Author: Nola Jones

One type of anime doesn’t make a big announcement. It doesn’t come with the hype of a fabled source material or the weight of cultural expectations. Episode after episode, it simply appears, subtly accomplishing what most shows find difficult: making you genuinely enjoy watching it. Greetings from Demon School! That type of anime is Iruma-kun. It has been acting in this manner since October 2019. The premise, on paper, sounds almost too absurd to take seriously. Suzuki Iruma, a 14-year-old human boy, is sold to a demon by his own careless parents. He is not consumed by the demon, Sullivan,…

When you watch a humanoid robot perform nine different tasks at a San Francisco tech forum for the third or fourth time, the novelty wears off and something more unsettling takes over. Not exactly fear. It’s more akin to the silent realization that the abilities we’ve been referring to as “digital literacy” for the past 20 years might already be out of date. When Faraday Future introduced its Embodied AI Developer Platform in late April, it appeared to be engineering that sensation, whether on purpose or not. There was more to the April 25 event in San Francisco than just…

One type of poverty does not appear on the front page. There is no abrupt crisis or dramatic collapse. With nothing else in the house, it appears as though a mother is consuming the leftovers from her toddler’s plate. It appears as unheated rooms, postponed travel, and a persistent, silent hum of financial anxiety that doesn’t go away at night. That is New Zealand’s cost-of-living crisis, which has been plaguing families long before the most recent budget discussions started. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s chapter in the nation, OMEP Aotearoa, has been watching this develop with increasing concern.…

There’s something peculiar about the artificial intelligence debate in schools. The majority of it occurs at the abstract level, such as policy conferences where education officials carefully discuss “balancing opportunity with risk,” think pieces about personalized learning, and opinion pieces alerting readers to the epidemic of cheating. In the meantime, decisions are already being made in real classrooms. After playing an AI-themed game created in collaboration with Amazon, a third-grader in Massachusetts receives a Certificate of Completion. Before they have typed a single word on their new Chromebooks, sixth graders at a public middle school discover Gemini pre-installed and nudging…

When a hospital hallway is crowded with people who aren’t there to receive treatment, there’s something special about it. A different kind of gathering took place in the hallways of Akron Children’s Hospital on a Monday afternoon in late April. Instead of medical personnel rushing between rooms or families waiting for news, the entire community stood motionless, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to say goodbye to a sixteen-year-old boy named Maddox Graser. Maddox attended Wooster High School as a sophomore. According to most accounts, he was the kind of child you remember because he paid attention to people rather than because…

An organization that has been making the same case for more than 70 years and still feels urgent has a subtly striking quality. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP in French, was established in 1948 in Prague when representatives from seventeen nations convened under UNESCO’s supervision to discuss a topic that most postwar governments were not particularly interested in: the education and care of very young children. After seven decades, the organization has special consultative status with the UN and operates in more than 70 countries. Not much has changed in the argument. The political will to…

A statistic that does not move quickly enough has a subtle revealing quality. By 2028, 75% of five-year-olds in England are expected to have reached a good level of development. As of right now, the percentage is 68%. This disparity, which amounts to seven percentage points, or about 130,000 kids, is more than just a policy shortfall; it also represents a group of actual kids who are beginning school without the language, social skills, or emotional preparedness that will influence their lives for the next ten years. The Local Government Association recently released a study that examines what is truly…

Somewhere in America, a teacher is currently attempting to teach algebra to a student who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. The math is not a problem for the pupil. Not at all. The worksheet in front of them hardly registers as something heavier sits on their chest. In schools designed for education but increasingly doubling as the first line of response to an unanticipated mental health crisis, this scene takes place in silence thousands of times a day. This is not sensationalized in the most recent research published in July 2025 by the Learning Policy Institute. It…

A child’s success is largely predetermined by the time they enter a primary school classroom. That’s not pessimism; rather, it’s what decades of research on child development have consistently told us, and it’s now impossible to ignore the most recent global findings on early childhood care and education. Through the eyes of organizations that monitor early childhood development globally, the picture appears to be mixed: a few nations are quietly doing this well, while one very large and wealthy country appears to be structurally incapable of doing so. The first-ever Global Report on Early Childhood Care and Education from UNESCO…

Walking through a neighborhood with opulent condos towering over closed daycare centers has a subtle unnerving quality. It occurs more frequently than people realize in places like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, which produce enormous amounts of wealth, support prestigious universities, and still struggle to find a suitable classroom for a three-year-old. Recent data from international early childhood education organizations, including analysis consistent with OMEP’s long-standing advocacy work, are starting to paint a picture that should shame both city hall and Washington policymakers. At rates that lag behind some developing countries, children in some of America’s wealthiest urban areas…