The great education hoax
Education is a political weapon. Judy Gahagan tells its story.

The magic word
Daouda Api explains how the lucky charm of literacy too often fails.

Filtering the few
Terry Furlong uncovers the hoax at the heart of education.

Three brothers
The brigand, the herder and the clerk - and the Ugandan education that made them. A short story by Julian Champkin

Tuned in and switched off
Television only teaches us to keep watching, argues Joyce Nelson.

Brazil's electronic childminder
Profiled by Moira Ashford.

EDUCATION - THE FACTS

Learning under fire
Richard Swift discovers an alternative education camouflaged in the canyons of war-tom Eritrea.

Aotearoa's hamburger chain
The UK's market model for education is already on the drawing-boards in Aotearoa, claims Brett Riley.

The right approach
Robin Richardson unveils the new British blueprint for inequality.

A teacher's tale
When children bring to school no other interest than video nasties it's time to rethink your ideals, laments Marianne Puxley.

Simply ... The New Internationalist Whole Person High School

The early winter evenings in Oxford are magic. Courtyards and cloisters are pools of shadow and lamp-light. The chapels glow through stained glass. The city seems like it is preparing for a masked ball. The students hurry about in a state of permanent excitement, as if they are amazed to have been chosen to live in such a sumptuous place, to eat breakfast under chandeliers. (I speak of course of those who are not members of the British aristocracy. The latter would regard it as their natural right.)

I look at these hand-picked people with great interest. And I know that they - and the place - are a result of a celebration of one particular part of the human mind: that part involved in academic knowledge. The reason they were picked (aside from those who are here by right of birth) is that a small portion of their total brain power was visibly alight at the right time and in the right place. And they have been rewarded for it.

This probably sounds like a run-up to a full-scale attack on Oxford and academic knowledge. But it isn't. The place is beautiful and its studies a precious part of human heritage. But...

But inside the great doors of the colleges there is often a small notice. It reads: 'This college is closed to visitors'. And indeed it is. These beautiful buildings, along with a whole realm of cultivated human intellect, are closed to the vast majority of humankind. And this is not because humanity isn't up to it. The only belief I'll never recant is that every single undamaged baby is born with fabulous, infinite intellectual potential. And that, of all the terrible wastage of resources in the world, it is the wasting of that intellectual potential that is the worst.

Anyway, to come back to Oxford: while editing this issue of the magazine, I was confronted every day with the contrast between the university and education all over the world. I was struck more and more by the fact that there are comparable celebrations of human brilliance in the most deprived places. The photographs of schoolchildren under fire in Beirut, of pupils piling into tin shacks for lessons in Namibia, of students reading (in between sinking a new well and sowing next year's crop) in Laos, give off that same feeling of excitement as the Oxford students. Better still, they are a reminder of the myriad forms that intelligence takes, a reminder that the Oxford sort is just one amongst many.

The anger in this issue is concentrated on two things. One is the attack on people's confidence in their own abilities by politically motivated assessment systems. The other is the onslaught on the mind by mass junk entertainment.

I realize that this issue may seem British-centred. This is partly because my personal experience of the rest of the world is limited. But there is another reason. The British education system contains both the best and the worst - from atrocious elitism to brilliant inventiveness in curriculum development. And aspects of both have been exported across the world - though, sadly, vastly more of the former.

Right now Britain is going through dark days - because the gang now in power are determined to destroy all the achievements of post-war British society, including the best in its education system. But I hope the articles in this issue of the magazine will say to you, as they do to me: you can fool some people some of the time, but you can't fool most people for ever. They are just too intelligent.

Letters
Letter from China
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Father John Medcalf
Reviews: including V S Naipaul classic
Country profile: Iraq

COVER PHOTO: Claude Sauvageot
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER