Three remote villages in India’s Madhya Pradesh state have become famous for their ‘thief schools’ where children as young as 12 are trained in pickpocketing, theft, and robbery by seasoned criminals.

The three nondescript villages – Kadia, Gulkhedi, and Hulkhedi – located about 120 km from the state capital of Bhopal are reportedly nurseries for young criminals, with parents actually paying ‘tuition fees’ of  200,000 to 300,000 rupees ($2,400 to $3,600) to have their offspring trained in “dark arts” like pickpocketing and bag grabbing in crowded places, carrying out robberies, bank account thefts, evading the police, and even withstanding beatings in the event of being apprehended. These so-called ‘thief schools’ have produced some of the most infamous criminals in India’s history, so they are sought after by impoverished and less-educated families unable to give their children a proper education.

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An Italian professor who was recently fired for around 20 years of absence out of 24 years of service at schools near Venice has vowed to contest her recent firing by the Ministry of Education.

51-year-old Cinzia Paolina De Lio, a secondary school teacher who specializes in history and philosophy, became famous in her home country of Italy for managing to skip work for a total of 20 years out of the last 24 years of service at a number of schools around Venice. De Lio was originally sacked in 2017, after an inspection found her to be “unprepared” and “inattentive” in class, but she appealed the decision, and a judge reinstated her the following year. She continued to provide all sorts of excuses to miss work until Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation decided that her original termination had been justified, especially since she had been absent from the classroom for most of her two-and-a-half decades as a school professor.

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Dozens of students at an Indian school are suspected of tying a math teacher and a school clerk to a tree and beating them, after a number of them received poor grades on an exam.

In a shocking incident that took place last Monday, students of the Scheduled Tribe Residential School in Dumka, India’s Jharkhand state, lured their math teacher and a school clerk to the school campus under the pretext of discussing their grades on a recent Class-9 examination only to tie them to a tree and allegedly beat them. Photos and videos doing the rounds on social media show three men tied to a tree with red rope and dozens of male students roaming around them and carrying thick wooden sticks.

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Despite failing the dreaded gaokao university entrance exam 25 times in a row, a 55-year-old man in China is still not giving up on his dream of attending college.

At age 55, Liang Shi is the owner of a successful building materials company in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province. He has enough money to do whatever he wants, but he doesn’t fell completely fulfilled. That’s because he has been dreaming of getting into Sichuan University ever since he was a teenager, and he has yet to achieve his goal. At an age when most people are starting to think about retirement, Liang Shi is only focused on studying hard for this year’s gaokao university entrance exam. It will be his 26th attempt to pass it, and hopefully the last.

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Institut Le Rosey is generally considered to be the most expensive school in the world, with the annual tuition per student surpassing $130,000.

Switzerland is home to some of the world’s most expensive and exclusive schools. The European country is home to at least 10 schools with yearly tuition fees of over $75,000, but the most expensive of them all is Institut Le Rosey, an old and reputed boarding school with an ultra-impressive list of alumni. There’s a reason why Le Rosey is known as the “school of kings”. King Juan Carlos of Spain, King Fuad II of Egypt and King Albert II of Belgium were all students here, as were the Shah of Iran, the Aga Khan and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, among others. Having educated some of the best-known families in Europe for over a century, it’s no wonder Institut Le Rosey has an annual tuition fee of over $130,000 per student.

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The “Class of Life” is a controversial program introduced in various Japanese middle-schools where students spend months raising and getting attached to fish, before having to decide whether to eat them or not.

A part of the Sea and Japan Project sponsored by Nippon Foundation, the Class of Life was introduced in a number of schools across Japan in 2019, with the goal of teaching young students about the work that goes into land-based aquaculture, the challenges the activity involves, and last but not least, the importance of life. To this end, students in classes 4th to 6th are entrusted with a number of small fish and tasked with raising them to maturity for at least six months and up to a year. The controversial aspect of the program is that at the end, the students need to decide the fate of the fish, whether to release or eat them…

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Chinese media recently reported the shocking case of a 13-year-old daughter who was found by fishermen on a deserted island, where her parents had taken her as a bizarre form of re-education.

This weekend, police in Weihai City, China’s Shandong Province, were notified by local fishermen about the presence of a young girl on a small deserted island, about a kilometer from the mainland. The girl had allegedly approached them claiming that she had been taken to the island against her will by her parents, and begged them to take her back to shore. Upon reaching the island, police found the girl and her parents, and learned that their presence there was a strange form of teaching the 13-year-old girl about hardship and adversity.

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South Korean media recently reported the disturbing case of a high-school teacher who scolded and humiliated a student in front of the class, causing him to take his life that same day.

On April 26th, 2020 ethics professor at Youngshin Middle School in Pohang City referred to only as “A”, for personal privacy reasons, was convicted of child abuse and sentenced to 10 months in prison and had his teaching license suspended for 5 years. His crime: shaming a 9th grade student in front of the whole class after catching him reading a light manga novel, and causing him to end his own life, because of the humiliation. The teacher’s sentencing sent shock waves through South Korean social media, with some users accusing the teacher of bullying, and other expressing fears that the case set a precedent that will put fear into other teachers, preventing them from being strict when they need to be.

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Japan’s “Class of Life” is a controversial school project that aims to teach students about valuing their food and the environment by having them raise and then eat animals like fish and chicken.

We first featured the Class of Life a couple of years ago, when a video showcasing its implementation at an agricultural high-school in Japan’s Shimano Prefecture went viral on Chinese social media, leaving most viewers in a state of shock. The footage showed students preparing chicken eggs for hatching, raising the chicks for several months, and finally killing, cooking and eating the chickens. The Class of Life has been a part of Japanese curriculum at certain schools for over six decades, so most Japanese people are familiar with it, but even they were stunned recently when they saw elementary school children taking part in the class.

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Outside of school, Laurent Simons is your typical 9-year-old child. The Belgian boy plays video games like Fortnite and Minecraft, spends time on social media, and loves to travel. But when it comes to studying, he puts students a decade his seniors to shame, graduating from university at age nine.

If all goes well and Laurent Simons completes his final project at Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands, he will graduate with a degree in electrical engineering in December. Most people take three years to graduate from the very same program, but Laurent entered just last year, and he is set to complete in just 10 months. That’s thanks to his superior intellect and his remarkable capacity to take in lots of information in very little time, which allows professors to go through the curriculum at a much faster pace.

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K-pop culture has been gaining popularity across the globe, but in China it is considered a decadent trend that threatens to destroy the nation’s future. To combat this menace, a former schoolteacher has founded the Real Man Training Club, a children’s boot camp that promises to turn boys into alpha males.

The Beijing-based Real Man Training Club offers members a variety of activities meant to boost their masculinity, such as American football, wrestling and boxing, as well as character-building treks through deserts and mountains. Founder Tang Haiyan leads the boys in chest beating and slogan shouting to build up their confidence, and makes them wear headbands with the words ‘Real Man’. Even their shirts and tracksuits feature English phrases like ‘Anything is Possible’ or ‘Power Leader’. All this is meant to develop the boys’ macho character to fit Tang’s perception of manliness, and make them immune to the taint of K-pop culture.

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A series of photos showing students casually lighting up cigarettes in what looks like a college classroom have been doing the rounds online for several months, leaving everyone puzzled as to what is going on. As it turns out, it’s just a display of hands-on learning in a course on tobacco.

The controversial photos originally went viral on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, back in November of last year, but they’ve been resurfacing on various other social networks and news sites ever since. Young students can be seen lighting cigarettes and casually smoking them, while others take their photos with smartphones and the teacher casually observes the spectacle. Teen smoking is frowned upon in China, as it is pretty much everywhere else, so the photos caused quite a stir online even after the dean of the university where the smoking took place offered an explanation.

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At just 12-years-old, Leonardo Nicanor Quinteros is still in secondary school, but he already runs his own free private school to help other children, and even some adults, with their studies.

Leonardo loves to study, but he also wants to transfer his passion for education to his peers. After seeing some of his colleagues struggling to keep up at school, and other children spending too much time playing on the streets and completely neglecting their studies, he decided to do something about it. Last year, he told his grandmother, Ramona, that he wanted to operate his own school and asked her to help him build it next to her house, in the Argentinian town of Las Piedritas, near San Juan. She obliged, and today’s Nico’s free private school caters to nearly 40 young students. The 12-year-old acts both as teacher and principal and is proud that his initiative has already made a big difference for many of the children attending there.

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A primary school teacher in China was recently dismissed for discriminating against a child suffering from cancer, by making him sit alone at the back of the class and not allowing him to take exams like everyone else.

The languages teacher is said to have complained about the boy ever since he transferred to the Liancheng Primary School, in Quanzhou, Fujian province, in September, in order to be closer to his parents while receiving chemotherapy treatment for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He reportedly thought that the child’s condition could be contagious, and he wasn’t the only one, as Chinese media reports that several children were withdrawn from the school following the sick 13-year-old’s transfer. Since then, he had gone out of his way to make the boy, named only as Zhou feel like an outcast, making him sit all by himself at the back of the class and even forbidding him to take exams.

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A 29-year-old American man decided to leave the United States behind and move to a remote jungle village in India so he wouldn’t have to constantly worry about paying back his student loan.

Like many other Americans, Chad Haag had to rely on a student loan to pay for his college education, but he struggled to find a college-level job after graduating, and going back school to pursue a master’s degree in comparative literature didn’t really help in that regard. His first job had him unloading trucks and constructing toy rockets on a factory assembly line, then he worked as an adjunct professor, but with only one class assigned per semester, he could barely make a living, let alone pay back his $20,000 student loan. At one point, struggling to pay the $300 monthly instalments became too stressful, so he just packed his bags, said goodbye to his life in the US and moved to a small village in India.

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