Author: Nola Jones

The Plataforma de Infancia website features a picture of a group of people seated around a conference table, documents spread out, and someone in the middle of a sentence. It’s not particularly dramatic. It appears to be just another nonprofit gathering. However, something about the image starts to feel a little different when you consider that this organization has been hosting similar meetings since 1997, long before the majority of today’s parents were considering having children at all. The Spanish Children’s Rights Coalition, formerly known as Plataforma de Infancia, was established almost thirty years ago and has worked on projects…

For over 60 years, educators in Buenos Aires have been debating, organizing, and sometimes yelling about the same thing: that Argentina’s youngest children deserve better. The building isn’t particularly impressive from the outside. Most passersby wouldn’t look at it twice. However, something tenacious and unexpectedly significant has been developing inside, or at least in the network that emanates from organizations such as it. Since the 1960s, Argentina has been home to the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP as it is known abroad. It’s worth pausing to consider that. 60 years in a nation that has experienced a…

Defending the obvious leads to a certain kind of weariness. Advocates at OMEP Argentina are in precisely that situation in Buenos Aires today; year after year, they contend that children should have access to food, education, and legal protection, despite the constantly changing policy landscape. Working from there is uncomfortable. However, they have been doing it nonetheless, and with a discipline that is noteworthy. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, has long had a presence in Argentina that extends far beyond scholarly gatherings. In times when governments have been less willing to listen, the Argentine chapter has…

This year, there is a subtly peculiar development in the field of education conferences. You can find researchers presenting papers on learning technology, curriculum design, and artificial intelligence at practically any major conference, including Vienna, Helsinki, and Austin. The discussions are intelligent, sometimes brilliant. However, if you spend enough time in the hallways between sessions, you begin to notice something that the agenda doesn’t explicitly state: the university-focused rooms aren’t hosting the most important discussions in 2026. Everywhere early childhood education is mentioned, they take place. Compared to the more spectacular events in Vienna or Helsinki, the 5th International Conference…

Modern parents have a certain type of weariness. The low-level guilt of giving a toddler a tablet in order to get through dinner is just as much a part of it as sleep deprivation. It takes place on Sunday afternoons in Valencia, in kitchens in Seville, and in apartments all over Madrid. A parent takes a 30-second breath, a child calms down, and a screen continues. Afterward, nobody is completely satisfied with it. It turns out that that guilt has been subtly growing into something more. Additionally, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s national chapter, OMEP Spain, appears to…

The fact that Cynthia Erivo hardly ever pursued a career in acting is somewhat amazing. It wasn’t because she wasn’t talented—anyone who has heard her sing knows that was never a problem—but rather because her initial course took her in a completely different direction. Erivo, then seventeen, started studying music psychology at the University of East London in 2004. It’s an intriguing detail that is simple to ignore. psychology of music. Not theater, not musical theater, not performance. the study of the psychological effects of music. In retrospect, it almost seems as though she already knew something that everyone else…

On Sunday nights, a specific type of anxiety strikes. The impulse to open an app, check a number, and either feel relieved or quietly spiral is more specific than the general, nebulous dread of Mondays. StudentVUE is that app for millions of students in American school districts. A portal that is so ingrained in everyday academic life that checking it has practically become automatic, similar to looking at a weather forecast you’re not sure you want to see. On paper, StudentVUE is an Edupoint-built student information system that is linked to school districts via the Synergy Education Platform. It generates…

Jeffrey Epstein never obtained a degree. Not from Cooper Union, where he spent the late 1960s studying advanced mathematics. Not from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, where he subsequently enrolled in courses on mathematical physiology before discreetly leaving without finishing anything. Nevertheless, by his mid-twenties, he was teaching calculus in front of pupils at one of Manhattan’s most prestigious private schools, chalk in hand. A dropout teaching at the Dalton School, the kind of school where tuition fees alone signify entry into a particular class of New York life, has an almost darkly humorous quality. Epstein was…

You see the same things when you enter practically any low-income pre-primary classroom, whether it’s in rural Mississippi, Karachi, or Nairobi. rooms that are packed. One weary teacher overseeing fifteen pupils. There are no books on the shelves. A cracked chalkboard, perhaps. And kids, who have no idea about any of this, are merely attempting to make sense of their surroundings. It’s difficult to avoid the impression that societies’ priorities in recent years have been fundamentally flawed. Right now, there isn’t much debate about the science. The human brain develops at a rate that will never be matched again during…

The origin story of Benson Boone has an almost disarming quality. Not because it’s particularly unusual, but rather because it’s so stubbornly ordinary—a child in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, competitively diving, playing tennis, and attending class like everyone else—until one afternoon in a high school auditorium, the entire course of his life was subtly altered. Boone was raised in Monroe, Washington, a small city about 35 miles northeast of Seattle where the pace of life hasn’t quite caught up with the urban sprawl that is slowly spreading out from the city and the mountains begin to feel…