Gordon Brown: Educating the World - No More Excuses. This September, five and six year olds in the western world have enjoyed their first day at school.
In the developing world, however, a total of 61 million school-age girls and boys around the world will not go to primary school at all. While if you visited the classrooms of New York, London or Paris you would find happy young children beginning their educational journey, if you visit the mining regions of Mali, West Africa, you'll find children as young as 10 working in tunnels 30 meters underground.
Visit the cocoa growing areas of neighboring Côte d'Ivoire and you'll see young boys of primary school age working with machetes. This tragic picture of child labor repeats itself across the developing world: new figures show that 91 million girls and boys are currently engaged in child labor. In Africa alone, the number of children aged between five and 14 involved in child labor is projected to increase by some 19 million. Textbooks round the world: It ain’t necessarily so.
Salman Khan: Let's Use Video To Reinvent Education. In this special year-end collaboration, TED and The Huffington Post are excited to count down 18 great ideas of 2011, featuring the full TEDTalk with original blog posts that we think will shape 2012.
Watch, engage and share these groundbreaking ideas as they are unveiled one-by-one, including never-seen-before TEDTalk premieres. Standby, the countdown is underway! Watch Salman Khan discuss the reinvention of education through video, then read a follow-up post by YouTube Education's Angela Lin below. Growing up, my mother always told me: "You'll learn more from a journey of 10,000 miles than from reading 10,000 books. "