Category: Literacy

Pope Francis apologized Monday for the Catholic Church’s role in Canada’s former policy of separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to attend Christian schools, where many were abused.

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Pope Francis said at a former Indigenous residential school in the western Canadian town of Maskwacis, Alberta.

More than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend government-funded Christian residential schools from the late 1880s to the 1970s in an effort to distance them from their native languages and cultures.

Many of the children were physically and sexually abused in a system that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”

Thousands of Indigenous peoples gathered Monday to hear the pope speak near the site of the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School, many wearing traditional dress. Others wore orange shirts, a symbol of residential school survivors.

The pope said the residential schools were a “disastrous error” that was “incompatible” with the gospel and said the schools had “devastating” effects on generations of Indigenous peoples.

“I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time,” he said.

He apologized for the Catholic Church’s support of a “colonizing mentality” and called for a “serious investigation” of the traumas inflicted on Indigenous children in Catholic educational institutions.

The pope has already apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in the Canadian residential schools during a visit by Indigenous delegates to the Vatican earlier this year. However, this is the first time the pope has apologized on Canadian soil.

The abuses at the Canadian residential schools drew international attention in the past year following the discoveries of hundreds of potential burial sites at former schools. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on the pope to apologize for the abuses on Canadian soil.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has apologized for Canada’s role in the residential school system, saying it was an “incredibly harmful government policy.”

On his arrival in Canada on Sunday, the pope was met by representatives of Canada’s three main Indigenous groups — First Nations, Metis and Inuit – along with Trudeau.

On his flight from Rome to Edmonton on Sunday, Francis told reporters “This is a trip of penance. Let’s say that is its spirit.”

The pope’s visit to Canada will also take him to Quebec City and Iqaluit, the capital of the territory of Nunavut.

The 85-year-old pope canceled a trip earlier this month to Africa because of a knee problem.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

GENEVA — A United Nations study finds 222 million children and adolescents worldwide have had their education disrupted by multiple crises.

Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, produced the study. When the organization was created in 2016, the number of crisis-affected children whose education had been disrupted stood at around 75 million.

ECW Director Yasmine Sherif says multiple crises over the past six years have boosted the number to 222 million among more than 40 countries.

“Conflicts are raging around the world — we know that, but they also are more and more protracted. But the growing record high number of refugees and internally displaced, as a result of conflicts and climate-induced disasters, have also contributed to this number, as have, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic,” Sherif said.

The study finds 78.2 million children worldwide have dropped out of school entirely. Education experts say those children are unlikely to resume their education, resulting in a detrimental impact on their prospects and earning capacity.

Sherif says she has visited countries where most children currently are out of school, and she has seen what happens to children in crisis-ridden countries such as Mali, Chad, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

“When you do not go to school, you are very exposed to being — if you are a boy — forcibly recruited into armed groups, terrorist groups, militia, government groups,” she said. “And, if you are a girl, you are exposed to becoming part of a gender-based violence at homes, sexual violence, trafficking, early marriages, and early childbirth.”

Sherif says the new data must be a wake-up call for all leaders and policymakers as more children are being left behind due to crises. She says the international community must do more to support their educational needs, or there will be far-reaching negative impacts for human and economic development.

Source: Voice of America

A total of 1.39 million children in the Tigray region are currently missing out on education because of Ethiopia’s civil war, according to the United Nations.

While journalists are banned from entering Tigray, VOA was able to access the neighboring Amhara region, where schools are beginning to reopen, after Tigrayan forces that occupied much of the region withdrew in December.

But the occupation left deep scars. Residents in the town of Gashena say Tigrayan forces used the classrooms as a base, left graffiti on classroom walls, insulting the Amhara ethnic group and Ethiopia’s prime minister, and dumped bodies into a mass grave on school grounds.

The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front has denied such accusations and called for an independent investigation.

One student, Ayten Mune, recounted returning to the school after the Tigrayan forces had left.

He said that when he returned to the school, there were bloodstains, broken desks, and broken computers here and there. The TPLF had used the school as a hospital, which is why there was so much blood, he said.

The deputy headmaster of the school, Getnet Habtamu, said he had to mobilize local authorities to exhume the mass grave filled with bodies of soldiers and civilians killed during the fighting because of the psychological impact it had on students.

He said students refused to attend because the school was a total mess and that there was blood all over the place. He added that the community worked together to bring the students back to school, but teachers had to go door to door to the students’ houses to persuade them to come back.

Children traumatized

Farther north, near the town of Sekota, the U.N. provides schooling for children displaced by the conflict, but many of them, like Bertukan Gebrat, have been traumatized from witnessing the fighting.

She said her brother was killed in an explosion while he was playing with his friend and that she had seen many bad things. “I even saw people killed after having their limbs cut off,” she said.

Yasmine Sherif, the director of Education Cannot Wait, a U.N.-funded nonprofit, said education can play an essential part in helping children like Bertukan and Mune build resilience to trauma.

“When you see family members, parents, siblings, rape, killing, injury, a child during the formative years see all this violence or are even the subject of this violence, will logically become traumatized and that’s why mental health and psychosocial services are another very existential, lifesaving component of education,” she told VOA via Zoom.

She added that while food security and access to water are essential to people displaced by war, education is also essential in the long term if countries are to build back effectively and avoid future conflict.

For the nearly 1.4 million students entering their third school year disrupted by war in Tigray, the consequences will likely be felt for the rest of their lives.

Source: Voice of America

Cameroon observed World Autism Awareness Day Saturday with rights groups advocating for autistic children to be given an education. Supporters say autistic children often can’t go to school because autism is falsely believed to be a result of witchcraft.

The Timely Performance Care Center, a school for disabled children in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, organized a campaign for parents and communities to stop the stigma that autistic kids often are subject to.

The center has an enrollment of 70 autistic children.

The school’s manager, Betty Nancy Fonyuy, said autistic children are frequently kept at home because of stigma. She said many communities and parents abuse the rights of autistic children by refusing to educate them or give them the freedom to socialize with other children.

“We want parents to accept the children that God has given them and to be able to educate the society that these children are not a form of divine punishment for witchcraft or a class of any evil thing. These children have a lot to offer to society if given a chance. Give them the chance. The world needs to know what autism is. Accept individuals born and living with autism,” she said.

Fonyuy said in January 2021, the center organized a door-to-door campaign to urge parents to send their autistic children to school. She said the response was encouraging, but that many parents still hide their autistic children at home.

To mark World Autism Awareness Day on Saturday, scores of community leaders, parents of autistic children and heads of educational establishments in Cameroon’s economic capital, Douala, emphasized at an event that autistic children, like any other children, need love, care and education.

Among the speakers was Carine Bevina, a psychologist at the University of Douala.

Bevina said parents should enroll their children in school because the parents would find it difficult to train their autistic children on their own. Bevina spoke by a messaging app from Douala.

She said autism level one means that a child needs regular attention and help to surmount difficulties initiating social interactions and maintaining reciprocity in social interactions. She said autism level two means that a child has repetitive behaviors and requires substantial support, and autism level three means the child’s communication skills are regressing.

Ndefri Paul, 45, is the father of an 11-year-old autistic child.

Paul said he came out on World Autism Awareness Day to tell anyone who doubted it that autistic children can compete with other children if well educated. He says in 2021, his autistic son, like many children without autism, wrote and passed the entrance examination to get into secondary school.

The educational talk at the Douala city council courtyard on Saturday was part of activities marking World Autism Awareness Day.

Similar activities were held in towns, including Bafoussam, a western commercial city, Garoua and Maroua on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria, and Yaounde.

Officials in Cameroon say there are 750,000 autistic children in the central African state. Sixty-five percent of them are denied education.

Cameroon’s Social Affairs minister, Pauline Irene Nguene, said communities should stop stigmatizing autistic children with the erroneous belief that autism is divine punishment for parents of autistic children. She said communities should denounce parents who hide autistic children at home and schools that refuse to teach children with the disorder.

The U.N. says that autism is genetic and families with one child with autism have an increased risk of having another child with autism. The U.N. says family members of a person with autism also tend to have higher rates of autistic traits.

World Autism Awareness Day celebrates the resilience of people affected by the disorder and supports causes that promote awareness of autism. Children in schools are educated about autism and encouraged to accept it. The U.N. launched World Autism Awareness Day for the first time in 2007.

Source: Voice of America