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Alex Stamos, the former director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, during congressional testimony in 2014. The research team Stamos led came under fire from Republicans, who alleged that their research amounted to censorship. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

Untangling Disinformation

A major disinformation research team's future is uncertain after political attacks.

June 14, 2024 • The Stanford Internet Observatory studied how social media platforms are abused. Now, its top leaders are out and future funding is uncertain amid attacks on its work by conservatives.

Selma Herndon Elementary School kindergarten teacher Diana Dickey starts the day each morning by asking students to share how they are feeling. Preston Gannaway for NPR hide caption

Kindergartners are missing a lot of school. This district has a fix

June 14, 2024 • In many places, kindergartners are as likely to be chronically absent as high school seniors, but one school district in rural California is doing something about it.

A California school is addressing chronic absenteeism at the root

On college campuses, women are making inroads in male-dominated fields like engineering and business. But that is not eliminating the earnings gaps in leadership and income in the workplace. Ania Siniuk for NPR hide caption

While women outnumber men on campus, their later earnings remain stuck

Hechinger report.

June 13, 2024 • On college campuses, women are making inroads in male-dominated fields like engineering and business. But that is not eliminating the earnings gaps in leadership and income in the workplace.

NPR Student Podcast Challenge

Starting Your Podcast: A Guide For Students

New to podcasting? Don't panic.

Librarian Sabrina Jesram arranges a display of books during Banned Books Week at a public library branch in New York City on Sept. 23, 2022. Ted Shaffrey/AP hide caption

Book News & Features

What’s a book ban anyway depends on who you ask.

June 10, 2024 • The term "book ban" is used a lot in media and elsewhere when addressing the rise in challenges to certain books being allowed in schools and public libraries. But is it more political hyperbole or a censorship alarm bell?

LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

Pandemic aid for schools is ending soon. Many after-school programs may go with it

June 10, 2024 • Once the federal money expires, one Tulsa organization estimates its after-school program offerings will shrink from 450 to just 75. That's unless they can find outside funding.

[StateImpact OK] ESSER after-school programs

Students continue to miss large amounts of school, but parents aren't concerned. Yunyi Dai for NPR hide caption

With 'chronic absenteeism' soaring in schools, most parents aren’t sure what it is

June 10, 2024 • Experts and educators are worried about students who miss big chunks of the school year, but a new NPR/Ipsos poll shows parents aren’t quite sure what it is.

Some states are seeing chronic absenteeism soar to more than 40% of students

Students listen to their teacher during their first day of transitional kindergarten at Tustin Ranch Elementary School in Tustin, CA, in August 2021. MediaNews Group via Getty Images hide caption

Consider This from NPR

Covid funding is ending for schools. what will it mean for students.

June 9, 2024 • Billions of dollars in federal COVID funding is set to expire for K-12 schools.

Janelle Monáe gives a commencement speech at Loyola Marymount University's 2024 Graduate ceremony. JC Olivera/Getty Images hide caption

All Songs Considered

Advice for graduates: listeners share songs, lessons from high school.

June 4, 2024 • Listeners share songs that take them back to the final days of high school, and the lessons they impart.

Bruhat Soma, 12, of Tampa, Fla., stands on stage with his family after winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee, in Oxon Hill, Md., on Thursday night. Mariam Zuhaib/AP hide caption

A 12-year-old from Florida has won this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee

May 31, 2024 • Bruhat Soma spelled 29 out of 30 words correctly in Scripps’ second-ever spell-off, in which competitors have 90 seconds to spell as many words given to them as possible.

Florida A&M University announced a "transformative" donation earlier this month — but the school said it ceased contact with the donor after questions arose about the funds. Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images hide caption

A mega-gift for an HBCU college fell through. Here's what happened — and what's next

May 24, 2024 • To people who watch high-level philanthropy, Florida A&M's embarrassing incident wasn't only a shocking reversal. It was something they've seen before. The school is now investigating what went wrong.

Due to the success of the State Department's J-1 Visa program, the Kuspuk School District and other rural districts in Alaska are looking at ways to utilize other visa programs to keep foreign teachers in classrooms for longer. Emily Schwing for NPR/Emily Schwing hide caption

Visa program draws foreign teachers to a rural Alaska school district facing a staffing crisis

Kyuk service.

May 24, 2024 • Teacher retention and recruitment is difficult and some schools make use of J-1 Visas to recruit teachers from outside the U.S. In one rural school district in Alaska, foreign teachers make up over half the staff.

Robert Hale gives an envelope with cash to a graduating UMass Dartmouth student at last week's commencement. Each of the 1,200 graduates received $1,000 onstage, half to keep and half to donate. Karl Christoff Dominey/University of Massachusetts Dartmouth hide caption

A billionaire surprised graduates onstage with cash, but it's not all theirs to keep

May 23, 2024 • Billionaire philanthropist Rob Hale gave UMass Dartmouth graduates $1,000 each, and instructed them to donate half. He tells NPR the best cause students can support is one that matters to them.

U-Mass Dartmouth graduates got a surprise gift from a billionaire at graduation

From left: Alexis Jones (Cornell University), Mei Lamison (New York University), Anaka Srinivas (Northwestern University). Alexis Jones; Mei Lamison; Anaka Srinivas hide caption

A concentrated dose of history: The class of 2024 looks back

May 22, 2024 • Everyone says you live through history, but "I don't think anyone prepared us for this much history," say the students in the Class of 2024.

Student Podcast Challenge

May 22, 2024 • Student Podcast Challenge invites students from around the country to create a podcast and compete for a chance to have your work featured on NPR.

Pedestrians pass through The Ohio State University's student union. John Minchillo/AP hide caption

Ohio reviewing race-based scholarships after Supreme Court affirmative action ruling

May 18, 2024 • Higher education officials in Ohio are reviewing race-based scholarships after last year's Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action.

Michelle Perez for NPR hide caption

These teens were missing too much school. Here's what it took to get them back

May 18, 2024 • Since the pandemic, chronic absenteeism in the nation's K-12 schools has skyrocketed. These teens are working to get their attendance back on track.

Perspective

Code switch, in a debate over a school name, it's not just parents who are attached to the past.

May 18, 2024 • At the height of the racial reckoning, a school district in Virginia voted to rename two schools that had been previously named for Confederate generals. This month, that decision was reversed.

Basil Rodriguez was arrested linking arms outside Hamilton Hall, but said the arrest had strengthened their resolve to continue protesting. The trespassing charge Rodriguez faced was dismissed this week. Keren Carrión/NPR hide caption

Campus protests over the Gaza war

Arrested. injured. suspended. six nyc university students say they'll keep protesting.

May 18, 2024 • Students arrested at Columbia University and the City College of New York spoke with NPR about their choice to risk legal and academic consequences.

Des Moines Superintendent Ian Roberts races students on an Iowa track. Phil Roeder/Des Moines Public Schools hide caption

Iowa superintendent and former Olympian bested in footrace by 5th-grader

May 18, 2024 • Ian Roberts has competed in some of the most high-profile races in the world. But his biggest competition to date was a determined fifth-grader in jean shorts and Nike tennis shoes.

Earlier this month, President Biden spoke about protests that have roiled many U.S. college campuses. Among their demands is for the Israeli military to leave Gaza. Biden said students have a right to protest but not to be disruptive. He is set to speak at Morehouse College in Atlanta on Sunday. Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Biden is set for the Morehouse graduation. Students are divided

May 17, 2024 • Ahead of Biden's address at Morehouse, students share their frustrations

Applicants to Georgia State University received a welcome email for the 2024-25 school year. However, the email was sent in error to 1,500 applicants by the school's admissions office. Here, the campus celebrates its fall commencement exercises on Dec. 17, 2014, in Atlanta. Meg Buscema/Georgia State University hide caption

1,500 college applicants thought they were accepted. They soon learned it was an error

May 16, 2024 • Georgia State University says the students were not sent an official acceptance letter but "communication" from a department welcoming those who intend to major in a specific academic area.

Kansas City Chiefs player Harrison Butker, pictured at a press conference in February, is in hot water for his recent commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas. Chris Unger/Getty Images hide caption

The NFL responds after a player urges female college graduates to become homemakers

May 16, 2024 • Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs urged female graduates to embrace the title of "homemaker" in a controversial commencement speech. The NFL says he was speaking "in his personal capacity."

Announcing the 2023 College Podcast Challenge Honorable Mentions

May 15, 2024 • Here are the honorable mentions from the 2023 College Podcast Challenge. Congrats!

Fahmida Azim for NPR hide caption

Why children with disabilities are missing school and losing skills

May 15, 2024 • A special education staffing crisis is raging through many U.S. school districts. It's taking a toll on students and families.

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Our Best Education Articles of 2021

Our most popular education articles of 2021 explore how to navigate some of this year’s challenges—including grief, boredom, and isolation—while uplifting our capacity for connection, belonging, and healing. Several articles also highlight how character, conscience, and kindness can guide us toward greater meaning in our lives.

If you are looking for specific activities to support your students’ and colleagues’ social and emotional well-being in 2022, visit our  Greater Good in Education website, featuring  free  research-based practices, lessons, and strategies for cultivating kinder, happier, and more equitable classrooms and schools. And for a deeper dive into the science behind social-emotional learning, mindfulness, and ethical development, consider our suite of self-paced online courses for educational professionals, including our capstone course, Teaching and Learning for the Greater Good .

Here are the 12 best education articles of 2021, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

How to Help Students Feel a Sense of Belonging During the Pandemic , by Mary C. Murphy, Kathryn Boucher, and Christine Logel: Belonging and connection in the classroom contribute to success and well-being, particularly for marginalized students.

Four Ways Teachers Can Help Students Develop a Conscience , by Vicki Zakrzewski: How do kids develop a sense of right and wrong—and what can educators do to help them act on their conscience?

How to Help Students of Color Find Their Power , by Brandy Arnold: Project Wayfinder is helping Black and Latino students explore their identities and goals.

What a Children’s Book Taught Me (and My Students) About Grief , by Lauren McGovern: Teaching sixth graders about grief helped teacher Lauren McGovern after the loss of her son.

36 Questions That Can Help Kids Make Friends , by Jill Suttie: A question-and-answer exercise may help middle schoolers build friendships, including with kids of different ethnicities.

How to Make This Hard Transition Back to School With Your Students , by Amy L. Eva: Here are three ways educators can support their students (and each other) this fall.

A Different Way to Respond When Kids Do Something Wrong , by Joanne Chen: Restorative practices—taking responsibility, making amends, and seeking forgiveness—are an alternative to strict punishments and blame.

What Do Kids Mean When They Say They’re Bored at School? , by Rebecca Branstetter: Boredom can be a temporary emotion or a sign of a deeper issue, says a school psychologist.

How to Help Students Be the Best Version of Themselves , by Karen E. Bohlin and Deborah Farmer Kris: When students are facing challenges, educators can help them reflect on—and act on—what matters to them.

Four Character Strengths That Can Help Kids Learn , by Carol Lloyd: Research suggests that fostering character strengths can help children be better students.

How Educators Can Help Make a Kinder World , by Vicki Zakrzewski: By integrating character education, SEL, and mindfulness, schools can cultivate the inherent goodness in students.

Three Strategies for Helping Students Discuss Controversial Issues , by Lauren Fullmer and Laura Bond: Here are research-based ways to facilitate civil discourse in the classroom.

Bonus: Science of Happiness Podcast Episodes

Episode 94: How to Craft Your Life : When the world around you changes, so can your goals. Our guest, Patty Brown, tries a practice to tap into a new sense of purpose.

Episode 96: Don’t Be Afraid of Your Anger : What happens when we suppress our anger? And what if we tried to work with it instead? Our guest, Soraya Chemaly, tries a practice to harness her inner fierceness to care for herself.

About the Author

Greater good editors, you may also enjoy.

How to Help Students Feel a Sense of Belonging During the Pandemic

What a Children’s Book Taught Me (and My Students) About Grief

What Do Kids Mean When They Say They’re Bored at School?

Our Best Education Articles of 2020

Our Best Education Articles of 2019

The Science of School and Education

Here are solutions to improve students’ emotional, physical, and mental health and to boost educational outcomes

simpson33/Getty Images

Reading for Pleasure Helps Kids’ Brain Development

The simple and fun act of reading for pleasure in early childhood produces better cognition, mental health and educational attainment in adolescence

Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Jianfeng Feng, Yun-Jun Sun, The Conversation US

Extreme Heat Threatens Student Health in Schools without Air-Conditioning

August and September will bring tens of millions of public school students back to class. Many face health risks from rising temperatures

Daniel Cusick, E&E News

Useful Feedback, More Than Praise, Helps Students Flourish

Teacher feedback that gives students options can make them feel empowered

Camilla Mutoni Griffiths

Adversity in Early Childhood Can Impair Brain Development

Adverse early childhood experience leaves persisting traces in brain structure, highlighting the importance of preventive measures for healthy brain development

Cordula Hölig, Ramesh Kekunnaya, Brigitte Röder

Fascism’s History Offers Lessons about Today’s Attacks on Education

Moves in Florida to control public education mirror past fascist strategies in ways that are disquieting for American democracy, a historian argues

Eden McLean

Let Teenagers Sleep

Despite years of evidence that starting school later promotes better health and improved grades, too few schools have adopted this measure

The Editors

Spiky ‘Sleep Spindles’ Linked to Acts of Learning

A study shows how bursts of brain activity during sleep could boost memory

Rebecca Sohn

We Need More Health Clinics at Schools

In-school clinics improve well-being and educational outcomes and serve children who need them most

Back-to-School Special: Kids, Tests and Long COVID Reassurance: COVID, Quickly, Episode 37

This is our back-to-school special episode of COVID, Quickly . We’ll talk about why COVID testing is about to become a school problem—and about whether or not kids are at risk for long COVID.

Tanya Lewis, Josh Fischman, Tulika Bose

A Cure for Vaccine Hesitancy Could Start in Kindergarten

Teaching simple basics in school about masks, handwashing and ethics can stave off misconceptions in adulthood

Children’s Risk of Suicide Increases on School Days

Unlike in adults, suicide risk among children is lowest during the summer and higher during the school year. Understanding these patterns can help prevent and treat suicidality

Tyler Black

In Schools, Honest Talk about Racism Can Reduce Discrimination

New laws make it harder for teachers to discuss racism and inequality, but psychological evidence shows these conversations dispel causes of bias and distress

Camilla Mutoni Griffiths, Nicky Sullivan

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Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

How do we reinvent education? These TED Talks explore the latest thinking — from teachers, parents, kids — on how to build a better school.

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What's Worth Learning in School?

• Posted January 10, 2015
• By Lory Hough

Professor David Perkins likes to tell this story: Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was getting on a train. One of his sandals slipped off and fell to the ground. The train was moving, and there was no time to go back. Without hesitation, Gandhi took off his second sandal and threw it toward the first. Asked by his colleague why he did that, he said one sandal wouldn’t do him any good, but two would certainly help someone else.

As Perkins writes in his new book, Future Wise , “People cherish the story as a marvelous example of a charitable act. And so it is, on a small scale, seizing a singular moment.”

But as he also points out, and as he told an audience at the Future of Learning institute held this past summer at the Ed School, it was more than that: It was also a knowledgeable act. By throwing that sandal, Gandhi had two important insights: He knew what people in the world needed, and he knew what to let go of.

Educators, Perkins says, need to embrace these same insights. They need to start asking themselves what he considers to be one of the most important questions in education: What's worth learning in school?

What’s worth learning in school? It’s a question that students have been lobbing at teachers for years, in a slightly different form.

“In the back of the class, there’s that idly waving hand,” Perkins writes. “You’ve been teaching long enough to be pretty sure that hand is going to go up as soon as you got started on this topic, and so it does, with an annoying indolence. All right. You gesture toward the hand, Let’s hear it.

“The student: ‘Why do we need to know this?’”

As a teacher, Perkins says he hates that question. Teachers work hard at what they do, and the question is disrespectful. Yet, he admits, the question is actually a good one — an “uppity version” of what’s worth learning in school. (It’s also one he admits having asked once or twice himself.)

“When that ballistic missile comes from the back of the room, it’s a good reminder that the question doesn’t just belong to state school boards, authors of textbooks, writers of curriculum standards, and other elite,” he says. “It’s on the minds of our students.”

That’s why Perkins decided to devote an entire book, and many lectures and discussions, to how that question gets answered.

These days, he says we teach a lot that isn’t going to matter, in a significant way, in students’ lives. There’s also much we aren’t teaching that would be a better return on investment. As a result, as educators, “we have a somewhat quiet crisis of content,” Perkins writes, “quiet not for utter lack of voices but because other concerns in education tend to muffle them.” These other concerns are what he calls rival learning agendas: information, achievement, and expertise.

INFORMATION

For starters, most education has become a mastery of a very large body of information, even if it’s not what Perkins calls lifeworthy — likely to matter, in any meaningful way, in the lives learners are expected to live.

“It’s nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things,” Perkins says. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips.” Instead, even though most people would say that education should prepare you for life, much of what is offered in schools doesn’t work in that direction, Perkins says. Educators are “fixated” on building up students’ reservoirs of knowledge, often because we default to what has always been done.

“Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?’ The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.”

As a result, “the lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty,” he says. “It seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

And simply having a vast reservoir of knowledge isn’t helpful if it’s not being used. “Knowledge is for going somewhere,” Perkins says, not just for accumulating. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes — scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used.

“The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives,” Perkins writes. “Overwhelmingly, knowledge unused is forgotten. It’s gone.”

Here’s where, during the Future of Learning session, Perkins asked the audience to think about something they learned during the first dozen years of schooling that really matters in their lives today, beyond basics like learning to read and not including specialty professional skills.

“The frightening thing when I have these conversations is how hard it is for people to answer,” he says. “I find that frightening. It also says a lot about the current state of education.”

Take mitosis, the process of cell division. During the Future session, he asked everyone in the audience — hundreds of people — to raise their hands if they had studied mitosis in high school. Pretty much every hand went up. He asked how many people remember, basically, what it is. About half went up. He then asked how many have used their knowledge of mitosis in the last 10 years. One hand went up.

Perkins acknowledged that he personally finds mitosis fascinating and stressed that with learning, there should always be room for passion, “but in terms of generalized education and what everyone should learn, something like mitosis doesn’t score well.”

ACHIEVEMENT

Just as educators are pushing students to build a huge reservoir of knowledge, they are also focused on having students master material, sometimes at the expense of relevance. This happens, for example, with the achievement gap. While Perkins is quick to say that the achievement gap is a highly important problem that should be taken seriously, in general, he says, “achievement” is about mastering a topic and less about providing lifeworthy content. The achievement gap asks if students are achieving X. Instead, it might be more useful to look at the relevance gap, which asks if X is going to matter to the lives students are likely to lead.

“If X is a good mastery of reading and writing, both questions earn a big yes!” Perkins says. “Skilled, fluent, and engaged reading and writing mark both a challenging gap and a high-payoff attainment. That knowledge goes somewhere. However, if X is quadratic equations, the answers don’t match. Mastering quadratic equations is challenging, but those equations are not so lifeworthy.” Perkins says we can fill in X with thousands of topics that make up the typical curriculum, such as geography. Students are drilled to remember state capitals and major rivers and rewarded as “achieving” when they score well. And while it’s nice and sometimes useful to know those things, Perkins argues that instead, knowing how the location of rivers and harbors and other features of the land have been shaped and continue to shape the course of history offers more in terms of lifelong usefulness — more so than “a bag full of facts. All that talk about achievement leaves little room for discussing what’s being achieved.”

And then there’s what Perkins calls “the Holy Grail” of learning in school: becoming an expert. The typical math curriculum is a good example of how we want learners to move toward expertise in a subject, with little regard for usefulness. Arithmetic leads to algebra, including many “hardly used twists and turns” of advanced algebra, then to geometry and calculus, “an entire subject that hardly anyone ever uses,” Perkins writes.

Unfortunately, if someone questions whether this expertise serves students well and instead suggests more life-relevant topics, Perkins says the common reaction is: “We’re sacrificing rigor!” But that doesn’t have to be the case. Instead of building during the first 12 years of schooling toward expertise in an advanced topic like calculus that hardly ever comes up in our lives, Perkins says students can instead become “expert amateurs” in something like statistics — a rigorous topic that is also used in daily life. In fact, expert amateurism works great, he says, in most of what we do in our lives — raising children, filing taxes, appreciating art, understanding insurance rates, or dealing with our own health care.

Perkins is very clear that expertise in a specific field is not bad; in fact, he encourages it and assumes it will happen at the college or university level. But he advocates that in today’s world, younger students need to first master the fundamentals of key learning and then decide where they want to specialize.      So we come back to the question: What is worth learning? In his book, Perkins promises that he is not going to answer that question, at least not in a tidy way. There’s no list of 1,000 things we must know or teach. Perkins says there would be no way to create a definitive list because there are lots of things worth learning at any given time or for a specialized career or even simply because we enjoy learning.

Instead, he does know that the encyclopedic approach to learning that happens in most schools that focuses primarily on achievement and expertise doesn’t make sense.

“The fixation on the heap of information in the textbooks is itself part of the problem because the world we are educating learners for is something of a moving target,” he says.

Historically, the first 12 or so years of schooling have focused on educating for the known, “the tried and true, the established canon,” he writes. “This made very good sense in the many periods and places where most children’s lives were likely to be more or less like their parents’ lives. However, wagering that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday does not seem to be a very good bet today. Perhaps we need a different vision of education, a vision that foregrounds educating for the unknown as much as for the known.”

And to do that, Perkins says we need to rethink what’s worth learning and what’s worth letting go of — in a radical way.

“We do kind of need to blow up the system and start fresh,” he says. “Well, maybe not blow up the whole thing, but at least some corners.”

One of those corners is the drive to educate through high-stakes testing, he says.

“It’s clear that NCLB has not worked well,” with pressures on teachers and students, sometimes leading to instances of cheating and maneuvering. With high-stakes testing, he says, there’s a fixation on “summative” versus “formative” assessment — evaluating students’ mastery of material with exams and final projects (achievements) versus providing ongoing feedback that can improve learning. “You end up shooting for the Big contest, the Big test, at the end of the year,” he says. “It’s a distortion.” As a result, “students are asked to learn a great deal for the class and for the test that likely has no role in the lives they will live — that is, a great deal that simply is not likely to come up again for them in a meaningful way.”

Perkins stresses that he isn’t taking a stance against assessment, which he says is critical for learning. Instead, “it’s more about how assessment is made. This is a vote for a richer form of achievement.”

To be fair, he says, the assessment “game” as it’s usually played in education seems perfectly reasonable — at first. Tests “are socially pretty efficient. You can distribute them widely and score them efficiently,” he says. “We give those tests. We evaluate those tests. But that makes for shallow learning and understanding. … You cram to do well on the test but may not have the understanding. It unravels.”

Instead, we should be moving away from an understanding of something — the information on the test, the list of state capitals — to an understanding with something. With the latter, he says, students are able to then make connections to other things. For example, rather than just learning facts about the French Revolution, students should learn about the French Revolution as a way to understand issues like world conflict or poverty or the struggle between church and state. Without those connections, Perkins says he’s not surprised that so many people have trouble naming things they learned early on that still have meaning today or that disengaged students are raising their hands, asking why they need to know something.

“And students are completely right,” he says. “First-graders are very interested [in school], but over time, engagement slides and slides. There are often multiple reasons why, but one is that they don’t see the relevance of what they are learning. They don’t see how it serves their lives.”

Growing up in Farmington, Maine, a small town with just under 5,000 residents, Perkins remembers it feeling safe and peaceful, a great place to come of age. He also remembers being bored with school through eighth grade.

“I got excited in high school when I encountered a range of topics treated at a higher level,” he says. But, he acknowledges, he was probably unique. “I was lucky, I think, in that I’m not so much the kind of person that Future Wise was written for. I like a lot of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Algebra, history — I can really get into those things. I don’t have to ask myself how is this going to be enlightening my life.”

Still, despite his own experience, he says that in the bigger picture of learning, we need to remember Gandhi.

“As the train started up and Gandhi tossed down his second sandal, he showed wisdom about what to keep and what to let go of,” Perkins says. “Those are both central questions for education as we choose for today’s learners the sandals they need for tomorrow’s journey.”

Illustrations by Shaw Nielsen.

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About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction

About half of U.S. adults (51%) say the country’s public K-12 education system is generally going in the wrong direction. A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction, and about a third (32%) are not sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2023.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand how Americans view the K-12 public education system. We surveyed 5,029 U.S. adults from Nov. 9 to Nov. 16, 2023.

The survey was conducted by Ipsos for Pew Research Center on the Ipsos KnowledgePanel Omnibus. The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey is weighted by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, income and other categories.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

A majority of those who say it’s headed in the wrong direction say a major reason is that schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.

These findings come amid debates about what is taught in schools , as well as concerns about school budget cuts and students falling behind academically.

Related: Race and LGBTQ Issues in K-12 Schools

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the public K-12 education system is going in the wrong direction. About two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65%) say this, compared with 40% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. In turn, 23% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans say it’s headed in the right direction.

Among Republicans, conservatives are the most likely to say public education is headed in the wrong direction: 75% say this, compared with 52% of moderate or liberal Republicans. There are no significant differences among Democrats by ideology.

Similar shares of K-12 parents and adults who don’t have a child in K-12 schools say the system is going in the wrong direction.

A separate Center survey of public K-12 teachers found that 82% think the overall state of public K-12 education has gotten worse in the past five years. And many teachers are pessimistic about the future.

Related: What’s It Like To Be A Teacher in America Today?

Why do Americans think public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction?

We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons:

• Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%)
• Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)
• Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)

About a quarter (26%) say a major reason is that parents have too much influence in decisions about what schools are teaching.

How views vary by party

Americans in each party point to different reasons why public education is headed in the wrong direction.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say major reasons are:

• A lack of focus on core academic subjects (79% vs. 55%)
• Teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom (76% vs. 23%)

In turn, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to point to:

• Insufficient school funding and resources (78% vs. 33%)
• Parents having too much say in what schools are teaching (46% vs. 13%)

Views also vary within each party by ideology.

Among Republicans, conservatives are particularly likely to cite a lack of focus on core academic subjects and teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom.

Among Democrats, liberals are especially likely to cite schools lacking resources and parents having too much say in the curriculum.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

• Partisanship & Issues
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Rachel Minkin is a research associate focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center .

72% of U.S. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom

U.s. public, private and charter schools in 5 charts, is college worth it, half of latinas say hispanic women’s situation has improved in the past decade and expect more gains, a quarter of u.s. teachers say ai tools do more harm than good in k-12 education, most popular.

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Home  /  News  /  Why Is Education Important? The Power Of An Educated Society

Why Is Education Important? The Power Of An Educated Society

Looking for an answer to the question of why is education important? We address this query with a focus on how education can transform society through the way we interact with our environment. 

Whether you are a student, a parent, or someone who values educational attainment, you may be wondering how education can provide quality life to a society beyond the obvious answer of acquiring knowledge and economic growth. Continue reading as we discuss the importance of education not just for individuals but for society as a whole. 

Harness the power of education to build a more sustainable modern society with a degree from  Unity Environmental University .

How Education Is Power: The Importance Of Education In Society

Why is education so important? Nelson Mandela famously said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” An educated society is better equipped to tackle the challenges that face modern America, including:

• Climate change
• Social justice
• Economic inequality

Education is not just about learning to read and do math operations. Of course, gaining knowledge and practical skills is part of it, but education is also about values and critical thinking. It’s about finding our place in society in a meaningful way. 

Environmental Stewardship

A  study from 2022 found that people who belong to an environmental stewardship organization, such as the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics, are likely to have a higher education level than those who do not. This suggests that quality education can foster a sense of responsibility towards the environment.

With the effects of climate change becoming increasingly alarming, this particular importance of education is vital to the health, safety, and longevity of our society. Higher learning institutions can further encourage environmental stewardship by adopting a  framework of sustainability science .

The Economic Benefits Of Education

Higher education can lead to better job opportunities and higher income. On average, a  person with a bachelor’s degree will make $765,000 more  in their lifetime than someone with no degree. Even with the rising costs of tuition, investment in higher education pays off in the long run. In 2020, the return on investment (ROI) for a college degree was estimated to be  13.5% to 35.9% . 

Green jobs  like environmental science technicians and solar panel installers  have high demand projections for the next decade. Therefore, degrees that will prepare you for one of these careers will likely yield a high ROI. And, many of these jobs only require an  associate’s degree or certificate , which means lower overall education costs. 

Unity  helps students maximize their ROI with real-world experience in the field as an integral part of every degree program. 

10 Reasons Why School Is Important

Education is not just an individual pursuit but also a societal one.  In compiling these reasons, we focused on the question, “How does education benefit society?” Overall, higher education has the power to transform:

• Individuals’ sense of self
• Interpersonal relationships
• Social communities
• Professional communities

Cognitive Development

Neuroscience research  has proven that the brain is a muscle that can retain its neuroplasticity throughout life. However, like other muscles, it must receive continual exercise to remain strong. Higher education allows people of any age to improve their higher-level cognitive abilities like problem-solving and decision-making. This can make many parts of life feel more manageable and help society run smoothly. 

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is key to workplace success.  Studies  show that people with emotional intelligence exhibit more:

• Self-awareness
• Willingness to try new things
• Innovative thinking
• Active listening
• Collaboration skills
• Problem-solving abilities

By attending higher education institutions that value these soft skills, students can improve their emotional intelligence as part of their career development in college.

Technological Literacy

Many careers in today’s job market use advanced technology. To prepare for these jobs, young people likely won’t have access to these technologies to practice on their own. That’s part of why so many STEM career paths require degrees. It’s essential to gain technical knowledge and skills through a certified program to safely use certain technologies. And, educated scientists are  more likely to make new technological discoveries .

Cultural Awareness

Education exposes individuals to different cultures and perspectives. Being around people who are different has the powerful ability to foster acceptance. Acceptance benefits society as a whole. It increases innovation and empathy. 

College also gives students an opportunity to practice feeling comfortable in situations where there are people of different races, genders, sexualities, and abilities. Students can gain an understanding of how to act respectfully among different types of people, which is an important skill for the workplace. This will only become more vital as our world continues to become more globalized.

Ethical and Moral Development

Another reason why school is important is that it promotes ethical and moral development. Many schools require students to take an ethics course in their general education curriculum. However, schools can also encourage character development throughout their programs by using effective pedagogical strategies including:

• Class debates and discussions
• Historical case studies
• Group projects

Unity’s distance learning programs  include an ethical decision-making class in our core curriculum. 

Ready To Learn More About Unity Environmental University?

Communication Skills

Effective written and verbal communication skills are key for personal and professional success. Higher education programs usually include at least one communication course in their general education requirements. Often the focus in these classes is on writing skills, but students can also use college as an opportunity to hone their presentation and public speaking skills. Courses such as  Multimedia Communication for Environmental Professionals  provide many opportunities for this. 

Civic Engagement

According to a  Gallup survey , people with higher education degrees are:

• More likely to participate in civic activities such as voting and volunteering
• Less likely to commit crimes
• More likely to get involved in their local communities

All these individual acts add up to make a big difference in society. An educated electorate is less likely to be swayed by unethical politicians and, instead, make choices that benefit themselves and their community. Because they are more involved, they are also more likely to hold elected officials accountable.

Financial Stability

The right degree can significantly expand your career opportunities and improve your long-term earning potential. Not all degrees provide the same level of financial stability, so it’s important to research expected salary offers after graduation and job demand outlook predictions for your desired field. Consider the return on investment for a degree from an affordable private school such as  Unity Environmental University .

Environmental Awareness

We have already discussed why education is important for environmental stewardship. Education can also lead to better environmental practices in the business world. By building empathy through character education and ethics courses, institutions can train future business leaders to emphasize human rights and sustainability over profits. All types and sizes of businesses can incorporate sustainable practices, but awareness of the issues and solutions is the first step.

Lifelong Learning

The reasons why education is important discussed so far focus on institutional education. However, education can happen anywhere. Attending a university that values all kinds of learning will set students up with the foundation to become lifelong learners.  Research  demonstrates that lifelong learners tend to be healthier and more fulfilled throughout their lives. When societies emphasize the importance of education, they can boost their overall prosperity.

The Role Of Unity Environmental University In Society

Environmentally conscious education is extremely valuable and should be accessible to all.   Unity Environmental University  offers tuition prices that are comparable to public universities, and financial aid is available to those who qualify. Courses last five weeks so that students can focus on only one class at a time. This ensures all learners are set up for academic success. 

Unity believes in supporting students holistically to maximize the power of education. This includes mental health services,  experiential learning opportunities , and  job placement assistance . Students in our  hybrid programs  can take classes at several field stations throughout Maine and enjoy the beautiful nature surrounding the campus for outdoor recreation.

Sustainable Initiatives

Some highlights from Unity Environmental University’s many sustainable initiatives:

• All programs include at least one sustainability learning outcome
• All research courses are focused on sustainability research
• Reduced building energy use by 25% across campus
• 100% of food waste is recycled into energy 
• Campus features a  net-zero LEED Platinum-certified classroom/office building

While many schools value sustainability, Unity stands out because  everything  we do is about sustainability. We also recognize our responsibility to model how a sustainable business can operate in a manner that’s fiscally viable and socially responsible.

Make An Impact At Unity Environmental University

While the phrase ‘education is power’ may sound cliche, it is also resoundingly true. Higher education has the power to transform individuals and societies. Unity Environmental University understands its power to make a positive impact on the world. That’s why we were the first university to divest from fossil fuels. 

This year, we celebrated our  largest incoming class ever , showing that students want an education system that aligns with their values. In addition to our commitment to sustainability, we offer flexibility to students with start dates all year round for our  online degree programs .

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5 Big Challenges Facing K-12 Education Today—And Ideas for Tackling Them

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Big Ideas is Education Week’s annual special report that brings the expertise of our newsroom to bear on the challenges educators are facing in classrooms, schools, and districts.

In the report , EdWeek reporters ask hard questions about K-12 education’s biggest issues and offer insights based on their extensive coverage and expertise.

The goal is to question the status quo and explore opportunities to help build a better, more just learning environment for all students.

In the 2023 edition , our newsroom sought to dig deeper into new and persistent challenges. Our reporters consider some of the big questions facing the field: Why is teacher pay so stubbornly stalled? What should reading instruction look like? How do we integrate—or even think about—AI? What does it mean for parents to be involved in the decisionmaking around classroom curriculum? And, perhaps the most existential, what does it mean for schools to be “public”?

The reported essays below tackle these vexing and pressing questions. We hope they offer fodder for robust discussions.

To see how your fellow educator peers are feeling about a number of these issues, we invite you to explore the EdWeek Research Center’s survey of more than 1,000 teachers and school and district leaders .

Please connect with us on social media by using #K12BigIdeas or by emailing [email protected].

1. What Does It Actually Mean for Schools to Be Public?

Over years of covering school finance, Mark Lieberman keep running up against one nagging question: Does the way we pay for public schools inherently contradict what we understand the goal of public education to be? Read more →

2. Public Schools Rely on Underpaid Female Labor. It’s Not Sustainable

School districts are still operating largely as if the labor market for women hasn’t changed in the last half century, writes Alyson Klein. Read more →

3. Parents’ Rights Groups Have Mobilized. What Does It Mean for Students?

Libby Stanford has been covering the parents’ rights groups that have led the charge to limit teaching about race, sexuality, and gender. In her essay, she explores what happens to students who miss out on that instruction. Read more→

4. To Move Past the Reading Wars, We Must Understand Where They Started

When it comes to reading instruction, we keep having the same fights over and over again, writes Sarah Schwartz. That’s because, she says, we have a fundamental divide about what reading is and how to study it. Read more→

5. No, AI Won’t Destroy Education. But We Should Be Skeptical

Lauraine Langreo makes the case for using AI to benefit teaching and learning while being aware of its potential downsides. Read more→

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What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

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Teaching About Technology in Schools Through Technoskeptical Inquiry

June 3, 2024 | victorialynn | Harvard Educational Review Contributors , Voices in Education

By Jacob Pleasants, Daniel G. Krutka, and T. Philip Nichols

New technologies are rapidly transforming our societies, our relationships, and our schools. Look no further than the intense — and often panicked — discourse around generative AI , the metaverse , and the creep of digital media into all facets of civic and social life . How are schools preparing students to think about and respond to these changes?

In various ways, students are taught how to use technologies in school. Most schools teach basic computing skills and many offer elective vocational-technical classes. But outside of occasional conversations around digital citizenship, students rarely wrestle with deeper questions about the effects of technologies on individuals and society.

Decades ago, Neil Postman (1995) argued for a different form of technology education focused on teaching students to critically examine technologies and their psychological and social effects. While Postman’s ideas have arguably never been more relevant, his suggestion to add technology education as a separate subject to a crowded curriculum gained little traction. Alternatively, we argue that technology education could be an interdisciplinary endeavor that occurs across core subject areas. Technology is already a part of English Language Arts (ELA), Science, and Social Studies instruction. What is missing is a coherent vision and common set of practices and principles that educators can use to align their efforts.

To provide a coherent vision, in our recent HER article , we propose “technoskepticism” as an organizing goal for teaching about technology. We define technoskepticism as a critical disposition and practice of investigating the complex relationships between technologies and societies. A technoskeptical person is not necessarily anti-technology, but rather one who deeply examines technological issues from multiple dimensions and perspectives akin to an art critic.

We created the Technoskepticism Iceberg as a framework to support teachers and students in conducting technological inquiries. The metaphor of an iceberg conveys how many important influences of technology lie beneath our conscious awareness. People often perceive technologies as tools (the “visible” layer of the iceberg), but technoskepticism requires that they be seen as parts of systems (with interactions that produce many unintended effects) and embedded with values about what is good and desirable (and for whom). The framework also identifies three dimensions of technology that students can examine. The technical dimension concerns the design and functions of a technology, including how it may work differently for different people. The psychosocial dimension addresses how technologies change our individual cognition and our larger societies. The political dimension considers who makes decisions concerning the terms, rules, or laws that govern technologies.

To illustrate these ideas, how might we use the Technoskeptical Iceberg to interrogate generative AI such as ChatGPT in the core subject areas?

A science/STEM classroom might focus on the technical dimension by investigating how generative AI works and demystifying its ostensibly “intelligent” capabilities. Students could then examine the infrastructures involved in AI systems , such as immense computing power and specialized hardware that in turn have profound environmental consequences. A teacher could ask students to use their values to weigh the costs and potential benefits of ChatGPT.

A social studies class could investigate the psychosocial dimension through the longer histories of informational technologies (e.g., the printing press, telegraph, internet, and now AI) to consider how they shifted people’s lives. They could also explore political questions about what rules or regulations governments should impose on informational systems that include people’s data and intellectual property.

In an ELA classroom, students might begin by investigating the psychosocial dimensions of reading and writing, and the values associated with different literacy practices. Students could consider how the concept of “authorship” shifts when one writes by hand, with word processing software, or using ChatGPT. Or how we are to engage with AI-generated essays, stories, and poetry differently than their human-produced counterparts. Such conversations would highlight how literary values are mediated by technological systems . 

Students who use technoskepticism to explore generative AI technologies should be better equipped to act as citizens seeking to advance just futures in and out of schools. Our questions are, what might it take to establish technoskepticism as an educational goal in schools? What support will educators need? And what might students teach us through technoskeptical inquiries?

Postman, N. (1995). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. Vintage Books.

About the Authors

Jacob Pleasants is an assistant professor of science education at the University of Oklahoma. Through his teaching and research, he works to humanize STEM education by helping students engage with issues at the intersection of STEM and society.

Daniel G. Krutka is a dachshund enthusiast, former high school social studies teacher, and associate professor of social studies education at the University of North Texas. His research concerns technology, democracy, and education, and he is the cofounder of the Civics of Technology project ( www.civicsoftechnology.org ).

T. Philip Nichols is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Baylor University. He studies the digitalization of public education and the ways science and technology condition the ways we practice, teach, and talk about literacy.

They are the authors of “ What Relationships Do We Want with Technology? Toward Technoskepticism in Schools ” in the Winter 2023 issue of Harvard Educational Review .

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Medical Education Celebrated on Med Ed Day

Medical education day at yale, mhs-med ed graduates, medical education fellows, alison whelan, md, chief academic officer, association of american medical colleges (aamc).

For the first time in five years, Medical Education Day at Yale (Med Ed Day)—now in its 12 th year— was fully in-person. Over 200 Yale School of Medicine (YSM) faculty, staff, students, residents, fellows, and alumni gathered on June 6, along with colleagues from the Yale Schools of Nursing and Public Health, to share best practices and to celebrate trainees and educators and Yale’s excellence and innovation in medical education.

In opening remarks, Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning Janet Hafler, EdD, discussed the role of the Center for Medical Education —which organized Med Ed Day—in centralizing educator development, assessment, and educational technology programs across undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education at Yale. On one end of the continuum of learning, Hafler pointed to the new Medical Education Concentration , recently launched for MD and MD-PhD students with a rigorous curriculum. While medical education leadership anticipated about 10 students to sign up, 44 enrolled, which Hafler described as “truly exciting.” Further along the continuum, Hafler referenced the faculty members who would be recognized at the end of Med Ed Day for either completing the Medical Education Fellowship (MEF), or the two-year Master of Health Science-Medical Education track degree program (MHS-Med Ed).

Med Ed Day reflected and celebrated this continuum of learning and development, with presentations and workshops led by a wide range of members of the Yale community. For example, two MD Class of 2025 students, Mitchel Wride and Madisen Swallow, MS, presented on The Effects of Early Exposure to POCUS on Medical Student Career Decisions , while Jessica Illuzzi, MD, MS, deputy dean for education and Harold W. Jockers Professor of Medical Education, and William Rando, PhD, director of pedagogy, led a workshop entitled Engaging Learners in Critical Thinking . Similarly, more than 80 members of the YSM health profession community, at different stages of their education or career, displayed posters highlighting medical education research or innovation in education.

Education Leadership: Milestones to Success

Before Alison Whelan, MD, chief academic officer, Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), launched into her formal keynote remarks, she offered an external perspective on medical education at YSM, explaining that in her role she has the opportunity to hear about what different schools are doing. “What has been going on in the last few years at Yale is really awesome,” Whelan said, highlighting the YSM Strategic Plan for Medical Education , something many other schools do not have, and the longitudinal focus on medical education scholarship.

In her keynote presentation, Education Leadership: Milestones to Success , Whelan drew from her own career path experiences in medical education to provide advice to the audience, regardless of their education and/or career stage. She emphasized that people are happiest and most successful when they are doing things that they are good at and like doing. To make her point, she shared that over time, she realized that while she values research and enjoys supporting others doing research and amplifying their work, she does not enjoy doing research herself. Therefore, a medical education leadership role focused on research would not have been a good fit for her; in contrast, a management role where she can help others do what they do well has been the right fit.

Whelan highlighted the wide range of medical education leadership roles that exist—varying by trainee-level and focus— and how these roles differ in how much they draw upon education leadership skills (e.g., leadership, management, curriculum development, assessment, teaching, and education research). She provided practical advice about professional development to fill skill set gaps and encouraged people to systematically document their activities. A central part of her advice was to do a “gut check,” reiterating that people need to ask themselves “is this what I love?”

Whelan also focused on engaging with mentors, coaches, and sponsors (and on serving in those roles for others), noting people love giving advice. She emphasized the importance of having “you supporters”—people who will tell you when an opportunity is a good one for you, and who similarly will ask you, “do you really want to do this,” when something likely is not the right career move.

An audience member asked Whelan how she would advise more junior faculty who tend to love everything. Whelan responded by sharing that early in her career, her chair asked her if she wanted to be a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. Whelan then explained that if a person’s goal is to have a leadership role in medical education, they have to stop some other things because it is impossible to do it all. She noted some faculty want to keep doing a bit of everything, and make the decision to do so; while many are happy with their careers, they likely do not have a named leadership role, but that is a trade-off they have chosen.

Celebrating graduates & poster winners

A highlight of Med Ed Day was the graduation of two groups of medical educators who exemplify Whelan’s advice about professional development, mentorship, and doing what one is good at and enjoys. First, 13 faculty received certificates for completing the MEF. (Each of these faculty presented a poster in the poster session that showcased their MEF education project; these projects are focused on enhancing a department’s or the school’s education programs.) This was followed by nine graduates of the MHS-Med Ed program receiving their diplomas. (A 10 th graduate of the program was not able to be present.)

The day ended with the announcement of poster award winners , and attendees having the opportunity to view the posters and engage with many of the poster creators during a wine and cheese reception.

Click here for the full Med Ed Day schedule, including a list of all the session topics and presenters .

Featured in this article

• Janet Hafler, EdD Professor of Pediatrics (General Pediatrics); Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning, General Pediatrics; Director of the Center for Medical Education, Pediatrics
• Jessica Illuzzi, MD, MS, FACOG Deputy Dean for Education and Harold W. Jockers Professor of Medical Education and Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences
• William Rando, PhD Director of Pedagogy

Related Links

• Congratulations MHS-Med Ed Graduates & Medical Education Fellows!
• Med Ed Day Poster Winners

Red states strike deals to show controversial conservative videos in schools

Educational material from PragerU is now offered to public schools in six states. Opponents call it indoctrination and inaccurate.

Key takeaways

Summary is AI-generated, newsroom-reviewed.

• Prager University partnerships are now in six states
• Critics label PragerU content as right-wing indoctrination with factual inaccuracies
• PragerU's reach and funding surge amid political education battles

Did our AI help? Share your thoughts.

A privately funded effort to use disputed videos to teach conservative values in public schools is gaining traction, as Louisiana recently became the sixth state to endorse educational materials produced by Prager University.

PragerU is not a university but a nonprofit that produces short videos that push patriotism and conservative views of history, race, sex and gender, among other topics. Since last year, Florida, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Montana and Arizona have also announced partnerships with PragerU under which the nonprofit’s lessons become state-sanctioned, optional teaching materials for public schools. PragerU is neither paying nor receiving money from state partners, the nonprofit and state officials said.

The company and its supporters hail the moves as countering what they call left-leaning ideas in education. The half-dozen partner states, said PragerU Chief Executive Marissa Streit, are just the beginning.

“We are pursuing every state in America,” she said.

Opponents say materials produced by PragerU amount to right-wing indoctrination.

“PragerU’s materials are hyperpartisan to the point of propaganda, inaccurate and incredibly substandard,” said Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, a statewide teachers group. Arizona launched a PragerU partnership in January.

PragerU, founded in 2009 by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager and screenwriter Allen Estrin, began by producing videos aimed at college students and expanded its offerings in 2021 to reach younger students. Its website says its goal is to counter “the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education” by promoting “American values.” Two of the most-watched videos on the “PragerU Kids” YouTube channel are a lesson on “Student Loans 101” and a cartoon-style retelling of the biblical story of David and Goliath that instructs children, “when God is on your side, you have nothing to fear.”

Some of PragerU’s videos have drawn criticism for factual inaccuracies, especially for a fictionalized animated clip that portrays famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass defending the nation’s Founding Fathers’ support of slavery.

Streit disputes that PragerU’s materials are inaccurate. She said the nonprofit is providing a patriotic viewpoint missing from public schools nationwide.

“American students are basically given a very one-sided perspective of American history and civics,” Streit said. “We don’t teach that America is perfect. But we teach that America is the greatest experiment on planet Earth.”

Supporters of the PragerU partnerships note that teachers are not being required to deploy the materials. They say the introduction of PragerU to public school classrooms is a much-needed course correction after years in which schools adopted implicitly or explicitly left-leaning lessons based on materials like the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which positions slavery at the heart of the nation’s founding.

In Oklahoma, which debuted a PragerU partnership in September, state Superintendent Ryan Walters framed the need for the nonprofit’s videos in overtly political terms. “There is no better example of a curriculum that rips the soul out of the liberal takeover of our schools than providing PragerU to every Oklahoma student,” Walters said in an emailed statement.

In Louisiana, which approved the PragerU materials last month, Superintendent Cade Brumley said the nonprofit’s videos represent an important optional addition to the state’s new “Freedom Framework” social studies standards.

The standards, adopted in 2022, are “based in American exceptionalism and our ongoing quest for a more perfect union,” Brumley said in a statement. “Students should understand and appreciate their role in sustaining and improving our constitutional republic” — and the PragerU videos “could be very helpful,” he said.

The PragerU partnerships are among the latest attempts by state officials to shape what school districts teach about hot-button topics. After the coronavirus pandemic prompted widespread remote learning, many conservatives began complaining that instruction was left-leaning, spurring lawmakers in mostly red states to pass more than 70 laws restricting what teachers can say about race, racism, history, sexual orientation and gender identity, a Washington Post analysis found.

PragerU’s reach and funding exploded alongside these political battles over education.

Today, the nonprofit counts more than 11.3 million followers across its social media profiles on sites such as Facebook , Instagram and X , according to a Post tally. PragerU’s website says it draws 5 million views each day. Its revenue catapulted from $36 million in 2020 to $68.7 million in 2023, tax records show .

Streit, the CEO, said the nonprofit is funded by about 350,000 donors from a variety of backgrounds “who give a wide range of amounts.” She declined to name or confirm donors, but previous major givers — each donating more than a million dollars — have included the conservative Bradley Foundation, the National Christian Foundation and Texas fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks, according to the Guardian and SourceWatch.org .

It is unclear how frequently PragerU materials will be used. In states that have debuted collaborations with PragerU, education officials contacted by The Post either did not respond to questions or said they are not tracking how many school districts have implemented PragerU content. It is likely that decisions on whether to use PragerU materials will come down to the views of individual teachers, and that nobody will track how many educators show the videos.

“My guess is it will be a lot of political sound and fury, signifying very little educationally,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the history of education.

A spokesman for the Louisiana Education Department noted that “supplemental resources and curriculum are local decisions,” adding that the department does not gather data from school districts on what supplemental materials they choose to use.

Education association heads in Montana and Arizona said they are unaware of any school districts formally choosing to use PragerU materials since their states opened partnerships with the nonprofit — and that it would be difficult to determine.

“We have over 400 school districts in Montana — each with their own school board and administration,” said Rob Watson, executive director of the School Administrators of Montana. “There could be at least one of those districts that have adopted PragerU, [but] I do not know of any who have.”

In Florida, which became the first state to partner with PragerU nearly a year ago, at least five school districts reportedly instructed their staffs not to use the videos . In most cases, the Florida districts cited policies requiring that all supplemental materials be approved by local school officials first. In Oklahoma, at least eight school districts have also declined to use PragerU materials for the same reason.

Allegations of inaccuracies

PragerU lessons cover topics from “government-run health care” to the U.S. Constitution to how to open and maintain a savings account. Under the PragerU partnership with New Hampshire, launched in September, state officials approved a PragerU online financial literacy course for use in public schools.

The nonprofit’s online material is free for teachers to use and available to the public through YouTube and its website. Its books and workbooks are also free online, although hard copies of some magazines and workbooks must be purchased, Streit said.

PragerU also publishes free guides meant to help teachers figure out how best to deploy its content. In Louisiana, for instance, PragerU created a nearly 100-page document , available online, that matches its videos to state standards.

Critics say PragerU lessons distort history and facts to serve a conservative worldview. Some scientists have said PragerU videos lack context and downplay climate change as climate alarmism, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations alleges some videos are anti-Muslim. Other complaints center on the nonprofit’s portrayal of slavery. In many PragerU videos that deal with the topic, various historical figures assert that people in the 21st century should not view those in the past by the light of modern-day values.

For instance, one animated video depicts Christopher Columbus speaking with two children from the 21st century. Defending the practice of slavery, he says “slavery is as old as time” and asks: “How can you come here to the 15th century and judge me by your standards? … You must ask yourself, ‘What did the culture and society at the time treat as no big deal?’”

The clip is one of several videos in which speakers describe slavery as an accepted practice in its time. PragerU videos also emphasize that White people worked to abolish slavery, while minimizing the fact that other White people were working to continue it.

In the video featuring Douglass, an animated version of the famed abolitionist says the nation’s Founding Fathers forged compromises on slavery because they were trying to unify the nation. The video mentions that some Founding Fathers owned enslaved people and says they knew slavery was “evil and wrong” but prioritized compromise and unifying the colonies. But Douglass was better known for his strident opposition to compromises over slavery in the 1840s and ’50s, when the video is set, and the video conflates events of very different time periods, experts say.

“There’s a constant effort to spin atrocities in the past as not so bad,” said Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, who has examined many of the company’s videos.

When Adrienne McCarthy, a researcher at Kansas State University, published an analysis of PragerU’s college-level materials in 2022, she found prominent themes included small government, opposition to the welfare state and pushback against movements such as Black Lives Matter. She concluded PragerU “mimics much of the extreme right-wing ideology in a way that is more readily digestible.”

Asked about criticism of PragerU’s offerings including the Douglass video, Streit said that whether people agree with PragerU’s portrayal of Douglass, “no one can fairly argue that PragerU denies the horrors of slavery.”

Generally, Streit said, the nonprofit is simply providing a counterbalance and offering a perspective that differs from what PragerU alleges children are hearing 90 percent of the time in school.

“Isn’t that what America is about?” she said. “We are not claiming people should only use PragerU.”

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A School With 7 Students: Inside the ‘Microschools’ Movement

Parents, desperate for help, are turning to private schools with a half-dozen or so students. And they are getting a financial boost from taxpayers.

By Dana Goldstein

Photographs by Audra Melton

Dana Goldstein visited three microschools in the Atlanta area, and attended a national microschooling conference.

When Nathanael was in kindergarten, he told his mother, Diana Lopez, that he did not want to return to school — ever. His teacher yelled at him, he said. And when Ms. Lopez picked him up from school, he would often immediately start to cry.

Nathanael has autism, and in a busy classroom of 25 children, the teacher seemed to have few strategies for working with him, Ms. Lopez recalled.

This year at a new school, Nathanael, 7, was happier. He shared a teacher with only six other students — not in one classroom, but in the entire school.

Nathanael attended a microschool, an increasingly popular type of super-small, largely unregulated private school, often serving fewer students than are enrolled in a single classroom at a traditional school.

The programs are benefiting from two trends: Since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted schooling, many parents have rethought their children’s education, and are open to nontraditional options. And Republican state lawmakers and donors, who have long supported private-school choice, have increasingly directed money toward microschools across the country, saying they give parents a chance to withdraw from school districts at a reasonable price — typically $5,000 to $10,000 per year.

Microschool students are usually registered with their states as home-schoolers. But the new generation of microschools, like the program Nathanael attended, Kingdom Seed Christian Academy, operate more like modern-day one-room schoolhouses, meeting in homes, church basements and storefronts.

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