Pictures have emerged allegedly showing Chinese schoolchildren hooked up to intravenous drips as a study aid ahead of the country’s notoriously difficult university entrance exams.

Students at Xioagang high school in Hubei province have reportedly been using the drips, filled with amino acids, in yet another example of how children are pushed to succeed at the highest level.

Gao Pingqiang, a school official, told The China Daily that the drips had become popular with children as there were no adverse health effects.

“The school will not suspend the injection and we will continue if students want it,” he said.

The dreaded exam, which is compared to “the stampede of 10,000 horses trying to cross a single log bridge”, is known as the “black” month among students.

Each year there are reportedly suicides before and during the exams. One third of students are excluded from university as a result.

Some of the questions in the exams can be baffling. In 2010, one 800-word essay question asked: “Why chase mice when there are fish to eat?”

of-praxis:

In the New York Times on March 7, Charles Murray offers some solutions to the class divide, then dismisses them nearly as quickly as he mentions them on the grounds that they wouldn’t actually work or aren’t necessary. Whether his facts on the class divide are accurate is not the subject of this post, but rather a closer look at a couple of his “solutions.”

Murray makes some decent points about the problems with unpaid internships and the benefits they may afford only those who come from families wealthy enough to allow such experiences. Aside from offering children of well-off parents the ability to pad their resume with unpaid internships , my colleague Ross Eisenbrey argues further that illegal unpaid internships are a scourge on the labor market. Murray rightly states that, “Internships that pay the minimum wage are still much more feasible for affluent students than for students paying their own way through college.”

The part of his article that I take issue with are his arguments about access to higher education. Murray suggests replacing ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action (an argument for another day), then later dismisses it as unnecessary, because “a high proportion of academically gifted children from the working class already get scholarships to good schools.”  Let’s take a look at the evidence.

The relevant issue is the quality of education accessible to children from families in different positions in the income scale. The figure below compares the family income of children in the entering classes at top-tier universities.  Nearly three-quarters of those in the top-tier universities come from families with the highest incomes, while 3 percent and 6 percent of the entering class come from the lowest and second lowest income groups, respectively – or, the bottom 50 percent of families.

(Source: cosmopolitan-fascist)

anticapitalist:

Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.

“If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school,” says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.

“Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,” Cristóbal says. “It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.”

After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. “When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education,” says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.

Read More

Holy shit. This is fucking awesome.

reblogging myself again because I can’t get over how awesome this is.

Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.

“If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school,” says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.

“Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,” Cristóbal says. “It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.”

After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. “When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education,” says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.

Read More

Holy shit. This is fucking awesome.

OpenTeacher is an opensource vocabulary training application that helps you learn a foreign language!

Enter a list of words in both a known and a foreign language, and OpenTeacher tests you.

OpenTeacher 2.2 has the following features:

• Smart question asking and interval training
• Think answer, shuffle answer and repeat answer input modes
• Easy symbol, Greek and Cyrillic input
• Read and write T2K (Teach2000), wrts and read ABBYY Lingvo Tutor files
• Save and open your online WRTS lists
• Print your word lists
• Available in Arabic, Trad. Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

OpenTeacher 2.2.1 is available for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Cool.

Reasons why I track the open source tag.

(Source: edistech)

mindbabies:

sarahlee310:

cwnl:

A comprehensive site providing thousands of downloadable Video lectures, Live Online Tests,etc in the fields of Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, Medicine, Management and Accounting, Dentistry, Nursing, Psychology, History, Language Training, Literature, Law, Economics, Philosophy,Astronomy, Political Science etc FREE to its visitors…

This site provides free video and audio lectures of whole courses conducted by faculty from reputed universities around the world. Science Animations provide students with fun and innovative ways of learning. Free live timed online tests with instant feedback and explanations will help you refine your test taking skills. Most of the materials offered are licensed by the respective institutes under a Creative Commons License.

Pass this on friends, it’s as legitimate as it sounds. Online education for free, cataloging a plethora of subjects ranging from the Arts to the Sciences to the Literature. Dig through, educate yourself.

Great resouce.  Thanks - got it bookmarked now.  And don’t forget the Khan Academy - another great free learning source.

Saved.

keeping this forever

(Source: )