1 . Mind the gap year

Young people in Finland enjoy one of the world's best school systems. By the age of 15 they perform above average in international tests of science, reading and math. That makes it annoying that once they leave school, their progress often comes to a stop. In America 90% of those who begin bachelor's degree do so in the same year they finish school. In Finland only 20% do.

    1    Universities have traditionally made applicants pass long- winded entrance exams, in addition to tests they take at school. Excelling at both in the same year is difficult: school-leavers commonly perform worse than applicants who are a few years older and have had more time to prepare.

The result is that Finland's smartest cookies end up taking at least one and sometimes several unplanned gap years. Many find that a pain.    2    Finland's population is among the fastest-ageing in Europe. It cannot afford to let ambitious youngsters idle for such a long time.

The government is trying to shake things up. Changes that came into full force last year require universities to accept at least half of applicants solely on the basis of their scores in school.    3    Mr. Pekkarinen says early signs suggest the reforms are helping to bring down the age at which most students start their studies.

Making admissions more efficient will help the government benefit more from the cash it is spending in expanding the number of spots on offer. The share of young Finns with a degree has not changed much for a decade.    4    The government wants to hit 50% by 2030. Last year it funded about 4000 more places to help youngsters put out by the pandemic. Perhaps one day Finland's school-leavers will come to miss all the time they used to get off.

2 . AGCCI builds digital skills and momentum (动力) towards a better future

In the rural Rwandan village where Chantal grew up, access to digital technology was basically non-existent. But when she was selected to attend one of the country’s top high schools, Chantal took to computer science right away. After doing well in her exams, she told her mother she wanted to pursue a career in programming. Her mother’s response, she says, did not surprise her: “She laughed and said ‘Do you know where you are from? That’s for students from the cities, rich families or boys,’” Chantal recalls.

Though the details vary, versions of Chantal’s story are shared by girls across Africa and around the world.     1     Even for girls who do have exposure to tech, their interest is often dampened by a lack of gender-responsive and interdisciplinary curricula. This was the experience of Sizolwethu, whose high school offered classes on information and communication technologies: “I was fortunate,” she says, “but I was never that much in love with it,” The courses had failed to connect technology to the real-world challenges she saw facing her community and country — a key driver of many girls’ career choices, research shows.

    2     There, she says, her passion for tech grew as the camp “opened eyes to the game changing innovations that can impact Africa. I learned that with little or no resources, I can make a huge difference if passion and determination are there.”

Launched in 2018 by UN Women and the African Union Commission (AUC), AGCCI working to empower girls across Africa by helping them build digital literacy (数字素养) a computer skills and placing them on the path to tech careers.

AGCCI’s coding camp was a turning point for Chantal, too. She credits the initiative was pushing her to pursue Information Technology at the university level — despite the pressure she was receiving against it.     3    

    4     Awa Ndiaye-Seck, UN Woman Special Representative to the African Union and UNECA says, “We are to address not only the policy-level bottlenecks related to access to technology and finances, but also the gender-based harmful norms and practices that prevent women and girls for pursuing STEM fields.”

5 . According to A Guide for Families by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children, preteens, and teens can lie for varying reasons.    1     Their upsetting situations could include failing a class. and other struggles with things about themselves or fitting in with their peers.

    2    . This is not to say that lying is acceptable, but the less parents take it personally, the more they can calmly and constructively help their child. Children and teens who fall into anxiety easily will use lying as an unhealthy coping strategy.

What should a parent or caregiver do? Try to keep in mind that kids can be quite self-absorbed and they often don’t understand how hurtful lies can be. With this in mind, here are a few tips to help promote truthfulness in your child at any age.

    3     If you overreact, then you are just building a barrier between you and your child, Calmly discuss or lecture about honesty and dishonesty and why they chose to lie.     4    Your understanding may not be able to stop your teen from creating those everyday lies, but you can convey that there are other options available.

Keep in mind that addressing lying behaviours is a process not a quick fix.    5     But if you keep your own emotion positively, your child or teen is more likely to eventually open up.

While in the short term you may just get a shrug, keeping yourself calm to create a sense of emotional safety will help your voice of truth and reason be heard throughout their lives.

9 . Thousands of students, faculty and staff boycotted classes and staged rallies across the 10-campus University of California (UC) on Thursday to protest dramatic cuts to the system’s budget and proposed additional hikes in undergraduate fees.

The authorities of the University of California, stung by a 20% cutback in state support due to the state budget crisis, are planning to increase student fees another 32%. The University of California system must chop $637 million out of its budget this year following the agreement between Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legislature on how to close California’s massive $26 billion gap in July. Many of the protesters believe the constant increase in fees over the past decade is endangering the university’s mission as a public university that offers students an outstanding education at a cost that middle- and working-class families can afford.

“It’s not just an economic crisis,” says Shannon Steen, a UC Berkeley professor who helped form Save the University to protest cuts to the budget, “it’s really a political crisis around the two-thirds rule in the legislature that holds the state hostage to a minority of legislators who are not doing what the people of California want”. California is the only state in the nation that has a two-thirds requirement for the passage of tax increases and to pass a budget. These two rules are at the root of the state’s chronic budget grief.

UC Irvine Anthropology Professor Victonia Bernal spoke passionately to about 125 students in the Social Science Hall saying “the beauty of the University of California is that it is an elite intellectual institution, but it is not elitist. If there were huge problems with the University of California, that would be one thing. Instead, we are taking something that by all measures is a great success and tearing it down.” Student leader Isaac Miller says the university community came together to “protest the defunding of public education by the State of California and the crisis of priorities of the university administration.” “It was stunning,” says Steen. “In the 20 years since I was an undergraduate here, I have never seen anything like this.”

The demonstrations did not disrupt schoolwork. A spokesman for University of California President Mark Yudof said most classes were held and that “most of the action was at the rallies.” But there will be more rallies. Protest organizers at Berkeley said that discussions are under way for a march on Sacramento that would include participants from the UCs, the 23-campus California State University system and the states’ junior colleges.“This is just the beginning,” says Miller. “It’s a wake up call to students about what is happening to their education.”

10 . An important lesson in the moral education of children could be as close as the book in their hands. Stories can play a role in changing the importance of particular moral values in young audiences, according to the result of a new study.

“Media can greatly influence separate moral values and get kids to place more or less importance on those values depending on what is uniquely stressed in that content,” says Lindsay Hahn, PhD, a professor in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.

Hahn is first author of the new study, which adds an important part to a body of literature that explores how media content affects children. While many previous studies have focused on broad conceptualisations (概念化), like positive or negative effects of specific content, Hahn’s study looks at how reading of content featuring specific moral values might influence the weight kids place on those values.

Do children reading about particular moral characteristics absorb those qualities as building blocks for their own morality? The findings suggest so, and further support how this indirect approach to socializing children’s morality can add to the direct teaching of moral principles kids might receive through formal instruction.

For the study, Hahn and her colleagues took the main character from a teenager story and edited the content to reflect in each version (版本) the study’s focus on one of four moral values. A fifth version was changed in a way that featured an amoral main character. The stories were shared with about 200 participants between the ages of 10 and 14. The team then measured the importance kids place on moral values to find out how participants might be influenced by specific stories.

“Measuring these effects can be difficult,” says Hahn. “That’s why one purpose of this research was to develop a measure of moral values for kids”.