The way Brent International School presents itself is intentional. No ostentatious advertising campaigns or large billboard advertisements. Situated approximately 25 kilometers south of Metro Manila in Barangay Mamplasan, Biñan, Laguna’s Brentville Subdivision, the campus exudes the calm assurance of a long-standing establishment. Brent is one of the Philippines’ oldest international schools, having been established in 1909. It still has things to prove more than a century later. The school has an ecumenical flavor rather than a strictly denominational one because of its affiliation with the Episcopal Church in the Philippines. The student body truly reflects the welcome for students of…
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. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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Once you know where the name Caraga originated, it becomes more difficult to ignore its weight. The Visayan term “kalagan”—a compound of “kalag,” which means soul or spirit, and “an,” which means land—is where the word originates. When combined, they roughly translate to “land of the spirited people,” and early Spanish chroniclers, seemingly impressed by what they saw, referred to the area as “land of the brave and fierce people.” It’s not common to incorporate that into a place’s identity. The majority of regions are named after colonial administrators, rivers, or mountains. Caraga’s name was inspired by the people who…
The name CALABARZON has a subtle sense of humor. It sounds almost like a place from a fantasy book when you say it out loud; it’s rolling, rhythmic, and a little exotic. However, the name is much more utilitarian than poetic. The initial syllables and letters of five Philippine provinces—Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, and Quezon—were combined to create this acronym. The letters “Ca” from Cavite, “la” from Laguna, “ba” from Batangas, “r” from Rizal, and “zon” from Quezon’s tail are all borrowed. Yes, it’s bureaucratic wording, but it stuck, and now a whole identity has developed around it. Located on…
A teen’s first online hangout, a middle schooler’s specially designed obstacle course, or a group of college friends who met in a Rec Room paintball arena and remained friends for years all likely existed somewhere in a virtual room that vanished after June 1. Globally, players have spent a total of 68,000 years on this platform over the last ten years. There, half a billion friendships were formed. It’s nearly impossible to retain the numbers in your mind. And it was all insufficient. On March 30, Rec Room, a cross-platform social gaming platform that allows users to create, socialize, and…
For many years, the mAadhaar app sat silently on hundreds of millions of Indian smartphones. It wasn’t flashy or particularly contemporary, but it was always there when someone needed to verify their identity at a government office, a hospital counter, or a hotel check-in desk. It fulfilled its purpose. The Unique Identification Authority of India, or UIDAI, has now confirmed that the app will soon be discontinued and replaced by a redesigned system that takes a very different approach to digital identity verification. The change is more than just a cosmetic one. When used for authentication, the old mAadhaar app…
Imagine the scene at the conclusion of the Round 8 match on April 30: the crowd is still on their feet as Dylan Moore, one of the competition’s more dependable set shots, lines up after the siren with the scores locked. He puts it in the slot. There is a draw for the Hawks. Supporters of Collingwood sigh and make their way to the exits. It feels like one of those annoying near-misses that football season frequently presents. The sequence leading up to Moore’s kick might never have been permitted to occur at all, something that no one in that…
The passport scans and selfie photos of at least 100,000 people were somewhere on an Amazon storage server, quietly and publicly available to anybody with the correct web address. Some of those pictures had embedded GPS coordinates that were accurate enough to show the location of the picture, and in a few instances, accurate enough to identify a person’s house. a number from a passport. a face. A place. One file for everything. That is all that is needed for identity fraud, and for an undisclosed period of time, this information was practically accessible to anyone who went looking. UK…
One type of influence is one that doesn’t make a big announcement. It doesn’t come from viral headlines or press conferences. It develops gradually, study by study, citation by citation, until one day a government minister of education in Seoul or Santiago is writing a policy brief and, almost without thinking, looks for the same source. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, is becoming more and more of that source, and its research findings are now genuinely hard to ignore in discussions about what young children deserve on a global scale. Years later, the organization’s flagship sustainability…
The world secretariat of an organization that most people outside of early childhood education are unaware of is located somewhere in Buenos Aires at an address on Sanchez de Bustamante. Three years after the United Nations was established, in 1948, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, was established. It has fought for children’s rights to care and education in over 70 countries for more than 70 years. UNESCO, UNICEF, and ECOSOC have given it advisory status. In all honesty, it is one of the most subtly powerful organizations in international education. Additionally, it is currently concentrating more…
Being informed that a five-year-old comprehends something you thought required decades of lived experience to grasp causes a certain kind of unease. Sitting cross-legged on a mat in a Stockholm nursery, a young child explains the importance of not wasting water. A worried-looking child in a Brazilian classroom sketches the Earth. When discussing environmental policy, most policymakers do not consider these moments. However, a substantial amount of research from the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, indicates that they most likely ought to. From 2009 to 2014, over 44,330 children between the ages of one and eight participated…