It’s difficult to ignore how much pressure seems to be in the air when you stroll through Harvard Yard on any given afternoon, past the worn brick of Widener Library and the iron gates. Applications for internships, research fellowships, and excessive course loads are all on top of an academic setting where practically everyone seems to be receiving As. Not a few pupils. Not the best quarter. roughly 60% of them. One of the more candid discussions American higher education has had with itself in recent years revolves around that figure. This week, Harvard faculty members have been voting on…
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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The notion that a child’s entire future could depend on their ability to resist eating a marshmallow for fifteen minutes seems almost ridiculous. However, that was essentially what we told ourselves for decades. The Stanford marshmallow experiment turned out to be one of the most complicated, misinterpreted, and frequently cited studies in contemporary psychology. Sometime in the early 1970s, a researcher, a child, and a single puffy white treat were seated on a table in a small room at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School. In retrospect, Walter Mischel, a psychologist who had studied human behavior and self-control for years, created what…
Most real turning points have a moment when you can sense the change before anyone makes an official announcement. That moment in the AI world occurred on Tuesday morning when Andrej Karpathy announced his joining Anthropic in a single paragraph on X. In its first hour, the post received close to three million views. By the afternoon, the tech sector was engaged in its usual activities: analyzing, arguing, and interpreting what might or might not have been stated.At this point, Karpathy’s career is essentially a chronology of contemporary artificial intelligence. Along with Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, he co-founded OpenAI…
There’s a certain energy at Stanford Stadium on a May evening. The rows of purple light sticks that reach every corner of the stands are illuminated by the California air, which is still warm after a hot day. Fifty thousand people have been waiting in the dark for something they won’t be able to adequately explain to anyone who wasn’t present, counting down the days, some of them weeks. The third and last night of BTS’s ARIRANG World Tour stop in Stanford took place there, and it delivered in ways that even the most prepared fan probably didn’t anticipate. Day…
Imagine a teen sitting in his room in India at around two in the morning. He has no textbooks open, no structured syllabus, just a laptop screen and whatever part of the internet he happened to be using that evening. No safety net, no IIT preparation course, no coaching facility. Just a tab in the browser and a restless, hazy feeling that there must be another way. This story starts with that image, which is unglamorous and a little lonely. Like these things, the story recently went viral. A 20-year-old college dropout claimed on Reddit that he had secured a…
On a weekday morning in Abingdon, you might not notice any difference if you stroll along Faringdon Road. The same gates, the same well-kept grounds, and the stone buildings remain in their familiar locations. However, there has been a formal, subtle change that has far-reaching effects outside of this area of Oxfordshire. With effect from the beginning of the new school year, Abingdon School, one of the best boys’ schools in the nation, has partnered with Abingdon Prep School and The Manor Prep to form the Abingdon Schools Group. The May announcement was presented in an ambitious manner. Abingdon School…
When you read about the Peel District School Board these days, you can sense a certain tension that exists just beneath the official announcements and award ceremonies, beneath the happy social media posts about boxing champions and powwows. It’s the kind of conflict that arises in organizations when those in charge of them can no longer agree on their true goals.About 153,000 students from more than 259 schools in Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon are served by the board. There are a lot of kids there. Many parents. There is a lot of faith in a system that is currently publicly…
Like many school disputes these days, it began when a student took out a phone. There was something going on in that classroom that felt wrong enough to record, not to browse or text a friend. That call was made promptly by Noah Carter, a student at Barrington Middle School in Lithia, Florida. He wanted evidence that whatever was happening in front of him was real.He captured an art instructor, later identified by the Hillsborough County School District as Karen Savage, tossing a black baby doll that was suspended from the classroom television while a charger cord was wrapped around…
In Brick Township, New Jersey, Lanes Mill Road is not the type of street that typically makes headlines. It passes by residential blocks and ball fields, as well as the kind of peaceful neighborhoods in Ocean County where children ride their bikes to school because the morning is still cool and the distance is short. That typical road turned into a crime scene at around 6:50 on Tuesday morning. A Brick Memorial High School student was riding a bicycle west on Rhode Island Avenue and passing through a designated crosswalk when he was hit by a fast-moving 2021 BMW heading…
The way institutions vanish has a subtly depressing quality. Instead of protesting or making headlines, a letter was sent home to parents on a Tuesday morning. That’s basically how Henley-on-Thames’ St. Mary’s Prep School, which has been educating kids for almost a century, found out that it would merge with its neighbor before the summer term was even over. Rupert House and St Mary’s Prep’s merger as a private school in Henley is being presented as a workable solution. And perhaps it is. However, it also presents a more unsettling picture of the current state of independent education in England.…