The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection Friday morning and it wasn't Malala. (The prize went to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.) To find out how that news was received among school girls, I stopped by the Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT) — a public high school near Cape Town, South Africa, that I have been profiling this year.

Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together. It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.

The mothers, holding the small hands of their children, can go only as far as the glass door, where Mexico ends and America begins. They lean down and send off their little ones with a kiss and a silent prayer. The children file into the U.S. port of entry, chatting in Spanish as they pull U.S. birth certificates covered in protective plastic from Barbie and SpongeBob backpacks. Armed U.S. border officers wave them onto American soil and the yellow buses waiting to take them to school in Luna County, N.M.

Boris Johnson has said forcing children to wear a burkha to school is “completely wrong” and contradicts British values and freedoms. Speaking after it emerged a number of UK secondary schools forced girls as young as 11 to wear the full Islamic veil, the Mayor of London said a burkha cannot be described as part of a school uniform, adding that he was “totally against kind compulsion in this matter”.

Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides yesterday said ties between Cyprus and Israel should not be limited to energy or security but should also embrace cultural diplomacy. Kasoulides was speaking at the signing of a cooperation agreement between the University of Cyprus and the Israeli Embassy in Nicosia for the creation of a Jewish Studies programme at the University of Cyprus (UCY).

As the new term starts across England, schools are chewing over this summer’s results in the 16-plus exams. One trend is clear—the coalition’s emphasis on pupils achieving five core academic subjects, including a language, in its new EBACC (English Baccalaureate) qualification has raised the number of candidates taking language exams.

To prepare for an endless barrage of secondary-school exams, Zhang Ruifan learned to memorize entire science textbooks. So when his family sent him to high school in the United States, he was so far ahead of his fellow freshmen in math and science that he usually knew the correct answer even before the teacher had finished speaking.