PAN: Fifty girl students fell ill and were hospitalised after drinking water from a well inside their school in the Samkani district of southeastern Paktia province on Wednesday, an official said. Education Director Mehrabuddin told Pajhwok Afghan News the Semin Akbari High School students were hospitalised after they complained of headaches, dizziness and vomiting.      Full news...

RT: Some 97 girls from two schools in northern Afghanistan have reportedly been hospitalized after falling sick as a result of suspected gas poisoning. In Maimana, the capital of Faryab province, a total of 77 girls from the same school were taken to hospital on Saturday afternoon after they fell ill, Afghan Pajhwok news agency reported on Sunday.      Full news...

PAN: At least 17 schoolgirls were brought to hospital for possible poisoning in central Bamyan province on Wednesday, a day after 75 schoolgirls fell sick after a suspected poisonous gas attack in northern Faryab province, officials said. The Bamyan Girls’ High School students started vomiting and fell unconscious after smelling gas at their classrooms in the morning...      Full news...

World Bulletin: 150 girls got poisoned by a toxic gas at their high school in Afghanistan’s northern state of Balkh. The teachers and students of the Kharti Khorasan Girls’ High School in Mazar-i-Sharif were hospitalized after they got poisoned by a toxic gas which was sprayed at their classrooms.      Full news...

RFE/RL: A number of girls appear to have been poisoned at a school in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A teacher at the Sultan Razia High School told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan that students fell ill after smelling some kind of gas when they entered their classrooms on May 1.      Full news...

PAN: At least 17 high school girls fell ill and lost consciousness after a suspected poisonous gas attack at their school in Taloqan, the capital of northern Takhar province, officials said on Thursday. The female students of 8th, 11th and 12th grade at the Bibi Hawa Girls’ High school smell a poisoning gas on Thursday morning at classrooms before falling unconscious, the education department spokesman Gul Agha Nazari told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

PAN: Unknown assailants blew up a newly-built school building in Qala-i-Naw, the capital of northwestern Badghis province, an official said on Tuesday. They lobbed a hand-grenade into the building on Monday evening , comprehensively damaging two rooms of the school in Kharistan area, the governor’s spokesman, Sharafuddin Majidi, told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

IWPR: Teachers as well as pupils at schools in eastern Afghanistan are struggling to get to grips with a newly-introduced curriculum. Some of the textbooks are far too advanced, while others are riddled with mistakes, experts claim. Ninety million US dollars has been spent on compiling and publishing the new set of textbooks.All of them are too young to remember the primer that was used in schools by their own parents. Page one, in Pashto, taught the letter “T” (or te) of the alphabet for topak (“weapon”), and used as an example “My uncle has a weapon”. Page two went further: “J” (jim), for jihad, as in “Jihad is mandatory”, or “Jamil went to jihad” and “I too will go to jihad”. And go he did. (Photo: The Economist)      Full news...

RFE/RL: Sheila, a 15-year-old Afghan girl, has spent years attending a refugee-camp school on the north side of Kabul. But she still does not know how to write her own name. “I am supposed to study the Koran, Dari, mathematics, Pashto, the English language -- altogether I am enrolled in 11 subjects,” she says. “But there are no lessons at my school because the teachers come for just a few minutes. Then they leave. So we sit there doing nothing.”      Full news...

Killid Group: An ambitious multi-million dollar exercise to modernise the curriculum in Afghan schools has been hit by glaring mistakes in textbooks printed for the first time. Officials have not denied there is a problem, but their views are different. The Ministry of Education (MoE) has paid 91 million dollars for the printing of new textbooks for schools as part of a planned massive overhaul of school education in Afghanistan.      Full news...

IWPR: Girls in rural parts of Nangarhar province in southeastern Afghanistan are missing out on years of schooling because their families see no need for them to be educated. One objection raised by some parents – and an issue that could potentially be resolved – is that there are not enough female teachers in the schools. Nangarhar has a total of 725 schools, of which just 128 are for girls.      Full news...

PAN: Unidentified gunmen blew up a boys’ school in the Achin district of eastern Nangarhar province, officials said on Wednesday. The district chief, Haji Abdul Khaliq Maroof, told Pajhwok Afghan News that nearly 45 armed men destroyed the school on Tuesday night.      Full news...

PAN: Nearly 260 schoolgirls were poisoned in Shiberghan city, the capital of northern Jawzjan province, on Monday, officials said. After falling sick, the students of Masrabad School were rushed to the provincial civil hospital and Afghan-Turk hospital, police chief Brig. Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

Khaama Press: According to local authorities in northern Sar-e-Pul province, more than 100 school students were poisoned in this province and were taken to hospital for treatment purposes. The officials further added the incident took place early Saturday morning at Hazrat Imam Zada Yahya high school and the main reason behind the poisoning of the students were unknown.      Full news...

The Sydney Morning Herald: When the Taliban was ousted from Afghanistan in 2001, there were 5000 girls enrolled in schools across the country. A little over a decade on, that number is 2.4 million. Today, in the capital Kabul, the sight of dozens of girls walking to school together is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. But for girls in Afghanistan, getting an education remains a fraught, and at times, dangerous endeavour.      Full news...

PAN: At least 97 students of the Bashirabad girls’ high school in the northern province of Takhar were poisoned on Saturday, officials said. Seven schoolgirls are in critical condition while the rest were discharged from hospital after treatment, Public Health Director Habibullah Rostaqi told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

Xinhua: “We want peace and schooling,” said Shah Mirza, an 11-year-old Afghan child, although he was unaware of the International Children's Day which falls on June 1 every year. Attired in school uniform, Mirza was in a hurry on Thursday morning to reach the classroom on time. Mirza, the fourth-grader who wanted to become an engineer in the future, was studying in a local school set up by a Non- Governmental Organization (NGO).      Full news...

PAN: A number of schoolchildren in the Tagab district of central Kapisa province on Monday complained they could not go to schools because of security posts established nearby. Taj Mohammad, a ninth class student at the Shaheed Abdul Ghayas Middle School, told Pajhwok Afghan News local police had established their posts near their school. Fearing militant attacks on the security personnel, students were not willing to go to the school, he said.      Full news...

PAN: Once again radicals opposing girls’ education on Sunday poisoned more than three dozen schoolgirls in northern Takhar province, the third incident of its kind over the past two months, officials said. The victims, students of the Bibi Hajira High School, situated on the 5th road of Taloqan city, the provincial capital, fell sick for unknown reasons...      Full news...

Reuters: More than 120 schoolgirls and three teachers have been poisoned in the second attack in as many months blamed on conservative radicals in the country’s north, Afghan police and education officials said on Wednesday. The attack occurred in Takhar province where police said that radicals opposed to education of women and girls had used an unidentified toxic powder to contaminate the air in classrooms. Scores of students were left unconscious.      Full news...

PAN: Unidentified gunmen set fire to a boys’ school in the northern province of Baghlan, affecting hundreds of students, officials said on Saturday. The incident took place late on Friday night in the Kishanabad area of Banu district, the town’s administrative head, Abdul Wali Hamidi, told Pajhwok Afghan News. A delegation was sent to the area to assess the damage, he said.      Full news...

PAN: Hundreds of schoolchildren were poisoned in the Ismailkhel Mandozai district of southeastern Khost province on Tuesday, an official said. The incident took place in the Urzi area, where all the 600 students of a middle school were poisoned, education department spokesman Syed Musa Majrooh told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

PAN: Local officials in western Farah province said on Monday that there was no school in Bakwa district while militant threats had forced the closure of five schools in Gulistan town. There was only one school that Taliban fighters destroyed five years ago, depriving many girls and boys of education Bakwa, said Mohammad Ismail, the district’s administrative chief.      Full news...

IWPR: In a highly controversial move, Afghanistan’s education ministry has dealt with the complexities of the last four decades of turmoil and war by simply omitting the entire period from the new history textbooks it is issuing to schools. Officials argue that the decision to pass over contentious events of recent history is an attempt to heal rifts in Afghan society and avoid further strife.      Full news...

IWPR: Hayatollah is supposed to be teaching history and geography for grades six to nine at the Kahrezak Secondary School, located 60 kilometres from Chaghcharan, the provincial centre of Ghor province in central Afghanistan. But when asked to identify Ahmad Shah Durrani, the first king of Afghanistan, the 22-year-old teacher replied with a smile that he did not know who he was.      Full news...

IWPR: Hakimi Hayatollah is supposed to be teaching history and geography to students at the Kahrezak secondary school in Ghor province in central Afghanistan. But there’s a problem: Hayatollah knows neither Afghan history nor geography. He’s stumped when asked to identify Ahmad Shah Durrani, the first king of Afghanistan. The only major river in the country the 22-year-old can name is one that runs through Ghor province, from which it takes its name.      Full news...

PAN: With almost 76 percent of schools across Daikundi province having proper buildings, more than 100,000 students are still studying under tents, officials said on Friday. A total of 334 schools are operating in the province, Director of Education Sardar Ali Jafri told Pajhwok Afghan News. As many as 118,104 students are taught under trees, in mosques and rented houses.      Full news...

PAN: Suspected militants stormed two girls’ schools in the Batikot district of eastern Nangarhar province, destroying one and partially damaging the other, officials said on Sunday. The schools were set on fire in Chahardi and Barikab areas late on Saturday night, district chief, Israrullah Qarizada, told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

CNN: At least 25 people were injured Sunday when a man on a motorbike hurled a grenade at a high school in northern Afghanistan, an official said. The blast injured at least 17 students at the school -- three of them seriously -- said Ahmad Jawed Bedar, a spokesman for the governor of Faryab province.      Full news...

PAN: Students in Kabul are complaining about the low quality of newly published school books, saying they are bound poorly and falling apart. Last year, the Ministry of Education published and distributed 42 million books to primary and secondary school students. The books’ bindings are not stapled and the pages fall out easily, Nabila, a fourth-grader at Kabul Al-fath School, told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...