Month: August 2017

August 6, 2017

YARP Greetings from Isabelle!

In my previous blog post I wrote about education, particularly education for the disabled children. Now, I want to focus on girls’ education. United States, where I live, seems more advanced towards female education, but other places, like South Sudan don’t provide good quality education for girls. In my opinion, girls are people too, they deserve quality education.

For example, in South Sudan, there is a total of 307 girls and 326 boys that attend the Tangal Basic School. There are 200 girls in the first grade, but in third grade there are less girls, and in fifth grade, even less. Now, in eighth grade, there are only two girls left, Tabita and Arruima who are both seventeen. Normally, girls their age are already married, and are forced to drop out of school.

I am pleased that education is slowly finding its way across the world, but the fact that the higher the grade the fewer girls in some countries is disappointing, as well as the fact that girls have to start a family at such a young age. In Armenia, it is the boys who sometimes drop out the school early in order to go and work for their families.

I have always had some questions about why females and males are treated somewhat differently. My mother took my sister and I to meet with an expert in issues on gender in Armenia, Ms. Nvart Manasian. I asked Ms. Manasian a few questions. Through all the information she provided us with, I was able to come up with a conclusion. Ms. Manasyan explained that before humans had evolved, and you could call males and females physically equal, when we had to hunt for food, is when we started to separate through gender.  When women had a baby on their shoulder they couldn’t fight as well as the males, or hunt as successfully either. Men got to eat what they hunted, and didn’t share for the sake of survival. In prehistoric times, I’m pretty sure everyone only thought for themselves, only made sure they would survive. Women, on the other hand, became mothers, and would sacrifice themselves for their child. Not being able to hunt, women lived off of berries, and grew less muscular and strong as the men, who got the good proteins from the meat. Now, both men and women have meat, but women’s history has made them smaller, and physically weaker than men.

Soon, as humans evolved, men started ruling and creating kingdoms. Women weren’t able to fight for the throne because they were too physically weak. Soon, men were the ones who went to war, and then became heros. Men were the ones who became scribes, and wrote down history. But they focused on their own gender, there were probably many women scientists who couldn’t get their voices heard. Take Nellie Bly, for example, a female journalist in the US in the 19th century. She had to work hard to get her articles published in the newspaper. Now, in places like South Sudan, families favor males over females, and send their boys to school instead of their girls. The girls grow up, get married, have children, at a young age and have to take school out of their schedule. The end result is they can’t get into good colleges, and they don’t get good jobs, and they are more likely to be poor.

I think that if more young girls were like Tabita and Arrumia, there would be more girls in school. If more girls were brave enough to stand up for their rights, like Nellie Bly did, the number of female heroes would be equivalent to the number of the male ones there are now. If women are more educated, the society becomes a better place, because women know how to properly take care of their families. It helps businesses become bigger since women in places like South Sudan can work too.

 

August 5, 2017

YARP Hello from Isabelle!

Armenia has great schools, but there are still many children who do not have access to quality education. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is an organization for children’s rights, is working around the world including in in Armenia so all children have the knowledge they need to live successful lives. Most children in Yerevan have access to education, but out in the smaller villages, not many children have the same privilege as the children in the city. A particular problem in villages is that there is lack of preschools.

Preschools are important because they prepare young children for school. Most children in the outskirts of Armenia enter school without knowing the letters, or even how to hold a pencil. Because they don’t know the letters, instead of learning how to read and write they have to learn the alphabet instead.

Like I mentioned before, most children in Armenia are able to go to school. Disabled children do not fall into that majority. The disabled don’t get the same quality education as those without disabilities. UNICEF believes that every child has a right to a bright future, as well as the right for education, including children with disabilities, with which I agree. Separating the disabled from those not disabled, will only be robbing the disabled from their society. They won’t be able to interact with others and normally will get lower quality education. If those with disabilities attend the same school as those without, this teaches the children without disabilities to care for their classmates. They will learn to be understanding, caring, and patient. These important skills will come handy later in life for those with and without disabilities.

In my opinion, no matter the child, girl or boy, disabled or not, should all get good education. This is one of UNICEF’s main goals, not only in Armenia. In many countries around the world 61 million children at the age of school are not going to school. UNICEF’s goal in education is to lower that number. Many children, not only in Armenia, disabled or not, deserve education. If a child’s education isn’t stable, this will result in an unstable future. I hope that by reading this post, you will donate some of your time to raise awareness for disabled children’s rights in Armenia and around the world.

YARP hello from Elise! I am greatly thankful to UNICEF staff in Armenia, for inviting me to a very interesting meeting about the needs of so many children I did not know about. I hope this post greatly helps UNICEF by informing others of these issues on access to education for all.

Along with the wonderful tourist attractions and rich cultural traditions, there are also many problems in Armenia, like in every country. They are not visible on the streets of Yerevan, the capital, but, away from Yerevan, in the smaller towns and villages, poor families struggle to feed their children. In addition, there are disabled children all over Armenia who are unable to get to school. There are also children in smaller towns and villages where there are no preschools. Children in such villages often cannot get to school as well, because the roads are too dangerous, on unstable bridges and icy in the winter. One of the main problems I am going to be writing about in this blog post is education and schools in smaller towns and villages. With the help of UNICEF, an international organization that benefits children’s education around the world, solutions are flourishing.

In the small town of Atan, the kids do not have access to quality education. In fact, many of them long to live in Yerevan. Also, Atan lacks a preschool, like many other villages. This may not seem like a major problem, but without preschools, the children are poorly prepared for elementary school. In first grade, the children barely know the alphabet, or even how to count to ten. When children are inadequately prepared for the first grade, they will fall behind and may drop out. Because of this, the children will be missing out on high quality universities, and will remain poor throughout their lives. The Armenian government pays for preschools in Yerevan, along with other big towns, but small villages like Atan are left out. The reasons for this are the costs. The local government is unable to pay for the preschools in smaller villages, such as the cost of the building, water, electricity, teacher salaries, etc.

UNICEF has introduced an idea for solving this problem, known as the alternative preschool. Usually a given town in Armenia already has a building that is not being used, or is partly used. UNICEF uses these buildings to create preschools, which cuts down on the cost for the building, water, electricity, etc. because the building is already being used for other purposes. Also, instead of hiring teachers, UNICEF trains local women to be teachers to work at the preschool. The preschool is only three to five hours a day, instead of a full eight, which also cuts down on the cost. Studies show that it is more important to get children into preschools when they are younger rather than later, even for shorter days. Shorter school days are cheaper and therefore possible to do for more years and they give access to more students. The good news is that after trying the alternative preschool method, the towns have adapted to it. Once an alternative preschool is created, the community is able to care for it without the help of UNICEF.

Another issue in education is that of children with disabilities. According to UNICEF, “there are at least 93 million children with disabilities in the world, but numbers could be much higher.” Some of these children are going to schools only for disabled children, and are missing the chance to interact with non-disabled children. UNICEF believes that disabled children should be integrated into regular classrooms. UNICEF calls this Inclusive Education. I agree with UNICEF about Inclusive Education, although teachers may not have the right knowledge about disabled children. The teacher may teach such students things they already know, or teaching them things way too hard for their level. UNICEF solves this problem by training teachers in regular schools how to interact with disabled children. If a family is lucky, they can send their child to a regular school, where they can learn to interact with all children instead of just with children with special needs in special schools. Sometimes families of children with special needs do not even have the money to send their child to any school at all. In other cases the family does not believe the child is capable of learning, and these children are called “out of school” children.

Overall, I agree with UNICEF’s mission that every child should have the right to quality education no matter what. Without education, children will not able to find a job when they grow up to help not only themselves, but also their society. Without jobs the society does not earn as much money, and the society may even become a dangerous place in which to live. This idea is similar to that of the food chain; without mosquitos there are no flies, then there are no snakes, then there are no eagles, etc. Quality education is interconnected with the society thriving and prospering. According to UNICEF, “an added year of quality education can increase an individual’s income by 10 per cent.” (www.unicef.org).

Lastly, I also agree with UNICEF that children with disabilities should be included in the same schools as children without disabilities in order to have a fair chance for quality education. In my elementary school in the United States, I had a friend in the fourth grade with a Down Syndrome, a type of disability. Interacting with her not only helped her learn, but I also learned the value of caring. If children with disabilities like this are included with children without disabilities, all the children are going to learn something, take something away from the experience.