The basic cable station MTV is shocked — shocked! — to learn that 25 percent of the children in the world’s current war zones currently cannot attend school on a regular basis.
The purveyor of television fare including “Teen Mom OG” and “Virgin Territory” announced its confusion and surprise on Wednesday.
Lazily citing a United Nations Children’s Fund press release, MTV reported that almost 24 million school-aged children in 22 war zones around the globe have limited access or no access to education.
“Children living in countries affected by conflict have lost their homes, family members, friends, safety, and routine,” UNICEF education chief Jo Bourne said in the press release. “Now, unable to learn even the basic reading and writing skills, they are at risk of losing their futures and missing out on the opportunity to contribute to their economies and societies when they reach adulthood.”
The problem is worst in South Sudan, according to UNICEF, where just over half of all kids between the ages of six and 15 cannot go to school. The percentages are similar in neighboring Sudan and in Niger. A lack of education is also a terrible problem in Nigeria, where attacks by Boko Haram have significantly disrupted education.
Hundreds of thousands of children have become refugees as a result of the wars and civil wars affecting the nations where they were born. Many of these children are highly unlikely to be attending any schools for long periods of time.
“Children who are not in school face a higher risk of sexual and gender violence, being drawn into dangerous child labor and recruitment into armed groups,” UNICEF spokeswoman Lisa Bender told MTV. “And girls have less of a chance of going back to school if they start to take on responsibilities in the home and they lose their parents.”
UNICEF works to provide emergency relief, basic services and — in some cases — education for refugee children and children in disaster-stricken areas.
MTV is most famous, of course, for “Headbangers Ball,” a 90-minute program featuring macho, guitar-driven music by bands such as Dokken, Helloween and Bang Tango which ran from 1987 to 1995.
In the mid-1990s, MTV decided to saturate its airwaves with various boy bands.
The station also foisted “Jersey Shore” on Americans from 2009 to 2012.
The writer of MTV’s piece on children missing school because of wars is Gil Kaufman, who has been “slangin news for mtv since 1999,” according to his Twitter account.
Kaufman holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (RELATED: Capitalism-Hating Marxist Professor Rakes In $170,000 Per Year At U. Wisconsin)
Forbes estimates the value of MTV as a brand at $6.2 billion, which is slightly more than the nominal annual gross-domestic product of Monaco, a ritzy microstate on the Mediterranean coastline of France.
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