Report: Protecting Education from Attack

A recent report from the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack entitled Study on Field-based Programmatic Measures to Protect Education from Attack.

Protecting higher education from attack

'Attacks on higher education may occur in countries where there is not an ongoing armed conflict, but when 

national governments, opposition groups, or other non-state actors fail to respect the ‘neutrality’ of education. 

It is therefore worth considering responses to attacks on education beyond situations of armed conflict in countries 

in which education is repressed, polarized, or highly politicized. 

Attacks on academic staff can often 

occur for publishing research as well as undertaking teaching.  

The negative consequences of attacks on higher education affect not just universities, but also primary and 

secondary schools that depend on quality teachers trained at the tertiary level and on research that informs 

pedagogy and curriculum at all levels. Attacks on higher education institutions and personnel also cause a 

‘brain drain’ as threatened scholars flee or are killed, diminishing the quality of education overall. The situation 

for scholars in Iraq is an extreme example: over 460 Iraqi scholars have been assassinated from 2003 to 

December 2011. 

Many more have been kidnapped and their families targeted or threatened in great numbers,

leaving them with no option but to flee. 

 

Overall, those assisting higher education personnel indicate that they are assisting those that have fled from 

many countries in almost every region of the world. Scholars and academics who face persecution work in many 

different disciplines - sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities - meaning that attacks on higher 

education are not always just about silencing the political opposition, but also about controlling ideas and knowledge in society.' 

The report takes a look at attacks on education from the perspective of: protection, prevention, advocacy, and monitoring and reporting. The end of the report provides several relevant country profiles. The sections on conflict sensitive policy and curriculum reform are worth reading. Check out the report here.

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Links to more Open Courses

In addition to the Open Yale Courses that I mentioned in this post. Below is a list of some more. 

Class Central lists all of the free online courses available at the links below.

From the likes of Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton: https://www.coursera.org/

As mentioned in a previous post, from MIT: http://www.mitx.mit.edu/

If you know of others, please feel free to share them in the comments box below. 

Open Yale Courses

Another one to add to all the fantastic Open courses and resources currently available on the web.

Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

Fantastic resource. Thanks to Dr Chris Blattman for sharing. Check out the courses for yourself.

Free Online Education for All

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. 

The full article from Forbes is here. 

This article is from last year, however raises the question of whether this approach can tackle the inaccessibility of HE in developing country contexts. Pros and cons of such an approach?