A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Smartphone Ownership In 11 To 13 Year Olds Correlates With… Wellbeing?

“The study, called The Life in Media Survey, was conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida in collaboration with the Harris Poll (Martin et al., 2025). The study surveyed 1,510 children, ages 11 to 13, in Florida… Kids with smartphones were less likely than kids without smartphones to agree with the statement, “Life […]

“A Brief History Of Education”

“In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Elsewhere I have summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own […]

A Critique Of National Standards

“Children learn when they are engaged and interested, when they want to learn, and engagement in the classroom cannot be legislated or coerced; it never results from drill. When engagement occurs, it results from the intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity of teachers who feel empowered to innovate, which power was stripped away by state mandates. Moreover, […]

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

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