need in a leader. Therein is our predicament. Without a stable government good education is difficult, but without an educated nation there will not be a stable government. This situation makes a solution difficult. I believe that our first priority should be figuring a way out of this static position. After that we can turn our attention towards economies and prejudice.
Amanda, I'm writing this as a response to your response. As an example, I'm using Iraq. We've set up a government there. So we should be all set, right? The problem is, prejudices get in the way of anything that involves cooperation. So I think we need to fix prejudices first. Unfortunately, the way to solve this is education. In America, we solved government first, like your suggestion, but then about 100 years later we had a brutal and bloody civil war over prejudices. Then, we started to rebuild, but the prejudices were still there. Finally, another 100 years later, the civil rights movement stopped the biggest prejudices, but even today we aren't perfect. So it's taken us about 225 years. The problem is, we need to solve this problem for other countries in less than 25 years, one-ninth of the time it took us. So my idea would be to handle prejudices first. Also, just to be annoying, I'll play devil's advocate. (By the way, your idea is good, I'm just trying to say there are other ways to do this.) I think we need to fix the economy first. If we don't, whether or not we have a government or people living in harmony, there will be starvation and disease. Those two things don't exactly help a person feel all sunny. But for a strong economy, you need education. So, if we listen to you and me, then we need to fix everything at once. The question is, how?
Our group has focused on war and how it affects education. We narrowed it down into topics such as child soldiers, starvation, illiteracy, economy, and government. We figured out the problems, plans, and solutions for each. To do this, we each researched a country that faces these issues. I focused on the country of Sudan. Their government is in chaos because of the conflict in Darfur. Public education has basically been lost. This is leaving a generation of uneducated people. This is almost like a lost generation because the children will be too old to go to school by the time the government is more stable. They will have to work to support their family and themselves. After the government becomes more stable, it will still be difficult for to reinvest in public education because of the lack of funding. Even when the government has money they won't necessarily put it into their education systems. Sudan is a good example of this because their government is run by the military and they will probably put the money towards their military. It will be difficult for all the countries we reserached to correct these problems without a massive amount of international help.
My group has worked on the topic of war and its affects on education in the past 2 weeks. The topics that we have looked at under the topic of war is the goverment and how it effects the education of children, child soilders and how that affects the kids leaving their homes and not being able to go to school,starvation, a week economy and lastly illitaracy. For all of these problems we have stated the problem, found a soulution and found a plan that will let us get rid of the problem. All of the issues that we stated are hard to cover in a global perspective. So we divided it up. Each of the 4 members in are group worked on a country so tht we could get a basic veiw on how these topics are working toaday. The countries that we reaserched are Iraqu, Columbia, Sudan and Afghanistan. The work so far has been hard but i think that we are working together and acomplishing the tasks with are fullest potential. This project has beeen hard not having everybody hear on the same day but we are keeping in contact folowing are rules that we made in the begining of this project
Yolanda, I hope you don't mind I'm putting another post, but I'd like to talk about the country I researched, Colombia. Colombia has multiple problems. For one thing, it has two warring sides, the conservatives and the liberals. Both have a military force fighting the government. Colombia's government has seen military takeovers, assassinations, and, most recently, democratic elections. However, the rebels have control of half of Colombia. It's like an unofficial country inside another country. There is also the drug trade, cocaine, which is harvested in this unofficial country. There is constant guerrilla fighting in Colombia. Colombia is hard to find a solution for. The problem is, the government doesn't have complete control of the country, so it's hard to implement any education reform. Also, the drug trade is incredibly important and luxurious for the rebels, it reaps riches for the owners and provides nutritional value for the workers. My first step would be to eliminate the drug trade, but then a lot of the population would starve. Somehow, if we could disarm the rebel groups, and provide aid for a little while to the poor to get the economy running again, we might be able to fix Colombia's education.
Ryan, I know that we all haven't been able to come to school everyday, but even with this I still think that we have done an excellent job. We have all had our homework done on time and have committed an equal amount of effort in and out of school. I know that it was a very difficult task to come up with plans and solutions for the problems we found for our countries. I think it would have been even more difficult task if we had to do it by ourselves and not have had the support and oppinions from others. Since we all have our own strengths and weaknesses, which we went over when we started the project, we each contributed our strengths and tried to improve in our weaker areas.
John, i agree with you and i think that this is the hardest topic to coveroverall, but i dont know if i agree with you when you said that illitaracy teis into education more because all of the topics affects the education in a major way. Not just illitaracy, but i can see how you would think that because if you dont go to school then you cant read or right. But overall i think that what you said was good and it stated clearly everything that we have done in this project. Good job.
9 comments:
My group has worked on the topic of how war effects education. In some ways it is one of the hardest topics, because it's not just how war itself effects education, it's also how war effects governments, economies, the people, and how all these also in turn effect education. We had 5 major headings under War; Governments, Child Soldiers, Illiteracy, Weak Economies and Starvation. Illiteracy ties into education more than the others, and starvation ties into the economies. We've discovered many things that you might deduce yourself; that the more fighting in a country (in, not by) the worse the standard of education, the better the economy the better the standard of education, any country with child soldiers has a lower education standard, countries with high illiteracy have a lower education standard, military regimes or unstable governments have lower education standards, etc. That bit wasn't hard to figure out. The hard thing about our topic is fixing all this. In some ways, nothing short of making a universal peace pact will solve our topic.
My idea for this project was to use four case studies, all of which are on the intense end of the war and education scale. From these countries, we would find the common global problems that other countries have.
Now, we have to find a solution to what we found. It isn't a good start. The problem is, war weakens economies, strengthens governments (this is usually a bad thing) and causes a lot of loss of life. Civil war is even worse; governments are weakened, economies plummet, education halts, a victory on either side results in a loss of life for your country. So, in order to completely solve problems in education relating to war or violence, we have to end war. There are things we can do to help, but there isn't a complete solution. Whenever you try to solve something, you need to solve something else too, and education is no exception. You need to fix economies, governments, and prejudices, the three hardest things to fix in the world.
In my next post I'll talk about solutions, but I haven't met with my group for two days, so I'll talk to them first.
My group has been studying the topic of war and its effects on education. We have also studied the sub topics of child soldiers, different forms of government, etc. In order to study these situations we each chose a country that is behind in education. We read articles about these countries, wrote summaries, and came up with lists of problems, plans and detailed solutions. For my country I chose Afghanistan. The articles that I have read about education are eye-opening to say the least. After learning about how the Taliban's regime effected education it is obvious that government and or politics has a great effect on the success of a nation's educational system. Through learning about Afghanistan I have also learned how poverty and the recruitment of child soldiers can effect education as well. Once we got a good grasp on the problems we decided to write our plans and solutions. One of the biggest problems we have had to solve with solutions is where to get funding. Although this group work has been challenging at times I think it has been a great learning experience.
John,
I'm writing this post in response to your post. I agree that the issues you describe are difficult to solve, difficult, but not impossible. I don't know too much about economies or how to fix them so I am afraid I can be of no help on that topic. As for governments, a good government that will serve the people will most likely arise from an educated people who know what they need in a leader. Therein is our predicament. Without a stable government good education is difficult, but without an educated nation there will not be a stable government. This situation makes a solution difficult. I believe that our first priority should be figuring a way out of this static position. After that we can turn our attention towards economies and prejudice.
Amanda,
I'm writing this as a response to your response. As an example, I'm using Iraq. We've set up a government there. So we should be all set, right? The problem is, prejudices get in the way of anything that involves cooperation. So I think we need to fix prejudices first. Unfortunately, the way to solve this is education. In America, we solved government first, like your suggestion, but then about 100 years later we had a brutal and bloody civil war over prejudices. Then, we started to rebuild, but the prejudices were still there. Finally, another 100 years later, the civil rights movement stopped the biggest prejudices, but even today we aren't perfect. So it's taken us about 225 years. The problem is, we need to solve this problem for other countries in less than 25 years, one-ninth of the time it took us. So my idea would be to handle prejudices first.
Also, just to be annoying, I'll play devil's advocate. (By the way, your idea is good, I'm just trying to say there are other ways to do this.) I think we need to fix the economy first. If we don't, whether or not we have a government or people living in harmony, there will be starvation and disease. Those two things don't exactly help a person feel all sunny. But for a strong economy, you need education. So, if we listen to you and me, then we need to fix everything at once. The question is, how?
Our group has focused on war and how it affects education. We narrowed it down into topics such as child soldiers, starvation, illiteracy, economy, and government. We figured out the problems, plans, and solutions for each. To do this, we each researched a country that faces these issues. I focused on the country of Sudan. Their government is in chaos because of the conflict in Darfur. Public education has basically been lost. This is leaving a generation of uneducated people. This is almost like a lost generation because the children will be too old to go to school by the time the government is more stable. They will have to work to support their family and themselves. After the government becomes more stable, it will still be difficult for to reinvest in public education because of the lack of funding. Even when the government has money they won't necessarily put it into their education systems. Sudan is a good example of this because their government is run by the military and they will probably put the money towards their military. It will be difficult for all the countries we reserached to correct these problems without a massive amount of international help.
My group has worked on the topic of war and its affects on education in the past 2 weeks. The topics that we have looked at under the topic of war is the goverment and how it effects the education of children, child soilders and how that affects the kids leaving their homes and not being able to go to school,starvation, a week economy and lastly illitaracy. For all of these problems we have stated the problem, found a soulution and found a plan that will let us get rid of the problem. All of the issues that we stated are hard to cover in a global perspective. So we divided it up. Each of the 4 members in are group worked on a country so tht we could get a basic veiw on how these topics are working toaday. The countries that we reaserched are Iraqu, Columbia, Sudan and Afghanistan. The work so far has been hard but i think that we are working together and acomplishing the tasks with are fullest potential. This project has beeen hard not having everybody hear on the same day but we are keeping in contact folowing are rules that we made in the begining of this project
Yolanda, I hope you don't mind I'm putting another post, but I'd like to talk about the country I researched, Colombia.
Colombia has multiple problems. For one thing, it has two warring sides, the conservatives and the liberals. Both have a military force fighting the government. Colombia's government has seen military takeovers, assassinations, and, most recently, democratic elections. However, the rebels have control of half of Colombia. It's like an unofficial country inside another country. There is also the drug trade, cocaine, which is harvested in this unofficial country. There is constant guerrilla fighting in Colombia.
Colombia is hard to find a solution for. The problem is, the government doesn't have complete control of the country, so it's hard to implement any education reform. Also, the drug trade is incredibly important and luxurious for the rebels, it reaps riches for the owners and provides nutritional value for the workers. My first step would be to eliminate the drug trade, but then a lot of the population would starve. Somehow, if we could disarm the rebel groups, and provide aid for a little while to the poor to get the economy running again, we might be able to fix Colombia's education.
Ryan,
I know that we all haven't been able to come to school everyday, but even with this I still think that we have done an excellent job. We have all had our homework done on time and have committed an equal amount of effort in and out of school. I know that it was a very difficult task to come up with plans and solutions for the problems we found for our countries. I think it would have been even more difficult task if we had to do it by ourselves and not have had the support and oppinions from others. Since we all have our own strengths and weaknesses, which we went over when we started the project, we each contributed our strengths and tried to improve in our weaker areas.
John, i agree with you and i think that this is the hardest topic to coveroverall, but i dont know if i agree with you when you said that illitaracy teis into education more because all of the topics affects the education in a major way. Not just illitaracy, but i can see how you would think that because if you dont go to school then you cant read or right. But overall i think that what you said was good and it stated clearly everything that we have done in this project. Good job.
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