Nataliya Kosmyna made an uncommon choice in a research lab at MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts: she published a study prior to peer review. She was afraid of what might occur if she waited, not because the results were not complete. Peer review can take up to eight months. She was concerned that during that time, a policymaker might decide that integrating AI into kindergarten curricula was a good idea. The study had to be published. Right now. “Developing brains are at the highest risk,” she stated bluntly. Over the course of several months, 54 participants from the Boston…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives.
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The Museum of Menorca is located in Mao, a small harbor city on the smallest Balearic island in Spain. It is surrounded by historic stone walls and has the unique peace that comes from being a little out of the mainstream. It’s an improbable setting for discussing artificial intelligence. However, for three days in late April 2026, it hosted some of the most important questions in cognitive education—not in any grand, declarative way, but in the particular, sometimes contentious, always fascinating way of those who actually work with children in classrooms, chess clubs, and, in one exceptional instance, operating theaters.…
Five-year-old Aurora Nikula is creating a chocolate cake at her nursery in Lahti, Finland, on a typical morning. Leaves, water, mud, and sand. One more handful of mud. With the assurance of someone who has done this numerous times, she tastes the mixture and finds it to be satisfactory. Aki Sinkkonen, a principal scientist at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, is standing close by, observing with sincere scientific curiosity. He’s not here to judge Aurora’s baking. He is here because Aurora is getting her hands deep into a specially prepared patch of forest floor, which contains soil, moss, and microbial…
The majority of discussions about education policy tend to overlook Liberty, Texas. Its school district operates in a different economic reality than the suburban districts that typically dominate discussions about school funding and innovation because it is located in Liberty County along the Trinity River, approximately one hour east of Houston. The Liberty Independent School District lacks both the endowment infrastructure of some of the wealthier systems in the state and the property tax base of Katy ISD. It appears to have a teaching staff with more ideas than the regular budget could ever support and a foundation prepared to…
Two children are learning at the kitchen table in a Denver suburb home with a good school district, high test scores, and the kind of neighborhood where parents used to compete for kindergarten spots. The older student is completing an online math course at a speed that is too fast for a classroom. Tuesday afternoon was free, so the younger one went to a science museum. The change, according to their mother, a former marketing executive, was that she no longer thought the system was designed with her kids in mind. She is not alone, and it turns out that…
A 10-year-old girl in the UK requested a challenge from Amazon’s Alexa in 2021. The AI complied. It instructed her to use a penny to touch a live electrical plug. Thankfully, the child did not follow through. One of those unsettling AI moments that makes headlines before fading away, the story briefly gained attention as a curiosity. For Dr. Nomisha Kurian of the University of Cambridge, the underlying question remained constant: why does a system that is advanced enough to carry on a conversation fail to recognize that it has just put a child in danger? Kurian used that question…
Imagine a preschool director in a small child care facility in a suburban area of Ohio on a Tuesday morning. She’s answering a parent’s call, covering for a teacher who called in sick for the third time this month, mentally going over the licensing paperwork that needs to be completed by Friday, and attempting to recall the last time she had lunch before noon. She oversees a group of seven employees. She doesn’t have a deputy. Since last fall, she has not had a peer check-in. By all measures, she is exhausted, and the teachers who are observing her are…
In her north London home, Maria Julia Assis was having dinner when her 6-year-old son ran into the dining room with a pale face. His Android phone’s puzzle game had been interrupted. A message from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing a first-grader in capital letters that those who cause harm will pay a heavy price took its place, along with footage of Hamas militants, scared Israeli families, and blurry graphic images. Assis immediately erased the game. She claimed that her son was shaken. He questioned the purpose of a graphic advertisement in his game. The question was reasonable.…
In the midst of a worldwide pandemic on a soggy June day in 2020, a team of community organizers in Multnomah County, Oregon, had four and a half weeks to gather 23,000 handwritten signatures. They received more than 32,000. Preschool for All, arguably the most watched early childhood education experiment in the United States at the moment, was founded on that unlikely signature drive. Fifteen states have taken notice of the program in an attempt to determine whether Oregon has cracked a code that has eluded American education policy for decades. By the standards of American education funding, the plan…
Located in Fort Myers on Florida’s southwest coast, Florida Gulf Coast University is more well-known locally for its closeness to the Gulf than for turning out scholars with international recognition. When Dr. Jessica Essary became the first American in OMEP’s history to win the Global Educator of the Year Award, that changed, at least in some circles. This is the kind of acknowledgment that usually reaches Europe or Latin America, the regions with the strongest ties to OMEP. The fact that it ended up in Florida this time around speaks volumes about the direction early childhood education is taking and…