Author: Errica Jensen

On a Tuesday morning, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s main entrance hall—the Cromwell Road entrance, with its terracotta arches and the scent of old stone—makes an argument. Every gallery, item, case of textiles, ceramics, and furniture makes the case that creating things well is a serious human endeavor and that design is thought given physical form rather than decoration. This argument has been made by the V&A since 1852. The director of the museum, Tristram Hunt, has been making a more pointed version of it since at least 2019: that Britain is systematically eliminating from its state schools the very…

The backpacks had to remain outside. The previous administration at Orchard Gardens K–8 Pilot School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, had concluded that children might use them to conceal weapons, not because of any official policy issued by a district office. It was an elementary school. Six security guards were employed, costing the school more than $250,000 annually to maintain hallways in a structure that, by most accounts, was failing all occupants. In seven years, five principals had come and gone. Every summer, half of the teachers departed. The lowest five percent of Massachusetts schools’ test scores were found there. According to…

On a January morning, you will discover something in the basement of one of MIT’s older buildings that is not mentioned in any brochure about the nation’s most renowned technology university. Students using anvils while wearing protective gear. Steel blocks that are red hot are being removed from furnaces and manually formed into blades. smoke. The scent of hot metal. A functioning forge in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts, running as it might have a century ago, with the exception that the anvils’ employees have PhDs in materials science and are actively considering conductivity, grain structure, and how pattern welding…

A group of intermediate English students at a language school in Tehran were given a seemingly simple assignment: write a brief essay in response to a picture prompt. An AI writing assistant was available to them. The task was presented as a language exercise. Grammar. vocabulary. The standard. Slowly and then with some surprise, the researchers observing them noticed that the students were doing more than simply fixing their sentences. Their voices were growing. stories. a level of control over the page that was not demonstrated in the same manner or at the same rate by the control group, which…

There’s a good chance that students are using Adobe Express if you walk into a primary school art classroom in Ohio or a design classroom in New South Wales. Adobe has been discreetly, methodically, and very purposefully integrating its tools into classrooms across six continents for years—not because their teachers selected it on their own or because a curriculum designer included it in the lesson plan. Adobe Express for Education is currently available to over 43 million educators and students worldwide. It is not an accidental number. It’s a tactic. In general, the approach is this: the businesses that shape…

A fifteen-year-old is currently asking ChatGPT to clarify a topic their teacher covered yesterday in a secondary school classroom. not to be dishonest. At eleven o’clock at night, when no one else is around to ask, just to better understand it in a less formal language at a pace they can manage. They are among the 93% of secondary school students who already regularly use artificial intelligence (AI) in their studies, according to a Save My Exams survey of over 1,500 students in the UK earlier this year. Not in an experiment. Frequently. 74% at least once a week. The…

Around the second year of a degree, there is a specific type of conversation that takes place in art school studios. It usually takes place late at night, over cold coffee, and between people who are beginning to silently question whether the program they enrolled in will truly help them achieve their goals. The tutors are competent. The work is intriguing. However, after eighteen months of theory-heavy coursework, the portfolio is not as strong as it should be, the debt is real, and there are few industry contacts. For years, this discussion has taken place. Now, more people have it…

Economist and longtime watcher of British education Richard Murphy describes a pivotal moment in a piece that circulated quietly before abruptly becoming anything but quiet. He claims that if you ask a five-year-old to tell you a story, they will. Right away. Without a doubt. When you ask an eighteen-year-old the same question, most of them will say they can’t, apologize, or go blank. He recently asked a group of A-level students, “When was the last time you wrote something creative?” They were almost all in agreement when they said they hoped they would never do so again. That part…

A sixteen-year-old named Jake was learning how to write a CV somewhere outside of Leeds, in a community center off a road that most people drive by without giving it much thought. He had had difficulty in school. He had no idea what would happen next. He received a laptop, free internet access, and non-rushing staff from the Sky Up Hub. He found his first apprenticeship in a matter of months. He is currently undergoing training in the manufacturing of prosthetic limbs, a career he claims he didn’t previously believe was feasible for someone like him. The government has been…

There’s a certain energy in the room when you walk around any major EdTech conference right now; it’s partly real excitement and partly something more difficult to describe. Booths are modern. The demonstrations are well-done. “AI-powered” appears in the tagline of every third startup, typically above an upward-trending graph. It’s the kind of environment that exudes confidence until you start posing the precise queries that no one really wants to address, such as whether or not these platforms are truly improving student learning. The industry has been debating this issue for years, and it is becoming more and more prevalent.…