Half of Charleston County’s high schools face a daunting challenge in educating the new crop of freshmen they will welcome this fall.

Twenty percent of their ninth-graders won’t be able to read better than a fourth-grader, but those students will be expected to learn and perform at a high-school level. Many of these teenagers likely will struggle to simply read the words on their teachers’ SmartBoards, much less understand and analyze the information being conveyed.

The Charleston County School Board recognized the severity of this problem last year by declaring literacy its top priority. Their decision followed a series of Post and Courier stories that revealed nearly 20 percent of the county’s ninth-graders read on a fourth-grade level or worse.

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The eldest of Pamela Fettes’ three sons only recently celebrated his 15th birthday, but she is already worrying about the cost of their college education.

Ms Fettes, a 46-year-old single mother, lives in Belvidere, a blue-collar town 70 miles north-west of Chicago. She earns $50,000 a year as a regional healthcare co-ordinator, putting her right at the US’s median household income ”“ although she also works two nights a week as a hospital clerk and decorates cakes on the side. She took on the extra work after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and getting divorced last year, both of which involved considerable expense.

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Online Education has created this hand-drawn infographic below to illustrate the state of our current educational system and how it compares to the rest of the world. Brace yourself — some of these rankings may come as a shock.

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Fewer than a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea’s ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to national history-test scores released Tuesday….

Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were “proficient” or “advanced,” unchanged since the test was last administered in 2006. Proficient means students have a solid understanding of the material.

The news was even more dire in high school, where 12% of 12th-graders were proficient, unchanged since 2006.

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Irish society is not just suffering from the sex abuse scandal but from a failure to pass on the faith to the younger generation, said the archbishop of Dublin.

“We have to completely, radically change the way we pass on the faith,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told Catholic News Service May 16. “Our parishes are not places where evangelization and catechesis are taking place.”

The archbishop traveled to Washington to present the Order of Malta Inaugural Lecture, “Faith and Service: the Unbreakable Bond.” During his speech and in remarks to CNS beforehand, he spoke of the declining practice of the faith in Dublin — 18 percent of Catholics regularly attend Sunday Mass — and of the need to give young people responsibility in the parish to reinvigorate them.

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At an age when his parents won’t let him go to the mall alone and in an era when he would never open up to a stranger, [Scott] Fitzsimones, who lives in Phoenix, already has a growing dossier accumulating on the Web. And while Congress has passed laws to protect the youngest of Internet users from sharing much information about themselves, once those children become teens, the same privacy rules no longer apply.

“It’s the Wild West for teens when it comes to privacy online,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a privacy advocate and communications professor at American University.

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On the surface, [Nathaniel] Colleton seemed an unlikely drug dealer. He had grown up in a solid home. His mom was a paralegal and church pastor, his dad a longtime employee of The Citadel.

Colleton was a high school graduate. He played music for church services and volunteered to teach underprivileged kids how to read, his attorney, Dale Cobb, said.

Cobb said his client turned to selling drugs after he lost his construction job and couldn’t find work. Whether it was that or the lure of easy money, as police suspect, Colleton’s new occupation would short-circuit whatever future he had planned for himself.

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In the large and growing Orthodox Jewish communities around New York and elsewhere, rabbinic leaders are sounding an alarm about an unexpected problem: a wave of anorexia and other eating disorders among teenage girls.

While no one knows whether such disorders are more prevalent among Orthodox Jews than in society at large, they may be more baffling to outsiders. Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size ”” and her mother’s ”” and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small.

Rabbis say the problem is especially hard to treat because of the shame that has long surrounded mental illness among Orthodox Jews.

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Controversy over religious education in Victorian government schools is hardly new. The debate has raged since the 19th century when the Education Act established that public education should be free, secular and compulsory. A more recent complication is the rise of a multifaith society, along with a decline in religious observance by the slightly more than 60 per cent of Australians who identify as Christian.

While only one in 14 Australians attends church weekly, and one in six monthly, some of the strongest objections to the way religion is taught in school do not come from non-believers. The Religions, Ethics and Education Network Australia has written to the Prime Minister, premiers and education ministers urging a review so that the national curriculum improves on the current flawed model for teaching religion and ethics….

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Every other Wednesday, right after school at 2:45, the newest club at Rutherford High, the atheist club, meets in Room 13-211.

Last Wednesday, Jim Dickey, the president, started out by asking his fellow student atheists (there are a few agnostics, too) whether they wanted to put together an all-atheist Ultimate Frisbee team for a charity event.

“We can pay the entry fee from the club treasury,” said Michael Creamer, the atheists’ faculty adviser, who urged them to take part.

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More than 20 years after God’s bikies revved up my school, the Victorian Education Department still forces its primary schools to hold ”special religious instruction” taught by volunteers.

While other religious groups – including Jewish, Islamic and Hare Krishna – are accredited to run classes, 96 per cent are taught by Christian education provider Access Ministries.

The education department says schools, by law, must offer religious classes if approached by accredited course providers. This is despite the fact that less than 10 per cent of the population goes to church each week.

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Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who “sext,” an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.

But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive.

Indeed, the photos can confer cachet.
“Having a naked picture of your significant other on your cellphone is an advertisement that you’re sexually active to a degree that gives you status,” said Rick Peters, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for Thurston County, which includes Lacey. “It’s an electronic hickey.”

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In some of Chicago’s troubled neighborhoods, it’s not unusual for boys to join gangs at a young age. For many, it’s a road fraught with violence.

But a group called Becoming a Man (BAM) is working on getting to those youngsters before they’re drawn into gang life or drop out of school.

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What advice can you give readers of TIME?

We talk about love in a way that’s very unrealistic: “If you’re in love, you’re not going to want to have sex with anyone else but that person.” That’s not true. We need to acknowledge that truth so that people don’t have to spend 40 years of marriage lying to and policing each other.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Call it a buzz kill, but anyone younger than 21 who brings alcohol to the Carolina Cup next month in Camden will find it harder to slip in and party.

Kershaw County deputies will be cracking down at the April 2 event by checking coolers and IDs. They will confiscate booze and arrest violators. And those particularly wily kids will find they no longer can hire a local adult to carry their booze onto the site.

Kershaw County officers are focusing on “College Park,” an area where thousands of young people ”” high school through young adults ”” have met for years to overindulge during the horse races, said newly elected Sheriff Jim Matthews.

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The Archbishops of Canterbury and York and more than 30 bishops committed themselves to making young people a priority in the Church of England, when they attended a conference held in Sheffield last week.

The Regeneration Youth Summit took place at St Thomas’s, Phila­delphia Campus, on Thursday of last week, and was organised by the Church Army, the Archbishop of York Youth Trust, and a group of young people, including Sam Follett, aged 20, the youngest member of the General Synod.

More than 120 people aged from 15 to 21, and about 30 youth workers, discussed ways of better equipping the Church to reach out to young people. All delegates were invited to sign a pledge committing to the work of the Church and young people.

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Leaders from the Church of England have gathered in Sheffield to meet over 150 young people.

The Bishop of Sheffield, Right Reverend Dr Steven Croft attended the event at St Thomas’ Church in Hillsborough alongside Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu.

The event, called ‘Regeneration’ was a summit led by young people aged between 15 and 21-years-old, giving them an opportunity to talk about how young people feature in the churches agenda.

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More than 100 young people are preparing to meet with Church of England bishops at a national summit in Sheffield where the future of the church will be discussed.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, will be attending the Regeneration Youth Summit on March 3rd along with more than 25 bishops and 30 youth leaders.

Regeneration is being led by young people, aged between 15 and 21 years old, and offers them a unique opportunity to meet with bishops on their terms. Throughout the day they will seek to make the future generation a priority for the Church of England and discuss in small groups how the church can better equip, resource and reach young people in the UK.

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Check their website here; I will post more on this tomorrow.

Making repairs and negotiating deals comes naturally to 14-year-old Jerome Smalls.

The Zucker Middle School eighth-grader learned how to fix things from his grandfather, Papa, who’s made a career in construction- related jobs, and Smalls’ knack for business is innate.

He combined the two skills to launch a business, The Handykid, and he spent most of last summer doing odd jobs for his North Charleston neighbors and family friends….

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

Now that [the Rev. Lee] Bines is stationed in Moncks Corner, he’s turned his energies toward the troubled youth in the rural schools of Berkeley County. Those are the schools with the highest dropout rates, poorest population and most black students, a special area of concern to a black pastor.

Bines was trying to motivate about 50 young people at a luncheon Thursday afternoon. It was part of what he called the fourth annual Young Brothers to Men Summit, which continues through Sunday at Wesley United Methodist Church at Highways 6 and 315.

The summit, which also was sponsored by the Delta Alpha chapter of the Phi Alpha Fraternity, brings together educators, counselors, lawmakers and representatives of the juvenile justice system to encourage each other to keep trying to reach troubled youth. For instance, one of today’s topics is “Breaking Strongholds: Confronting and Resolving Violence in the Youth Culture,” with Moncks Corner Police Chief Chad Caldwell and staff from Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

It is one of the most difficult, yet important conversations that needs to take place in family life ”“and potentially one of the most embarrassing. It’s the sex and relationships discussion between parents and teenagers. But now a novel approach to ease the awkwardness of these conversations has just been developed by a joint Church and Health Trust group looking at young people and sexual health.

The Faith sub-group of the Belfast Area Sexual Health Project Board has recently produced a relationships resource, entitled ”˜Unique’, for both young people and their parents that is user-friendly and easy to work through. However it is how this resource is used that will give a new approach to conversations on difficult issues.

Read it all and see what you think of the accompanying website.

The mad housewife is a reliable comic icon, her trials trivialized as boredom and cabin fever. It’s hard for most people to accept that mothers ”” even maybe their own mothers! ”” can be unloving, and sometimes unsafe. Which helps explain why killings like those ascribed to Ms. Schenecker, among some 200 American mothers who kill their children every year, always seem so surprising.

It’s easy to write these cases off as freak results of severe mental illness. But most of these women’s stories also include a lot of ordinary stress and social isolation, the fallout from divorce and the dispersal of extended families. Increasingly cut off from real-time conversations, mad housewives find solace in e-communities, where “life” is so much more soothing and predictable than dealing with teenagers. While news reports say Ms. Schenecker was seeking help from real-life counselors in the weeks before the killings, her Facebook page, with its pretty family photographs and homilies, is a portrait of polished denial.

Amid the debate about whether social networks are depriving us of healthier, non-virtual encounters, a University of Texas study last fall claimed that Facebook was not supplanting such interactions. Perhaps that’s true, but one thing I’m sure of, from my own lucky odyssey, is that all the poking and tagging in the world can’t compete with a pair of real-time eyes when it comes to noticing that someone needs more help than she’s getting.

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[James] Eunice, a 17-year-old Valdosta native who drowned while duck hunting last month at Ocean Pond in Lake Park, has been posthumously named to the University of Georgia’s football roster by head coach Mark Richt.

During Eunice’s funeral last Saturday, Jay Rome and Malcolm Mitchell, who played football with Eunice at Valdosta High and have signed letters of intent to play for Georgia, came to the podium with a box. A letter that Richt had written to the Eunice family was read to the mourners in attendance.

At the end of the letter, Richt wrote, “Oh yeah, James made the team.”

Then Rome and Mitchell took an official Georgia jersey out of the box. On the jersey were Eunice’s last name and the No. 23 he had worn at Valdosta.

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Read it all (an 8 page pdf).

Why do otherwise good kids seem to make bad decisions when they are with their friends? New research on risk taking and the teenage brain offers some answers.

In studies at Temple University, psychologists used functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 40 teenagers and adults to determine if there are differences in brain activity when adolescents are alone versus with their friends. The findings suggest that teenage peer pressure has a distinct effect on brain signals involving risk and reward, helping to explain why young people are more likely to misbehave and take risks when their friends are watching.

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This program really scared me–I was not aware of this. Take the time to watch it all–KSH.

The study pointed out that relatives were most often esteemed because of goals accomplished, personality traits, and overcoming adversity, while friends were most highly regarded because of the encouragement and support they provide the teen. Faith leaders received recognition because of their strong spiritual convictions, their moral lifestyles, and because the teen hopes to pattern their lives like these leaders. Coaches and teachers also made the grade because teens hope to follow their lifestyles and because of the encouragement coaches and educators dole out.

Not surprisingly, entertainers and sports figures are recognized most often for their talent. However, the profiles of the two types of celebrities diverge from there. Entertainers earned teens’ attention not only with their humanitarian efforts but also with fashion and money. In contrast, sports stars scored points with teens based on their accomplishments as well as their ability to overcome adversity.

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A BBC Today audio report on this is described as follows:

A Church of England bishop has called on Anglican clergy to take the Church’s message to young people by trying to address the fundamental questions of life and death. Dr Graham Kings, the Bishop of Sherborne, in Dorset, says a lack of religious knowledge is one of the causes of religious doubt. Robert Pigott reports.

Listen to it all (about 3 1/2 minutes).

You may also find much more about this ministry here.

1. Is youth ministry killing the church? by Kate Murphy (February 4)
I’ve always met young Christians through youth programs. I’ve been hired by churches that expect regular events created exclusively to minister to young people. But I wonder now if we’re ministering them right out of the church.

Read it all and follow the links to the articles/posts if you have not seen them.