Teen pregnancy has been a big problem in Bogotá, Colombia for a long time. Data show that in 2015, one in five of the city’s girls under 19 were mothers, or pregnant. The city’s mayor Enrique Peñalosa, like many mayors before him, wanted to try and change things.
One of the reasons people go to Esther Wojcicki for parenting advice is because her three daughters are off-the-charts successful: Susan is the CEO of YouTube, Janet is a professor at UC San Francisco, and Anne is the CEO of 23andMe.
In the UK, kids take a lot of high-stakes tests. They take exams around age seven, and more around age 11. There are subject exams at 16 (GCSEs) and then, for those who want to go to university, tests known as A-levels at 18. There’s a battery of other assessments along the way. From a weirdly young age, British kids are regularly preparing for tests.
On one major standardized test measuring proficiency in technology and engineering, there’s a gap in scores favoring girls. And it’s growing.
Plenty of parents fret over their children’s undying love of video games. Do interactive games like Fortnite and World of Warcraft inhibit kids’ ability to hold normal human conversations? Do aggressive games foster an unnatural desire to wield guns and destroy things? Or does gaming help kids develop a crucial suite of 21st-century skills?
Three-quarters of young adults say becoming financially independent from their parents is a key sign of becoming an adult. On this front, they appear to be failing.
Toad, a 20-year-old Danish woman living in Copenhagen, has been lonely her whole life. She is autistic, and as a child, did not have any friends. When she moved from the country to the city, not much changed. “They says it’s a phase, but a phase becomes a life,” she says, surrounded by six other young adults in a cozy apartment in Copenhagen—all of whom are working on becoming less lonely.
Clayton Spencer, the president of Bates College, a small liberal arts college in Maine, is unapologetic that careers do not arrive as neatly packaged gifts for students. Figuring out what kind of work to do after graduation requires exposing students to different kinds of work, and intentionally connecting what they learn in a classroom to what happens in the real world.
Henley Homes, a property developer, markets Baylis Old School, their 149-home London development on the site of a former school, as “an education in living well.”
Peter Tabichi, a Kenyan math and physics teacher, won the $1 million Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize at a star-studded event in Dubai Sunday (March 24).
Last year, Andria Zafirakou, an art and textiles teacher at Alperton Community School in the UK, won the $1 million Global Teacher Prize from the Varkey Foundation. The next winner will be announced Sunday (March 24) at the Global Education & Skills Forum in Dubai.
The future of classrooms is coming to Flanders.
Since 2013, Making Caring Common, an initiative from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has tried to make the college admissions process saner. It has encouraged admissions officers to prioritize not the quantity of students’ achievements but rather the quality of their ethical and academic engagement to make the admissions process more fair.
We fret a lot about what smartphones are doing to kids (and, let’s be honest, parents). A pair of researchers asked a different question: how are the devices changing the time families spend together?
We live in confusing times. Kids have never been so depressed, averse to failure, and incapable of doing their laundry. Parents respond, understandably, by trying to help: assisting with homework, attending every imaginable activity, and giving detailed guidance on life skills, only to be reprimanded for over-parenting, helicoptering, and generally rendering their children helpless.
William McGlashan, Jr., a top executive at the private equity firm TPG, co-founded the Rise Fund, a socially conscious investment vehicle, with Bono. He also allegedly paid $250,000 to an “admissions consultant” to help his son cheat on a college admissions test and pretend he was a football player to guarantee him a place at the University of Southern California.
Today, the US Justice Department charged dozens of parents (including a few celebrities), college coaches, and standardized test administrators in a made-for-TV scheme in which parents paid bribes to help their kids cheat on tests and gain admission to elite universities on sham athletic scholarships.
On a blustery March day five years ago, I locked arms with my mother and walked into a church in Maplewood, New Jersey to bury my brother. Bagpipes played “Amazing Grace.” I remember shivering and worrying: that my dad would slip, my mom would collapse, and that I would botch the eulogy.
Facebook has just done an about-face. After turning the world into one big, aggressive, competitive, depressing, hyper-connected community that shares tons of information nobody needs to know about their personal lives, the social network is now emphasizing privacy.
Ethan Emler isn’t a typical Harley-Davidson rider. For one thing, he’s two years old. But he’s become a poster child (literally) for the iconic motorcycle-maker’s push to attract the “next generation of riders.”
In 2012, Oliver Scott Curry was an anthropology lecturer at the University of Oxford. One day, he organized a debate among his students about whether morality was innate or acquired. One side argued passionately that morality was the same everywhere; the other, that morals were different everywhere.
The great outdoors may be one of the cheapest therapies for kids, a new study from Denmark shows. Kids who grow up surrounded by nature have up to 55% less risk of developing various mental disorders later in life, according to the paper from Aarhus University in Denmark, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America.
Andreas Schleicher is a German data scientist—tall and precise with a grey mustache and a steely gaze. The head of the education division at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), he gives off an impression of determined focus. That’s useful, considering that he’s on a mission to change the way countries around the world teach their children.
The general consensus on helicopter parenting is that it is bad. It hurts kids because they never learn to do anything for themselves. It stresses out parents, who now spend way more time with their kids than they did in the 1970s—while simultaneously working more, too. And older generations definitely disapprove: They let kids walk to school on their own, play by themselves, and get bored, and everything turned out fine.
