Why use schools as battlegrounds

Why use schools as battlegrounds

There are many reasons why schools and students, despite being protected by international law, are targeted during times of armed conflict and unrest. Students collected together in a school, or isolated travelling to and from school, are prime targets for abduction by armed groups.

Children are often taken to be recruited as child soldiers, or used as human shields or human bombs. Schools are soft targets, and the targeting of children is very effective in campaigns of terror, having a destabilising effect on communities.

Schools and universities are also ideal locations for military headquarters and facilities, and can become central to war efforts. This makes them key military targets for opposing sides.

Schools can be seen by armed groups to represent state authority, and are therefore key targets in campaigns against the government. This is especially true when the groups disagree with the form of education being provided. This reality is perhaps best illustrated by Boko Haram, which in 2015 committed to the cause of Islamic State and renamed itself the Islamic State of West Africa.

Despite the change, the group remains best known as “Boko Haram”, which in the local Hausa dialect roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden”. Targeting schools and abducting children is a core strategy of the group, whose extremist beliefs oppose such education as sinful, and particularly object to the education of girls.

Boko Haram’s infamous 2014 abduction of 276 girls in Chibok sparked the #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign. According to Human Rights Watch, more than 910 schools have been destroyed by Boko Haram in Nigeria; 600 teachers have been murdered, and thousands have been more forced to flee.

What the rest of the world can do

All children have the right to an education, and that can only be secured when schools are safe places to study. While the world watches and encourages American children rallying to make their schools safer, it’s a salient time to remember that 75 million children worldwide experience significant disruption to their education in regions of conflict and insecurity.

Despite the United Nations declaring attacks on schools as one of the six grave violations that most impact on children during armed conflict, much remains to be done to safeguard education during conflict – particularly for girls.

This is largely because education is not seen as a priority in crisis situations. Its loss is not immediately life-threatening, so it often takes a back seat to other concerns. This forms part of what is sometimes referred to as “the humanitarian-development divide” – the disconnect between priorities during protracted crises. Education is often one of the first services to be lost during a crisis, despite its importance to communities.

Education attracts less than 2% of global humanitarian aid. Many affected countries invest far more on their military spending than they do on education.

While many initiatives and funds exist, there is still a need for greater coordination between government bodies and NGOs to effectively mount a response. And with countries slashing their aid budgets, this will become increasingly difficult.

There may also be a lack of political will to confront this problem by countries not directly affected. In Australia, this is reflected by the government’s current failure to endorse the Safe Schools Declaration – an international commitment supporting clear guidelines and reporting mechanisms to protect schools and education during armed conflict. These include the commitment not to use schools or universities for military purposes and to support measures to monitor and report on attacks on schools.

Education is a right, not a luxury to be indulged in better times. To rise out of conflict and create truly stable communities, education is a necessary investment in the future, and the international community shares a collective responsibility to protect it.

references:

https://theconversation.com/why-schools-become-battlegrounds-during-conflict-93851

how media making impact on cognitive learning(edweb seminar)

part 1: what is the cognitive learning ?

cognitive learning is a style of learning that encourages students to use their brains more effectively .this way encourages students to fully engage in the learning process so learning,thinking and remembering get easier.

 we are in the 21st century and children learn in the context of their social and cultural environment and media are in in the children's learning environments ,they are an important influence on burgeoning social cognition .
first part in the conference was talking about the age of the students that must receive the message from the media and choosing the content carefully depending on the age and also at some different ages of life students learn more from narrative storytelling, it work best to extract the moral message  from the content for example:

•  in early childhood: age realistic stories positive consequence and simpler storylines would work best with the students.
• middle childhood or early tween :introducing some nuance but still difficult to extract moral .
• teen years:less didactic would be more successful.

 part 2:media and cognitive learning:

• what does the research say about how the 21st century digital media and technology impacting our cognitive learning ?

we all know that cognitive learning is related to our capability to memorize things and our ability to critical thinking but the media nowadays is able to memorize everything and knows anything that would able to affect our memory and critical thinking for example some research shows that :

• students that have access on the internet taking more time to memorize things than that the students that have only computers and papers, also another study said that students with networking computers has the lower average in critical thinking from students with only papers and computers so we can conclude, that accessing the internet would affect negatively the students cognitive learning.
• just seeing a smart phone(with no sound) can affect cognitive performance , also a forced separation from a ringing phone can increase heart rate and anxiety,phantom vibration well documented (89% of people report experiencing these) and also a phone being on and being face up affect cognitive performance on the task so just having a phone can distract a cognitive attention and performance of the students.
• also taking photographs diminished memory of observed objects(students will recall the name of the folder in which the relevant information was located is easier to remember the information itself ).
• writing notes versus typing them improve comprehension and memory.
• also expectation of having later access of information can make us less inclined to encode and store information in long term memory (we remember what is important for us to remember or what we can't access through other means e.g : google).
• so what about computer usage and academic performance ? some study at west point shows 3 conditions : students with laptops ,ipad faceup and students with no computer. at the end of the quarter students with no computers conditions scored 1.7 points higher than other conditions so using computer in classroom not necessary would have  a positive effect on performance.
• however study shows that participants in video game condition show enhanced mental rotation ability but girls who play video games with spatial component improve dramatically in this area .

==>so we can conclude that digital media and technology impact cognitive performance in both positive and negative ways .

part 3:the combination of computer use internet and smart phone has changed the cognitive skills required of individuals . the students can rapidly check his or her smartphone whether the professor is right or indeed whether there isn't some other authority offering an entirely different approach .with the erosion of that relationship (between professor and students) goes the environment that nurtured it ; the segregated space of the classroom where for an hour or so all attention was focused on a single person who brought all of his or her experience  to the service of the group.this an argument that hate technology but nowadays technology in the class can make the relationship between the teacher and students more flexible and make the students more motivated, excited for learning. also there are some app that relate the parents with the students and classroom that will make student more enthusiastic and excited to do their best in the classroom.