PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Schools an ideological battleground in Sudanese strife, scholar says

2010-10-28
(Press-News.org) Education is often heralded as an engine for peace and prosperity, but in the fifty-year civil war that has gripped Sudan, schools have played an important role in deepening the country's divisions. That's the conclusion of Anders Breidlid, a professor of international education and development at Oslo University College. His research on education in Sudan is published in the November issue of Comparative Education Review.

Since taking power in northern Sudan in 1989, the Arab-dominated National Congress Party (NCP) "targeted the Ministry of Education to conduct their 'Islamic crusade,'" Breidlid writes. "President al-Bashir announced in 1990 that the national education system on all levels should be based on Islamic values." Arabic was decreed as the medium of instruction, and texts took on a strong Arab orientation, with few, if any, references to South Sudanese history, religion, and culture.

The Arabization of the education system alienated the people of South Sudan, who are largely Christian or adherents of indigenous religions. Interviews conducted between 2002 and 2004 by Breidlid and his team of researchers capture the depth of southern resentment. "Recently [the Khartoum government] said that they wanted to impose Islamic education on us with no concessions to Christians," one interviewee said. "I told them, if they do, this is why the war broke out in the South. You know that this community doesn't belong to the Muslim community! We are supposed to have rights. We are talking bitterly to them. … We have the right to practice our Christian faith! I just told them: 'If you want to kill me, it's OK, but I want to die as a Christian.'"

Breidlid argues that the educational discourse in liberated areas in the South was ideologically different from NCP's Islamic education discourse. Southern schools pursued "a modernist, secular educational curriculum and used a local language (or English) as the medium of instruction for the first 4 years of primary school," Breidlid writes. English became the medium of instruction from grade 5 onward. The curriculum stressed science education and a more Western perspective. While this shared educational vision served to unite disparate factions within Southern Sudan, it deepened the rift between the North and South.

"While the southern schools are not necessarily abused for war propaganda purposes, they signal an epistemological position that is in conflict with the Islamic educational discourse in the North," Breidlid writes. "It is the complexity of this situation, where the educational discourses reflect the political discourses on the macro level, that makes the North-South conflict so intractable and that dampers hope for a complete resolution to the conflict and a united Sudan. These are the issues that southerners will have to consider when they vote in the referendum scheduled for [January] 2011."

### Anders Breidlid, "Sudanese Images of the Other: Education and Conflict in Sudan." Comparative Education Review: 54:4

Founded in 1957, Comparative Education Review investigates education throughout the world and the social, economic, and political forces that shape it. The journal is sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society and published by the University of Chicago Press.


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Not so fast -- sex differences in the brain are overblown

2010-10-28
People love to speculate about differences between the sexes, and neuroscience has brought a new technology to this pastime. Brain imaging studies are published at a great rate, and some report sex differences in brain structure or patterns of neural activity. But we should be skeptical about reports of brain differences between the sexes, writes psychological scientist Cordelia Fine in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results from these studies may not necessarily withstand the tests of larger sample ...

Scientists issue call to action for archaeological sites threatened by rising seas

Scientists issue call to action for archaeological sites threatened by rising seas
2010-10-28
Should global warming cause sea levels to rise as predicted in coming decades, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal areas around the world will be lost to erosion. With no hope of saving all of these sites, archaeologists Torben Rick from the Smithsonian Institution, Leslie Reeder of Southern Methodist University, and Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk. Writing in the Journal of Coastal Conservation and using California's Santa Barbara Channel as a case study, the researchers illustrate ...

Prospective voters and the new health care law

2010-10-28
Boston, MA – A comprehensive review of national opinion polls, including newly released data, shows that those who say they intend to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate in 2010 and those who say they intend to vote for a Republican in their district hold starkly different views of what they want the future of health reform legislation to be, mirroring the divide between Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress on this issue. Nearly three-fourths (73%) of registered voters who say they intend to vote for a Democratic candidate favor the health care legislation ...

Doctors' sense of mission, self-identity key in choice to work in underserved areas

2010-10-28
Medical schools and clinics could boost the number of primary care physicians in medically underserved areas by selecting and encouraging students from these communities, who often exhibit a strong sense of responsibility for and identification with the people there, according to a new study by UCLA researchers and colleagues published in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Training these students in underserved settings during medical school and their residencies could also increase the likelihood they would continue serving those populations, ...

Tumor suppressor acts as oncogene in some cancers, say Mayo Clinic researchers

2010-10-28
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida have found that a molecule long believed to be a beneficial tumor suppressor — and thus a potential cancer drug target — appears to act as an oncogene in some lethal brain tumors. The protein, epithelial cadherin (E-cadherin), is known for its ability to keep cancer cells glued together, preventing them from breaking away and metastasizing. But, based on their findings, published online in PLoS ONE, the scientists suggest E-cadherin can also function as an oncogene in some cancers. An oncogene helps push cancer ...

Structural genomics accelerates protein structure determination

2010-10-28
Proteins are molecular machines that transport substances, catalyze chemical reactions, pump ions, and identify signaling substances. They are chains of amino acids and the individual amino acid sequence is known for many of them. However, the functions a protein can carry out inside the cell are determined by the three-dimensional spatial structure of the protein. Establishing this so-called tertiary structure presents a great challenge to scientists. There is, thus, a lot of catching up to be done in structure analysis. To push progress, the National Institute of General ...

NOAA: Tagged narwhals track warming near Greenland

2010-10-28
In a research paper published online Saturday in the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans, a publication of the American Geological Union (AGU), scientists reported the southern Baffin Bay off West Greenland has continued warming since wintertime ocean temperatures were last effectively measured there in the early 2000s. Temperatures in the study were collected by narwhals, medium-sized toothed Arctic whales, during NOAA-sponsored missions in 2006 and 2007. The animals were tagged with sensors that recorded ocean depths and temperatures during feeding dives from the ...

Researchers find a 'liberal gene'

2010-10-28
Liberals may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4. The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views. Appearing in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics published by Cambridge University Press, the research focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study ...

Deadly monkeypox virus might cause disease by breaking down lung tissue

Deadly monkeypox virus might cause disease by breaking down lung tissue
2010-10-28
RICHLAND, Wash. -- A new study of an exotic, infectious virus that has caused three recent outbreaks in the United States reveals clues to how the virus might damage lungs during infection. The findings also suggest possible new ways to treat lung diseases in humans. Not only does the infection from monkeypox virus increase production of proteins involved in inflammation, but it decreases production of proteins that keep lung tissue intact and lubricated. The findings appear in an upcoming issue of Molecular & Cellular Proteomics. "Going into this study, we thought ...

Exposure to BPA associated with reduced semen quality

2010-10-28
Oakland, Calif.(October 28, 2010) — Increasing urine BPA (Bisphenol-A) level was significantly associated with decreased sperm concentration, decreased total sperm count, decreased sperm vitality and decreased sperm motility, according to a Kaiser Permanente study appearing in the journal of Fertility and Sterility. The five-year study recruited 514 workers in factories in China and compared workers who had high urine BPA levels with those with low urine BPA. Men with higher urine BPA levels had 2-4 times the risk of having poor semen quality, including low sperm concentration, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Being physically active, even just a couple of days a week, may be key to better health

High-fat diet promote breast cancer metastasis in animal models

A router for photons

Nurses and AI collaborate to save lives, reduce hospital stays

Multi-resistance in bacteria predicted by AI model

Tinker Tots: A citizen science project to explore ethical dilemmas in embryo selection

Sensing sickness

Cost to build multifamily housing in California more than twice as high as in Texas

Program takes aim at drinking, unsafe sex, and sexual assault on college campuses

Inability to pay for healthcare reaches record high in U.S.

Science ‘storytelling’ urgently needed amid climate and biodiversity crisis

KAIST Develops Retinal Therapy to Restore Lost Vision​

Adipocyte-hepatocyte signaling mechanism uncovered in endoplasmic reticulum stress response

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Low LDL cholesterol levels linked to reduced risk of dementia

Thickening of the eye’s retina associated with greater risk and severity of postoperative delirium in older patients

Almost one in ten people surveyed report having been harmed by the NHS in the last three years

Enhancing light control with complex frequency excitations

New research finds novel drug target for acute myeloid leukemia, bringing hope for cancer patients

New insight into factors associated with a common disease among dogs and humans

Illuminating single atoms for sustainable propylene production

New study finds Rocky Mountain snow contamination

Study examines lactation in critically ill patients

UVA Engineering Dean Jennifer West earns AIMBE’s 2025 Pierre Galletti Award

Doubling down on metasurfaces

New Cedars-Sinai study shows how specialized diet can improve gut disorders

Making moves and hitting the breaks: Owl journeys surprise researchers in western Montana

PKU Scientists simulate the origin and evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation

ICRAFT breakthrough: Unlocking A20’s dual role in cancer immunotherapy

How VR technology is changing the game for Alzheimer’s disease

[Press-News.org] Schools an ideological battleground in Sudanese strife, scholar says