When: Thursday 2nd September, 7.30pm
Where: New Cross Learning (map)
Speaker: Steve Hurd, founder of the Uganda Humanist Schools Trust
We will be back in New Cross but will also be zooming this meeting for those that can’t attend or are unsure about returning to in person meetings. Click for Zoom link.
[Steve Hurd will be talking to us via zoom.]
Humanist schools in Uganda: providing hope in challenging times
Imagine a happy and purposeful school with abundant opportunities for personal development; a school aiming to deliver the highest standard of education, providing knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for success in the modern world. An inclusive school based on reason, compassion and tolerance.
This is what the Uganda Humanist Schools Trust, a charity supported by many humanist groups in the UK including SELHuG, fosters in the small but growing number of schools it supports. In the past two extraordinary years, at the urgent request of parents, the trust stepped in to rescue two primary schools in strife-affected communities near the Congo border, and two further primary schools forced to close due to covid. Charity founder Steve Hurd will tell the story of the schools and the challenges facing them now, followed by questions.
Steve became a humanist in his student days. He taught Economics and Geography in a secondary school in Uganda from 1970 to 1972. This started a lifelong interest in development issues, which influenced his teaching, teacher training, curriculum development and research in schools and universities. With the Open University he established a British Council-funded project, working with a team of 50 Ugandan educationists to create computer-based materials to support teachers across the secondary curriculum. He got to know Ugandan humanists who were setting up schools in Uganda. In 2008 he formed Uganda Humanist Schools Trust to raise funds to support them and a new Human Studies Project is developing resources to help them widen their curriculum.
