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Category: Education

French high school students lead mass protests over school funding and inequality. Thousands are arrested

French high school students lead mass protests over school funding and inequality. Thousands are arrested

  Nearly 2,000 French high schools are blockaded or closed today amid massive student-led protests over school funding and inequality. The demonstrations began in September at a single school in the economically deprived suburbs of Paris, where students protested teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and dilapidated school buildings beset by rats, falling debris and more. But the scope of the protests has widened amid a violent crackdown by French police. French authorities have arrested more than 5,000 people, largely underage students,…

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We live in a rape-prone society. The horrific Cornell case reveals what that looks like

We live in a rape-prone society. The horrific Cornell case reveals what that looks like

Rebecca Solnit writes: Sometimes a story is so so appalling, it captures the public’s attention, including the attention of people who don’t focus on the issue otherwise. Such is the case with the alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University. For feminists who focus on violence against women or anyone who has ever cared about campus rape, the claims made in Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit against the alleged perpetrators may be unusual in its severity – but we know the…

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The existential threat that AI poses to universities

The existential threat that AI poses to universities

The New York Times reports: The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering “cognitive surrender.” Many university leaders are embracing A.I. with enthusiasm anyway. As A.I. leaders warn about the dangers of their own technology, the dissonance between the optimism of university leaders and the fears of many students and professors may increase. Professors and students…

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Four Islamic polymaths prove breadth beats specialisation

Four Islamic polymaths prove breadth beats specialisation

Mariam Sabri writes: This semester, my students are learning about four polymaths who shaped Islamic science: al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different: one wrote his way out of scarcity; one was held under house arrest for a decade; one distilled an era’s medical knowledge into a text that ruled European universities for 500 years; and the last worked at the largest research institution of his age. But each shared the same underlying instinct:…

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How to create a society of cheats

How to create a society of cheats

John Paul Rollert writes: Recently, I have taken to telling friends that whenever I’m on campus, I feel like I’m trapped in the middle of a crime spree. I’m not talking about an epidemic of overdue library books or out-of-control parties. I’m talking about AI and the ways in which students are constantly using it to cheat on any work that is assigned to them. For those of us in higher ed—and I’ve taught at universities for more than 20…

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Stanford University’s dirty secrets, according to the student who exposed them

Stanford University’s dirty secrets, according to the student who exposed them

  How does a college freshman take down the president of Stanford University? Theo Baker became the youngest-ever recipient of the George Polk Award after exposing research misconduct tied to former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Now, in his new book How to Rule the World, Baker argues that the story goes far beyond one university leader—and reveals how Stanford became the training ground for Silicon Valley’s most powerful people. Kara and Theo discuss Stanford’s secretive power networks, the university’s no-boundaries…

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How Big Tech steers the public school system in the service of its commercial interests

How Big Tech steers the public school system in the service of its commercial interests

Natasha Singer writes: One humid afternoon in the summer of 2025, representatives from Microsoft were waiting as some 200 teachers trooped into a conference hall in downtown Manhattan. The educators were there for a workshop on the school technology of the moment: artificial intelligence chatbots. The Microsoft team gave a presentation on their Copilot chatbot and asked the teachers to practice using it for tasks like generating emails to parents and customizing lesson plans. Microsoft instructors also screened an A.I….

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U.S. military family schools will indoctrinate kids on Western civilization and Christianity

U.S. military family schools will indoctrinate kids on Western civilization and Christianity

The Associated Press reports: The Department of Defense is introducing a course centered on Western civilization and Christianity this fall in the schools it operates for military families, part of an effort by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to redirect the education system toward patriotic values and classical learning. The Department of Defense Education Activity operates about 160 schools across 11 countries and educates roughly 70,000 students who are children of active-duty military or civilian service members. Conservatives have eyed the…

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Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Fortune reports: When DeepSeek unveiled an AI model last year that rivaled America’s best at a fraction of the cost, or when a Chinese hypersonic missile test caught U.S. intelligence off guard to the point where a top U.S. general called it “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the reaction each time was the same: that a handful of Chinese firms had suddenly pulled ahead. But a sweeping new National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 14 million Chinese…

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Can we stop AI from flooding scientific journals?

Can we stop AI from flooding scientific journals?

C&EN reports: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic,” begins a retracted paper in the Elsevier journal Surfaces and Interfaces. This is one of ChatGPT’s standard openers when responding to a user prompt. The researcher submitted the manuscript beginning with this line, and it passed peer review. No one noticed the mistake until after publication. Publishing is crucial for many scientists’ careers, especially those in academia, and a key part of securing jobs, funding, and tenure. The pressure…

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Diversity in graduate school linked to higher starting salaries

Diversity in graduate school linked to higher starting salaries

PsyPost reports: Recent research indicates that attending graduate school with a racially diverse group of peers is linked to higher median starting salaries upon graduation. The large study examined decades of data from business and law schools across the United States. The results were published in Nature. The United States Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. Justices opposing the practice argued that the educational benefits of diversity were too abstract for courts to evaluate…

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France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

The Guardian reports: France’s parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first EU country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. “France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers,” Macron said in a video posted on social…

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Reading is the ultimate cognitive enhancer

Reading is the ultimate cognitive enhancer

Neuroscience News reports: In his new book, Falk Huettig, Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, brings together research spanning psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and education to answer that question. The result is a systematic account of how literacy reshapes memory, attention, language processing, and reasoning – and even abilities readers might not expect, like face recognition. Cognitive enhancement is having a moment, with people turning to better sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management, and tools like caffeine or neurostimulation…

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Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Xin Fan writes: A narrative has taken hold that science and the humanities are at odds. In universities around the world, investment in cutting-edge technologies often comes at the expense of retrenchment in philosophy, history, literature and the arts. Contraction of the humanities is presented as an unavoidable cost of modernization. But that ‘zero sum’ logic is flawed. As science and technology race ahead, the world needs humanities research to understand the reasons and implications. My experience at ShanghaiTech University…

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Rising diesel costs from Iran war strain U.S. school budgets

Rising diesel costs from Iran war strain U.S. school budgets

Reuters reports: Soaring diesel prices since the onset of the Iran war are draining already tight U.S. school district budgets, making it more expensive to bus students and run generators in a shock officials say they will not be ​able to afford for long. School districts from Yakima, Washington, to Waco, Texas, are tapping emergency funding reserves to keep buses running. In remote Alaska, officials are scrambling to secure enough ‌fuel to keep the lights on, according to Reuters interviews….

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Epstein and his academic friends bonded through male supremacy

Epstein and his academic friends bonded through male supremacy

Lydia Wilson writes: When I read through many of the email threads between [John] Brockman [host of Edge], Epstein and various intellectuals, what was most jarring wasn’t the crude codes about women and sex that wouldn’t have been out of place in messages between teenage boys — the mass media coverage had to some extent prepared me for this boorish childishness of successful men. What unsettled me was, in fact, the familiarity of how these men were speaking to each…

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