'education' - tagged features

The Swedish government’s sparked a bad tempered debate this week over how schools should deal with the era of communist history in Europe and Russia. Sweden’s Education Minister wants to make classes on communism and the Soviet regime’s crimes obligatory. Some opponents say that by setting a rigid history syllabus for schools is itself quite authoritarian. Stalin would approve perhaps, if the subject was something other than his reviled gulags. 

As the years pass, the tragedy of the Holocaust, now more than six decades ago, is fading from living memory. The last survivors and eye witnesses are dying, and there are concerns that communicating the scale of the Nazi genocide and its importance to current and future generations will become more difficult. To try and counter that, the Berlin campus of a Jewish-American university has put together Germany's first master's degree dedicated to communicating the Holocaust to the public. This week the seven master students attended their first seminar. 

A new website which explains sex - in graphic detail - to teenagers in the Netherlands has come in for both hefty criticism and loud applause. Some say it fills a niche between formal sex education at school and the pornography readily available elsewhere on the net. Others think the site is too explicit. Radio Netherlands' reporter Marijke van den Berg talked with the site's creator. 

The issue of aggression in children is causing alarm in the Czech Republic. School bullying is a relatively new phenomenon in this former Eastern Bloc country: children would have led far more regimented lives two decades ago. School violence gets a lot of attention in the Czech press, and parents wonder what to do. Radio Prague’s Daniela Lazarova reports. 

And on to another interesting cross-cultural phenomenon: Esperanto - a language that was invented 120 years ago by a Polish Jew. Cynics mocked it as an idealistic cult for linguistic weirdos. But today there still some diehards lobbying for Esperanto to be the EU's official language. They argue Esperanto is perfect for the modern internet age without global barriers. Radio Prague's Pavla Horakova has been finding out more about the small but vibrant community of Esperanto speakers in the Czech Republic. 

Most Roma in Sweden don't finish school and truancy absenteeism rates are high. However, attitudes are now said to be changing, and more and more are recognizing the value of a good education. But now there are calls for schools to give Roma children more support. 

“Never again”: how many times have we heard that, after genocides, wars and human rights violations…..yet these are still happening. Well let’s zoom in on an original project which is hoping to change this… "So that children know" is the title of an EU-funded project, in the Czech Republic. It’s goal is to teach fourteen and fifteen-year olds about human rights. The idea is not new - what makes it special is that it aims to break with the old practice of memorizing a text; instead it encourages pupils to talk about various aspects of human rights – and takes them to a World War II concentration camp. Radio Prague’s Daniela Lazarova reports. 

The Nazi regime and the atrocities of World War II almost wiped out Jewish life in Germany. But, the number of Jews has been steadily increasing since the early 1990s, mainly a result of many Jews from the former Soviet Union moving to Germany. Comprehensive education for rabbis is once again available in Germany. This year, for the first time since the war, three Rabbis were ordained in Dresden. Germany's Jewish communities are awakening to new life. Kirsten Rulf visited one of them as he settled into his new job. 

A recent study revealed a massive increase in the number of overseas students enrolling at universities in the UK. In fact, the number has more than doubled since the mid 1990s. What's led to this huge rise, and what impact is it having on university education in the UK? Radio Prague's Ian Willoughby has been finding out. 

There are two things that come to mind when you think of Romanian education. On the one hand, really good specialists most of whom are now in America or in Western Europe and on the other hand an education infrastructure which has been completely neglected in the last 16 years. RRI’s Iulian Muresan went to see Bucharest’s largest student campus at the beginning of the school year.