Education | Simon Roughneen

Push to ban books such as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from schools in Ireland – dpa international

Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird on a bookshelf in a west of Ireland home (Simon Roughneen)

DUBLIN — A county council in Ireland is calling on the education ministry to review the school curriculum for books containing allegedly offensive language. The council in Meath, a county adjoining capital Dublin, in Ireland’s east, is petitioning the Department of Education and Skills to consider culling novels such as “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the latter a Pulitzer Prize-winning anti-racism parable. Citing conversations with mixed-race families, councillor Alan Lawes said on Friday that the books caused students to use “certain racial slurs” against classmates. “I don’t think 12-year-olds have the mental capacity to deal with such books,” Lawes said, discussing the council’s request on Newstalk, a Dublin radio station. Ex-diplomat Eamon Delaney said on the station that people should be “wary of banning books … it is censorship.”

Singapore’s schools reopen despite pandemic, bucking global trend – dpa international

KUALA LUMPUR — Singapore’s schools and kindergartens reopened as scheduled on Monday after a holiday, a day after the government announced a ban on visitors due to the pandemic. The reopening comes as the number of cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, continues to increase in Singapore, with 32 new cases announced on Sunday for a total of 455. Two people have died. That number is relatively low compared with countries in Europe, the pandemic’s “epicentre” according to the World Health Organization, where widespread school closures have been ordered in recent weeks

Singapore to reopen schools as local virus transmission recedes – dpa international

KUALA LUMPUR – Singapore’s schools and kindergartens will open again on Monday, the country’s Ministry of Education announced on Thursday, allaying concerns a week of holidays could be extended due to the coronavirus outbreak. Singapore’s coronavirus cases increased from 178 to 313 over the past week and is the second-highest in south-east Asia after Malaysia’s 790. Schools will deploy “enhanced precautionary measures” that will include daily temperature checks and “wipe-down routines” in classrooms when they return, the ministry said. Singapore has seen a reduction in locally transmitted cases of coronavirus, but the Health Ministry announced a new daily record high of 47 positive diagnoses on Wednesday night. Of the new cases, 33 were described as “imported.”

Tongue-tied: How English is winning Cambodia’s war of words – Southeast Asia Globe/RTÉ World Report

Chinese-language signage on one of the many new high rise apartment blocks being built in Phnom Penh . Simon Roughneen

PHNOM PENH — Dependent on its increasingly assertive neighbour China for investment and on faraway markets in Europe and North America for exports, Cambodia’s 16.2 million people, like residents of any small country, are exposed to the flux and churn of fortune and influence from without. Such vulnerabilities are not just economic. The national language, Khmer, is increasingly treading lexical water, as if about to be pulled under by waves of technological and scientific neologisms. “Hundreds of new technical, scientific and legal terms are added into the English dictionary every year,”said Khoun Theara of Future Forum, a Cambodian think tank.Such terms, usually coined first in English, present tongue-twisting translation dilemmas for Khmer speakers trying to localise new words in what is the mother tongue for around 97% of Cambodians. That is not to say that other tongues in the region do not face similar dilemmas. “All Southeast Asian languages have difficulty in adapting to the modern world,” said Jean-Michel Filippi, professor of linguistics at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

Asia’s universities rise in global reputation rankings – Nikkei Asian Review

JAKARTA — Asia’s universities are continuing to rise in prominence relative to established Western counterparts, according to a global survey of over 10,000 academics. Twenty-one Asian universities made it into a list of the world’s top 100 universities by reputation. Of those, six are in mainland China, with five in Japan, three in both Hong Kong and South Korea, two in Singapore, and one each in India and Taiwan. The list was compiled by Times Higher Education, the U.K.-based publishers of the World University Rankings, an annual benchmark of tertiary institutions. Singapore’s representatives — the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University — both made notable gains, with NUS rising three places to 24th overall and NTU leaping from the 81-90 grouping to the 51-60 decile.

Students in east China and Vietnam top rich-world peers – Nikkei Asian Review

JAKARTA — Long before emerging as one of the leading proponents of Brexit, Michael Gove’s role as British education minister took him to Asia, where he declared in 2010 that “places like Shanghai and Singapore put us to shame,” when it comes to quality of schooling. Perhaps Gove should not have been surprised, given that the previous year Shanghai topped the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s PISA science rankings. The Program for International Student Assessment scores are published every three years and rank students in mathematics, science and reading. Eight years on, it is not only well-funded Asian schools such as those in Singapore, which topped PISA’s 2015 rankings, that are outpacing the West, according to a new World Bank report on education in the Asia-Pacific region. “Average performance in Vietnam and in B-S-J-G [Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Guangdong] regions in China surpassed OECD member countries,” said the report.

In first, 3 Asian schools crack world’s top 30 university ranking – Nikkei Asian Review

JAKARTA — For the first time, three Asian universities are in the top 30 of the 2018 World University Rankings published by Times Higher Education. The rankings cover more than 1,000 universities worldwide and are arguably the best-known and most prestigious of such league tables. The new list for 2018 places the National University of Singapore as the highest ranked Asian school at 22nd, level with the University of Toronto. The other Asian schools in the top 30 are China’s Peking University at 27th — tied with New York University and the University of Edinburgh — and Tsinghua University, also in China, at 30th.

Diverse business models pose a test for Asian MBA programs – Nikkei Asian Review

SINGAPORE — Asia’s business schools have much ground to cover if they are to blend the region’s business models with the old nuts and bolts of MBA curricula borrowed from longer-established Western institutions. Not only is the region vast and diverse, from wealthy Singapore and Hong Kong to the middle classes emerging in China and Indonesia, the types of companies are also varied. Students come from or aim for companies as disparate as government-linked corporations, Asian-style family businesses, big Western multinationals, as well as an array of tech-based startups launched by the region’s young entrepreneurs. “The culture and the institutional details are very different,” said Nilanjan Sen, associate dean of Graduate Studies at Nanyang Business School in Singapore, discussing the gamut of businesses across Asia.

Asia schools itself in the art of business – Nikkei Asian Review

SINGAPORE/HONG KONG — There are plenty of metrics to chart Asia’s economic rise over the last two decades, ranging from economic growth rates and industrial output to tourist numbers and car sales. Less noticed, but just as striking, is the emergence of around a dozen first-rate Asian business schools. According to the Financial Times* global ranking of Master of Business Administration courses — an annual league table based on jobs found and money earned by graduates — 11 Asian business schools feature in the top 50 this year (including INSEAD, founded in France in 1957, but now French-Asian, with a campus in Singapore since 2000). “We can certainly link this with overall economic growth in knowledge-economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, which can regularly be found in the top 20s of global innovation indices,” said Mansoor Iqbal, senior MBA editor at Quacquarelli Symonds, an education consultancy.

Asian universities edge up world rankings – Nikkei Asian Review

JAKARTA — One of the world’s leading university ranking systems has found significant improvement in Asia’s tertiary education institutions over the past year, although long-established Western bodies continue to dominate the field in most key academic subjects. QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a London-based group, published its 2017 rankings covering 1,127 universities from 74 countries across 46 subjects. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described as “perennial rivals” by QS, led all universities in the field in 15 and 12 subjects, respectively. But the prominence of Asian universities has been increasing in recent years. While elite U.S. and European institutions are likely to remain at the top of the rankings in the near future, more Asian universities nonetheless are moving up the list, as regional economies grow and education spending increases. “It seems certain that Asia’s leading institutions will continue to strongly displace the second tier of North American and European institutions,” said QS research director Ben Sowter.