The great
education scandal
Chris Brazier begins a four-part report with the question: what the hell went wrong?

The Coke Dude
A leaked letter about Coca-Cola in US schools.

Gender canyon
Denying girls an education doesn't just abuse their rights: it costs lives.

A quiet escape
Charlotte Carlsson finds a girl who, against the odds, slipped through the schoolroom door in Pakistan.

Testing, testing, 123
It's now an international obsession: schools ranked in league tables, children judged by standardized tests, teachers paid by results. What happened to education of the whole child?

IDEAL and Reality
An attempt to improve Bangladesh's classrooms has not carried teachers with it, as Sameera Huque reports.

Dancin' circles
US teacher Daniel Ferri recalls his own failure to standardize his students.

Class wars
Five young journalists visit Tanzania - and confront the World Bank about the educational plight of children their age. A report by Children's Express.

Making it happen
The claim that Education for All would cost too much simply won't wash. Chris Brazier exposes some barbarous priorities.

Action

Teaching Global Issues
Visit this special New Internationalist help page for teachers and students of global issues.

The editor's letter is always the last part of any New Internationalist issue to be written. Which is odd, really, given that it may well be the first thing people read - not because it appears first, but because it is short, approachable and personal. It may suffer occasionally as a result of the brain-dead state that editors are liable to fall into near the end of the production process.

Like many magazines, I imagine, we are currently re-evaluating what we do, spurred on by the all-invasive millennium deadline. And as part of that review the editor's letter has looked vulnerable. 'It's a bit of fluff,' some have said. 'If it rehearses the arguments in the main section it's boring, while any pretence that it gives readers a demystifying glimpse behind the scenes (its original rationale) has long gone.'

If these arguments are true, my own guess is that it is only because we aren't hitting the right notes. Granted that describing the mechanics of magazine production would be a hit only with chronic insomniacs, there is usually at least one tricky decision or ethical dilemma involved somewhere in the creation of an issue that could usefully be exposed to the light.

So what would that be in this case? Perhaps the wrangling over whether we should cover the danger that the millennium bug in computers could set off nuclear weapons. This small matter of possibly imminent Armageddon did not loom fully into view until I was well down the road with an issue on education. For obvious reasons, it seemed like a topic which needed urgent attention - planning a magazine on the subject for February 2000 would be amusing perhaps but not exactly useful. Yet could I tear up my education project and go back to square one?

I put the question to the editorial team at one of our regular weekly meetings, which now involve an open phone conference with Toronto and will soon include Adelaide as well. I sketched out how both issues would work, put the pros and cons with admirable balance and... and... my colleagues divided down the middle, putting the ball back in my court. Thanks a bunch.

The solution I came up with was to continue with the education project but give over the central four pages of the magazine to a campaigning blast on the nuclear danger. This has changed the whole geography of the issue. It means, for example, that the education section has its factual graphics sprinkled throughout rather than collated on one setpiece visual. It also means there are two separate action pages (alarm call/action ideas and action) with extensive lists of ideas and contacts - even two separate campaigns which urge you to put pressure on governments by writing letters or postcards. But then you're always telling us you want to know how to help...

Letters
Letter from Lebanon
Update
The NI Interview with Robyn Archer
Reviews: plus Robert Graves classic
NI Crossword
Endpiece: by Arzu Merali
Country profile: Azerbaijan

FRONT COVER PHOTO:
SHEHZAD NOORANI / STILL PICTURES
MAGAZINE DESIGNED BY ALAN HUGHES
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER