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A Guardian article, examining why Estonia has (arguably) the best schools in Europe. 

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A Guardian article, examining why Estonia has (arguably) the best schools in Europe. 

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Today's subject in the sci-fi class at Pelgulinna State Gymnasium is Blade Runner. Thursdays are "voluntary" lesson days, where students at this upper secondary school in Estonia's capital, Tallinn, can choose from a range of subjects; others taking place today include a rights and democracy course, programming and creative writing in English. The seven 17-year-old students in the sci-fi lesson have just finished watching 30 minutes of the film and are preparing to discuss it when I sneak in at the back, switching to perfect English for my benefit. "We've talked about Jungian archetypes, persona and the superego," says Triin, one of the students. "It has been really helpful for me to understand the different aspects of being human and how to create deeper characters." They've also studied Brave New World and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the few minutes I am there, the students touch on US history, child labour, empathy and more. "I have so many questions," says Triin.

Me too. How did Estonia, a small country that is relatively poor compared with most of the EU, become an educational powerhouse? In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) rankings, which measures 15-year-olds' abilities in maths, reading and science, the top spots are held by a handful of Asian countries, but Estonia ranks next - the best in Europe. Its teachers are highly educated, the focus is on social and personal skills as much as academic learning and the typical curriculum is packed with a wide range of subjects, from robotics to music and arts. British politicians are taking note. In 2022 Labour's shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, visited to see what Estonia is doing right.

Gunda Tire, who leads international assessments for Estonia's education and youth board, says the country's success is partly thanks to its mix of history and geography. "We have had the Swedes, Danes, Russians, Germans, a lot of people coming and going. Estonians, if they wanted to survive, had to be smart, and they understood that education would take them forward. It was the same when we were under Soviet occupation."

One of the abiding principles, she says, is equality - universal free school lunches are as much ideological as they are practical. And almost all children attend kindergarten, which is heavily subsidised, so that by the time they start school at the comparatively late age of seven, disadvantages are not as entrenched. Autonomy is also fundamental. "We have given schools the ability to decide for themselves."

When Estonia embraced the digital age, schools were part of that. As far back as 1997, the country launched an initiative called Tiigrihüpe (Tiger Leap), to upgrade computer resources and provide internet access to schools. "We trained a lot of teachers, connected all the schools and gave them computers," says Tire. "The idea is not to have an IT class, but to have digital skills incorporated everywhere." Many children learn coding and robotics, and everything from textbooks to communication with parents is digital. Instead of disruptive students facing harsh discipline, says Tire, Estonian schools tend to have a more nurturing approach - it is common to take children out and teach them in a small group with a separate teacher, and most schools have a psychologist and counsellor.

Creative subjects are just as valued, Tire explains: "They all have to take arts and music, and [what we call] 'technology' - in other words, they learn how to cook, knit, things like that. If we allow kids that, their wellbeing and sense of accomplishment increases. We don't think that that's irrelevant. Some countries say: 'We took out the music lesson to teach more maths.' But look at a sheet of music and you will not think it is less complicated." Creative subjects, Tire points out, can foster all kinds of skills such as teamwork and problem-solving. She smiles when she remembers watching teenage boys at a large festival last year enthusiastically taking part in folk dances they'd learned at school. "It's a physical activity, gives you joy, and you are in a group and have to use communication skills."

To progress into upper secondary, the equivalent of sixth form, students take just three exams - maths, Estonian and a subject of their choice - rather than the pressurised workload when taking many GCSEs in the UK. Could you imagine having to take eight or more exams, I ask Cordelia Violet Paap, a 17-year-old student at Pelgulinna State. She looks shocked and says: "That's a lot. I'd be a lot more stressed."

Paap says her school's ethos of creativity "is a lot more enjoyable than the very orthodox way, where you just sit in a classroom and listen." To counter any notions that this is too liberal, Targo Tammela, 17, who has just come from a Nordic history class, says there "is still discipline, you still have to pass every test." Neither has particularly embraced Estonia's much-admired digital education, but it is still a big part of their learning, they say. Tech is readily available, and most learning resources and tests are online. "There are a few cons, because you can get lazy with it or get lost in the internet," says Tammela. "But the pros outweigh it."

It's early afternoon and at the Gustav Adolf Grammar school in the old part of Tallinn, the school day is already over for many students. I wait at the front gate for the headteacher and watch young children walking off home by themselves, or with friends. "They tend to be very independent," says Henrik Salum, the (young, jeans-wearing) head.

Behind the historical facade, the school - it educates children aged seven to 15 and this site is for the younger students - has been redeveloped, with plenty of space and light. There are punchbags in one area, which is also used for dance lessons; table tennis in another. The huge central atrium, where children have their lunch, has a piano and a stage for performances. Students sit on the tiered step seating, doing schoolwork or chatting. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed.

Are there behavioural problems? "Of course," says Salum. "Every day there is some sort of incident where you have to talk to students about how to respect others and how to behave. We have certain students we need to keep a closer eye on and we work with parents a lot, but overall I think the students tend to appreciate their environment." It looks pretty harmonious to me. Two children are playing chess in one of the wide corridors and there are neat piles of cushions everywhere to be used for socialising, or for whenever one of the teachers fancies a change of scene and wants to hold their lesson outside the classroom.

In an Estonian class, there is quiet as a group of eight and nine-year-olds work on their own summaries of a book they've just read, which is up on the big screen. In another classroom, 12 and 13-year-olds are focusing on English vocabulary. There are just 16 children in this class. Class sizes are usually up to 28 students, but foreign languages are taught in smaller groups, so everyone has the chance to speak and participate.

In Maria Toom's class of 10 and 11-year-olds, some of the children have stayed back to speak to me - all in excellent English. What do they remember of kindergarten? It was fun, they say. "We had sleep breaks," says one girl, Laura. Here they get "brain breaks" instead, she says - several times in a lesson, their teacher, known by her first name, will give them a break for a bit of movement, or to play a game.

"One of the key elements of the Estonian educational system is that schools and teachers have a lot of freedom," says Salum. There are standards they need to meet, but how they achieve that is up to them. Toom has access to tablets and laptops for the children, but she is just as likely to take a lesson outside, or on the roof terrace, with paper and pencil - not to study nature (although they do that, too), but because it's nice to learn maths outdoors. "I think it gives freedom and it means that students have the flexibility to learn everywhere," she says.

As we walk around the school, every student says "tere" (hello) to Salum, and one girl comes up to him and throws her arms around his middle. "Some want a high five," he says. "As long as students are smiling and saying hello then everything is fine. If they stop doing that, I know I'm in trouble." When Salum was at school, it was more traditional but he says the students appreciate a less hierarchical atmosphere. "We tend to view our students as colleagues so we work together, we involve them." Many of the school's teachers are former pupils, which he likes.

The main problem for Salum, and many other heads, is the lack of teachers. Despite the positives of the system, there are still workload and recruitment issues. Why, when teachers are required to have a master's degree (kindergarten teachers must have a bachelor's degree), would they earn a comparatively low salary when they could go into a higher-paying job, such as in Estonia's healthy digital industry? Earlier this year, Estonia's teachers held their first strike for many years.

Teachers' pay "is a problem all over the world," says Kristina Kallas, Estonia's education minister, when I meet her in her office. "The education system is always under resources pressure." There are two main issues at the moment, she says. "One is the economic recession, and the other is that any budget surplus goes to defence, because we are in a very precarious situation." All eyes are on Estonia's neighbour, Russia, and the situation in Ukraine.

Kallas thinks the strength in Estonia's education system is because "it's built from the bottom-up, not run by [central government], and it never was. The education system is older than the state." Are there politicians who would like to have more control over it? "Surprisingly not," says Kallas. "Everybody leaves [education] to the experts. Teachers and universities debate it, sometimes publicly and there are arguments about whether it should be done this way or the other way, but it's not the politicians."

There are issues that Kallas has her eye on. During the pandemic, Estonian children didn't fare too badly because they were already well set up for digital learning, but since then, there has been a worrying number of teenage boys dropping out. And although there isn't an elite private school system, higher-earning families often move to be near the best schools, pushing others out. "This is a trend I don't like because it works against the reasons why our education system is strong - equity is important," says Kallas.

Pelgulinna State Gymnasium is clearly one of the better schools. It only opened last autumn - one of 13 new secondary schools built by the state in the last five years, and it's beautiful, with the focus on space, light and natural materials, especially wood. One room has rows of large screens where students can work in small groups and share presentations, and there are comfortable nooks built into the wall, complete with power points, where students can cocoon themselves. There are also 300 bicycle parking spaces, cool pink bathrooms, trees growing indoors and a comfortable library. A small reminder that all is not entirely perfect in this idyll is this morning's class in the lecture theatre, where several army officers are offering "defence education", including preparation, communications and looking after neighbours; these courses were introduced to Estonian upper secondary schools last year.

The teachers use a mix of practises, says Agne Kosk, head of languages, who was leading the sci-fi course. "This generation want to express their opinion, they want to be included in the conversation, to know all sides of the issues. Teaching by regurgitating a textbook doesn't work any more." She says a good relationship with her students "is number one. If you don't click with the students, it doesn't matter what you do". Estonia's education system seems particularly geared up to nurturing that, from the informal and creative approach to the mostly happy teachers.

In her sci-fi class, there is clearly a great relationship - the students have created their own hashtag, written on the whiteboard, which translates as "Agne is cool". Kosk asks them what notes they made when they watched the first part of Blade Runner, and this sparks a discussion about whether or not they'd fail an empathy test (which would mark them out as one of the film's non-human replicants), what it means to be human and a bit about film history (is this, one of the students asks, one of the first films to have flying cars in it?). It's time to watch some more. Lights down - the students fix their attention on the screen.

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Free lunches, brain breaks and happy teachers: why Estonia has the best schools in Europe

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How did a small, relatively poor country become an educational powerhouse? Creativity, autonomy and a deep embrace of the digital age

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A Vox article, explaining the new 'science of reading' movement.

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A Vox article, explaining the new 'science of reading' movement.

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For over a century, a pendulum has swung back and forth on the best way to teach kids to read. On one side are advocates of phonics, an instructional approach focused on the relationships between sounds and letters; on the other, various methods, championed by educators, that emphasize word recognition and context clues.

This fight has occasionally grown so vicious it's been dubbed the Reading Wars.

But in the last five years, one camp has scored a victory that, if not permanent, is at least decisive.

Since 2019, 45 states and Washington, DC, have passed at least one bill related to reforming reading instruction. The new rules apply to areas like school curriculum, professional development for teachers, screenings for dyslexic students, and requirements for testing. New York City - the largest public school system in the nation - has also ordered change for its 700 elementary schools.

These new policies - met with a mix of excitement and skepticism - are typically accompanied bybold promises. "These changes to our education system will actually educate our kids better in the future than we did before the pandemic," Tennessee's Republican Gov. Bill Lee declared. "This is the beginning of a massive turnaround," said the New York City Schools chancellor.

A life with poor literacy skills is a hard life. Not being able to read means countless social, economic, and physical challenges, making the stakes of these new reading reforms tremendously high. Coming out of the pandemic, as students still struggle with learning loss, policymakers are especially aware of the need to get these new literacy interventions right. Though some critics have claimed we have no national reading crisis at all, for the millions of kids and adults who struggle to read in America, there is no question that each day brings about new isolating, draining, and avoidable challenges.

Momentum for these reading laws traces its roots to four main factors.

The first came five years ago, when a journalist named Emily Hanford released an influential radio series that looked critically at reading instruction, and specifically how popular strategies employed by American teachers conflicted with decades-old research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology about how kids best learn to read. Hanford's reporting helped launch a movement dedicated to advancing the "science of reading" - a shorthand for applying these brain-focused studies to instruction.

The second factor came a year later, when Mississippi, a high-poverty state that overhauled its own reading policies back in 2013, soared in national test score rankings. Mississippi fourth graders went from being 49th in the nation for reading on a major exam known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to 29th, and one of the reforms Mississippi had embraced in 2013 was a focus on the "science of reading."

The third factor was the emergence in the 2010s of national grassroots networks of parents of children with dyslexia, who have more recently brought their organizing prowess to bear for new state policies they felt could better serve their children's needs.

And lastly, but no less important, was the pandemic, which fueled a major drop in student achievement and sparked an infusion of new federal funds for schools.

This is not the first or even second time our country has quickly moved to revamp literacy instruction, and some worry that history is about to repeat itself with failed or misguided policy changes.

"I've been doing this for more than 50 years and I've been through three of these," said Tim Shanahan, who once served as president of the International Literacy Association and on a federal study into the scientific evidence behind reading instruction.

Reading Wars veterans like Shanahan say this wave of reform has some new elements. Still, some problems that have undermined past waves threaten these new laws too, like a lack of fundingand the challenge of maintaining political support if (and likely when) somestandardized test scores go down.

Indeed, not all teachers and school administrators are on board. Many have resented the pendulum that has swung back and forth over decades, with competing rules and ideas and sometimes teacher-bashing to boot. Some educators reject the idea that they've been teaching reading incorrectly and note that the new materials they're being told to use now lack a strong track record, too.

One of the most prominent cognitive scientists studying how kids learn to read has emerged as a vocal critic of many of the curriculum guides now being marketed as adhering to the "science of reading."

Even the more enthusiastic champions of the new reading reforms recognize that passing laws is only the first step, and there's a long road ahead to making these changes lasting and successful, as schools deal with other intense challenges including chronic absenteeism, a student mental health crisis, and unusually high staff turnover.

The science behind the science of reading

The definition of "science of reading" -a term first used in reading instruction in the 1830s - has evolved over the decades.Today, it primarily refers to cognitive research that pertains to what happens in the brains of strong and poor readers, and is frequently a shorthand for deploying more classroom time on phonics, with its emphasis on learning to sound out words. Past research has found that most kids need systematic phonics instruction when they're young to ultimately read well.

Sometimes this phonics research gets overstated by proponents. The best studies have shown that teaching phonics is moderately better than other approaches - translating to about a few months of extra school instruction. Experts caution against forgetting that at its core, phonics is a means to an end: "Programs that focus too much on the teaching of letter-sounds relations and not enough on putting them to use are unlikely to be very effective," stated the National Reading Panel report in 2000, a seminal federally funded investigation into science-based reading instruction.

And not everyone needs explicit phonics instruction at school to read well; indeed tens of millions of children have acquired strong literacy skills without it for generations, either learning through osmosis at home or through other classroom approaches that have waxed and waned in popularity like " whole language" and " balanced literacy."

But what reading experts generally agree on is that most students - roughly 60 percent of children - will benefit from more systematic phonics instruction, especially in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. A school's average reading performance will likely go up, and it could be especially helpful for students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those struggling with dyslexia.

Sometimes "the science of reading" is invoked as a way to signal what's not considered scientific. The most prominent example of that today is a popular reading instruction strategy known as "three-cueing" or MSV, an acronym for meaning, syntax, and visual information. Popularized in the 1960s and '70s, these methods encouragestudents to look at context clues to guess the meaning of unknown words; for example, a picture of a house in a story about the country might help a struggling reader guess the word "cottage."

But studies have shown that these sorts of predictive approaches are ineffective in helping students actually learn to read specific words. Strong readers, rather than guessing a word's meaning based on adjacent clues, will work to decode letters in the unfamiliar word itself. Have students who rely on cueing generally understood the meaning of a passage? Yes. But they haven't read the passage well.

These debates around phonics instruction can grow contentious, especially over the last few years. Many academics argue there should be a broader, more inclusive definition of "science of reading" that encompasses research fields beyond just the brain.

"There isn't shared language with thinking and talking about this with any precision," said Rachael Gabriel, a professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut. "A lot of the language is dog whistle-y, and everyone gets really deep in the weeds and then confuses each other."

For example, though some reading experts defend context-based strategies like cueing, pointing to experimental studies showing they could be complementary to phonics, others believe it's a mistake to encourage teaching the strategies of poor readers at all.

"Being a reader isn't like being pregnant where you either are or you aren't," said Shanahan, who supports the move away from cueing. "We care how good a reader are you, and we know that strong readers don't try and guess the meaning."

In 2019, a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey found 75 percent of K-2 teachers said they teach students to read using the three-cueing method, and 65 percent of postsecondary instructors who teach courses on reading instruction said they did too. As the "science of reading" movement has picked up steam, popular school curriculum providers who endorse these strategies have come under intense scrutiny, blasted for teaching young children strategies that could delay or derail their reading.

The tide is seemingly turning. Three states - Indiana, Arkansas, and Louisiana have recently gone so far as to ban "three-cueing" in legislation, and ExcelInEd, a national advocacy group founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, holds eliminating three-cueing as essential for any model reading policy. Last year Lucy Calkins, a longtime proponent of the "balanced literacy" approach to reading instruction, revamped her popular school curriculum program to include class-wide daily phonics lessons. "All of us are imperfect," Calkins told the New York Times. "The last two or three years, what I've learned from the science of reading work has been transformational."

The problem is we don't know how to teach the "science of reading" well yet, either

Though states have moved to replace poorly rated curricula or banweak instructional approaches, figuring out exactly what schools should do instead is harder. Politicians have falsely declared that experts know what science-backed alternatives teachers should use, and education companies have rushed to meet the demand for new materials, selling school districts their own questionable curricula and teacher trainings.

"We think we have some sort of tentative answers, that various kinds of instructional approaches work better than others, but that evidence is definitely far from ironclad," said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California and an expert in K-12 curriculum standards. "Generally speaking there is not a lot of good research on the effectiveness of core curriculum materials, and that's true both in reading and for other subjects."

For example, LETRS, an acronym for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, has become one of the most popular training courses claiming to adhere to the "science of reading." Mississippi embraced it beginning in 2014 as part of its statewide reading reforms, and following Mississippi's impressive gains on the 2019 NAEP exam, other states rushed to follow. (It's a pricey professional development course that can take teachers up to 160 hours over two years to complete.)

Despite its close associations with the "science of reading"- LETRS has its own middling track recordof effectiveness. One experimental study found teachers who were trained by LETRS did improve in their knowledge of reading science, but their students did not have statistically higher differences in achievement than teachers in the control group. (A spokesperson for LETRS told Vox, "weknow it has been proven to drive positive student outcomes when coupled with other educational interventions.")

Likewise, studies of reading interventions known as Orton-Gillingham, which have been promoted by many literacy reformadvocates, have yielded mixed results so far. One 2021 meta-analysis found the approach did not generate statistically significant improvements in foundational skill areas like phonics. Evenfor students with some forms of reading disability, Orton-Gillingham wasn't found to significantly boost comprehension or vocabulary.

Generally reading experts say the policies included in the new state reading laws are a "real mixed bag." Some laws incorporate more research-backed ideas like coaching, while other endorsed approaches are more suspect. There is no clear amount of time that research shows should be spent daily on phonics, no established curriculum for the "science of reading" and studies on so-called decodable books - strongly endorsed by some phonics advocates to help young students practice letter-sound combinations - have their own mixed research track record.

"Often phonics advocates promote the use of research since research supports phonics instruction ... but when it comes to specific prescriptions about how phonics should be taught, they make all kinds of claims that come down to: do it my way, I know best, don't worry about what the science has to say," said Shanahan. "There are features of effective phonics instruction suggested by the research and there are aspects on which there is either no research or the research rejects the advocate's prescription."

Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author ofLanguage at the Speed of Sight, has emerged as a critic of some of the new materials being promoted under the banner of the "science of reading." He's blasted "influencers" leading the movement whose own background in cognitive science is limited. (Seidenberg's book on reading research heavily shaped Hanford's reporting.)

In an interview with Vox, Seidenberg expounded on his criticism: "It's a difficult situation because people want to adopt better practices, they understand the idea that what was done before was not really based on solid ideas ... but now you have a huge demand for science-based practices pursued by advocacy groups and people who don't have a great understanding of the science."

Seidenberg believes that moving away from strategies like three-cueing is important. But he warned that a simplistic reliance on some of the foundational reading science research can lead to some misinformed instructional conclusions, like the idea that children should learn units of sound (or "phonemes" ) before letters, and letters before syllables and words.

"That's a basic misunderstanding," said Seidenberg. "Phonemes are abstract units that are results of being exposed to an alphabet, they're not a precursor." He also lamented that some leaders have incorrectly cited his research to suggest there's no downside to teaching kids phonics in the early grades for too long. "There are big opportunity costs and the clock to fourth grade is ticking," he said. "You only want to do a lot of instruction on these components enough to get off the ground."

The UK offers a cautionary tale. Last year reading researchers published a major study that concluded England's present emphasis on phonics instruction came at the expense of other needed literacy skills. They attributed the country's heavy prioritization in part to a national phonics screening test introduced by the government in 2012, which incentivized in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons.

"There's no question that phonics instruction is important," Dominic Wyse, the study's lead author and an education professor at the University College London, told Vox. "But let's be clear, there are risks to overdoing it. You're wasting their time and damaging their time to develop reading comprehension."

Getting implementation right

The success of the new reading instruction laws will depend primarily on how well they're implemented on the ground in schools and individual classrooms.

This past spring researchers from Michigan State presented a study assessing the impact of the new reading reform laws on test scores. The research, which has not been peer-reviewed, found students in states with more "comprehensive" supports - like coaching for teachers, adequate funding, and summer tutoring - had larger gains on test scores and on the NAEP than students in states with less comprehensive reading laws.

One concern for advocates is the great variability in how states might hold schools accountable to the new laws. Some worry that without more proactive transparency and enforcement provisions, the reforms could wither on the vine. Others worry about unfunded mandates in a year or two once Covid-19 aid dries up.

Still, others point to the fact that many colleges of education are still teaching methods to prospective teachers like three-cueing, and the New York Times quoted Lucy Calkins at a conference in March telling educators they can join other school leaders in rejecting these new approaches. "You can say no," Calkins had said. "And people all over the country are doing so."

To encourage more successful implementation, Gabriel of the University of Connecticut and Sarah Woulfin, a professor of education policy at UT Austin, have been encouraging more focus on school systems, structures, and leadership, rather than a narrow focus on what individual teachers know about reading. "It is not enough to deliver new materials that may sit in boxes in a closet without strong leadership for their integration," they write. "It is not enough to press teachers to use new tools, without providing high-quality opportunities."

In some states, such as North Carolina, lawmakers have rolled out new policies but provided little support for educators to incorporate the new mandates into their existing workflow, fueling backlash.

Ginny Sharpless and Amanda Harrison, co-founders of Literacy Moms NC, a group for parents of students with reading disabilities, told Vox they've been deeply disappointed by the lack of investment lawmakers have made in building teacher buy-in for the new policies.

"If you're already working crazy hours, already not getting paid enough, and then someone says, 'Oh, we want you to do 200 hours of extra training on your own time,' well, you're going to be pissing off people who are already burnt out," said Harrison.

"State lawmakers did absolutely nothing to try to change [educators'] views, you can't just show people the data and expect them to be converted," added Sharpless. "Leaders should have gone out there and had meeting after meeting to talk to teachers to bring them on board."

Polikoff, of the University of Southern California, said the history of US education policy reform suggests that building teacher buy-in and avoiding overly punitive mandates will be important to helping the new "science of reading" laws actually stick. He also warned against hinging hopes to specific state test score gains. When scores trended down following the introduction of the Common Core standards, opponents used those declining results to then water down the policies.

"There's the risk of setting yourself with unrealistic expectations, and states that go up in test scores also go down," he said. "One of the states that could go down is Mississippi, which has a lot of conditions that make it likely to have educational difficulty."

As teachers embark on the 2023-24 academic year, eager to educate students using the best reading materials available, they'll have to wade through this morass of information, hoping to do the best job possible but waiting for more clarity on exactly how. And in the meantime, there are real disagreements over what instructional strategies to use in schools, what emphasis each should get, what counts as evidence, and who gets to decide.

"Policymakers don't necessarily want to hear that the science is more complex and less certain than we thought," said Amanda Goodwin, the co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and a professor of literacy at Vanderbilt University. "It's much easier to get public support for a handful of 'proven' practices."
Correction, September 14, 5:45 pm: A previous version of this story misstated the origins of Common Core standards. They were developed via governors and national nonprofits.

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The new "science of reading" movement, explained

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A huge shift in how kids are taught to read is underway. But the reading wars probably aren't gone for good.

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A BBC article, reporting on a gift given to a New York medical school, enabling its students to study tuition-free. 

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A BBC article, reporting on a gift given to a New York medical school, enabling its students to study tuition-free. 

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Yuliana Dominguez Paez, a 24-year-old student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, was going to miss the mysterious assembly that her faculty had scheduled on Monday morning.

Stuck in New York City's interminable traffic, she asked a friend to FaceTime her with any news.

From the other end of the line, "all I heard was screams," she said. "And, 'free tuition.'"

Back on campus, Dr Ruth Gottesman had just changed the lives of Ms Dominguez Paez and her peers.

The students screamed. They cheered. They called their mums. In the back of an Uber, Ms Paez cried. "When I got back to campus... I just hugged all my friends, because this is life-changing for all of us."

As the US grapples with a student debt crisis and political solutions seem far out of reach, Albert Einstein College of Medicine has suddenly charted a different course.

After being relieved of as much as six figures of debt, students told the BBC they could suddenly envision goals that had felt financially out of reach. They spoke of starting families, buying homes - and embarking on a career guided not by the need to repay a mountain of loans, but by giving back to their communities and bolstering underserved areas of medicine.

Less than 24 hours after Dr Gottesman's announcement, five students sat down with the BBC in the sunshine of a campus courtyard to share their new ideas about the future.

"It felt like an answered prayer," said Sam Woo, a first-year medical student from the Midwest who wants to focus on addiction medicine and providing healthcare to low-income patients.

When he arrived a few months ago, he believed he would have to take on extra jobs and burden himself with loans to pursue a degree and support his family.

"Something that I think about a lot when choosing my career path is money, because it's really important for me. I come from a low-income background and street outreach is not the most lucrative field," Mr Woo, 23, said. "But now I don't have to worry about, 'Okay, I should choose a specialty that pays more, so I can support people back home and so I can support myself.' I can actually do things I'm really passionate about."

The private university charged $59,000 annually for its four-year medical programme, which Ms Dominguez Paez - a member of student group First Generation/Low Income Partnership - said was too pricey for many.

American medical schools are typically very expensive, and many doctors begin their careers with six-figure debts. In 2023, medical students in the US on average graduated with $250,995 in student loan debt, according to an analysis by the Education Data Initiative. That sum can take decades to pay off.

Dr Peter Campbell, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the college, said eliminating the financial burden meant his students were able to choose their paths in medicine without worrying about what it might pay.

He described Monday as "unquestionably the happiest day" he had experienced in 20 years of teaching, including three at Einstein.

"We saw all our students coming in, they were absolutely electric," he said. "I've never seen 20-something year-olds collectively that happy in my life. There was just so much pure happiness."

The students will still have to pay for costs like housing, food, test preparation, and registering for exams - costs that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. But there is no question that the new policy could prove to be transformative for the approximately 1,000 current students.

Students already in their fourth year of medical school would have their spring semester reimbursed, according to Elaine Iandoli, a spokeswoman. She said that tuition would be funded in perpetuity from interest on the $1bn donation.

Trevor Barker, a 25-year-old from California, said his classmates were talking about getting married or having children sooner than they had previously thought, thanks to their freedom from loans.

At the same time, the students said, the school now had a responsibility to diversify its admissions, and provide a pathway to a medical career for applicants from the surrounding community. The Bronx is the poorest borough in New York City and is ranked among the least healthy counties in the state.

According to the school's statistics, nearly half of its MD students are white. Eleven percent are Hispanic or Latino, and only 5% are black. The demographics are fairly similar for its PhD program. Meanwhile, 44% of Bronx County residents are black, and 56% of its residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to 2020 census data.

"I feel like what I'm most excited to see is seeing an increase in applications that reflect the population in the Bronx," said Ms Dominguez Paez. "Because now they know that they have the opportunity to afford going to medical school."

Nelson Perez Catalan, a 28-year old student pursuing a joint MD and PhD, had witnessed a "huge bias in medicine for high scores, and people who have very traditional ways of showing success through their application, and that is also tied to income levels."

He said: "This is an opportunity for reinventing the wheel and rethinking what admissions looks like, how we assess who gets to become a doctor."

Jade Andrade, 30, who aspires to work in paediatric medicine, was thrilled for herself and her classmates.

"But I think most exciting thing is really the impact this will have on future generations of students," she said. "The larger picture is, this is really a beacon of hope."

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Albert Einstein College of Medicine: An unimaginable gift just changed these students' lives

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After a former professor donated $1bn to a Bronx school, students see hope for wider access to a medical education.

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A Big Think article, which argues that given students are allowed to use calculators for mathematics, they should also be allowed to use ChatGPT to write.

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A Big Think article, which argues that given students are allowed to use calculators for mathematics, they should also be allowed to use ChatGPT to write.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “Education often treats students like robots instead of humans… maybe we should leave the robotic work to AI.” Do you agree?

KEY TERMS Strong evidence, Rigid, New calculator, Change, Fear of change, Robotic work

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When ChatGPT was launched to the public a little under a year ago, users were amazed by the AI chatbot's knowledge, conversation skills, and writing ability. After being prompted by a human user, the large language model generates replies by predicting what word should follow the previous one, taking into consideration the prompt, all the prior words, and its vast training from information available on the internet.

With this formula, ChatGPT can create apparently "thoughtful," coherent, and well-written content. Many onlookers were soon predicting that high school and college students would use the AI to write their essays for them. At the time these prognostications were made, however, it wasn't clear whether essays created by ChatGPT were actually superior to those penned by students.

Students vs. AI

We now have strong evidence that they are. In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers in the faculty of computer science and mathematics at the University of Passau in Germany provided 111 high school teachers in Germany each with six essays to rate. The teachers were told to use a scale from zero to six to rate each essay for topic and completeness, logic and composition, expressiveness and comprehensiveness, language mastery, complexity, vocabulary and text linking, and language constructs.

Unbeknownst to the teachers, some of the essays were penned by real students aged 16 to 18 while others were generated by ChatGPT-3.5 or ChatGPT-4, the latter being more advanced. The essays were all "argumentative," requiring students (or AIs) to think critically about a topic, then establish a position and support it with evidence. In total, the teachers rated 270 essays across 90 topics.

When the researchers tallied the results, they found that ChatGPT clearly outperformed the students across all the criteria. Student essays received an average score of 3.69 out of 6, while ChatGPT-3.5 scored 4.36 and ChatGPT-4 scored 4.68. (The researchers only examined high school students; it is likely that college students would have performed better.)

Interestingly, the researchers noticed that ChatGPT had some very robotic writing ticks. For example, every one of the AI-written essays began the concluding paragraph with the phrase "in conclusion." The introductory sentences universally started with a general statement using the main concepts of the essay topics.

"Although this corresponds to the general structure that is sought after for argumentative essays, it is striking to see that the ChatGPT models are so rigid," the authors commented.

ChatGPT as a learning tool

Such tendencies could allow educators to identify AI-created works handed in ostensibly as human-crafted and penalize students accordingly. But the researchers think such a push to maintain the education status quo by excluding AIs like ChatGPT would be a missed opportunity. As AI models improve and increasingly make certain human efforts obsolete, why not instead refocus education toward more modern pursuits that are more appropriate for this undeniably tech-driven era?

"Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more," Will Douglas Heaven wrote for MIT Technology Review earlier this year.

Heaven interviewed an educator whose exploits are highly applicable in light of the current study. While she previously required her students to write argumentative essays, instead, she now asks her students to have ChatGPT generate them. Students are then tasked with editing the work and assessing the AI's arguments, considering their effectiveness on specific audiences. Students then turn in a rewrite.

Like a calculator, but for essays

The University of Passau researchers think that ChatGPT should not be viewed as a cheating tool but rather as "the new calculator," which took a lot of the grunt work out of math. Students should be extensively taught to write in class but then eventually permitted to utilize ChatGPT once they have attained sufficient mastery. They can then correct, stylize, and hone the AI's work.

"Our results provide a strong indication that the fear many teaching professionals have is warranted: the way students do homework and teachers assess it needs to change in a world of generative AI models," the researchers wrote.

Fear of change is natural, but it regularly passes with time. ChatGPT may finally be the impetus that brings about long overdue changes in education, transforming it from a system that revolves around memorizing and regurgitating facts to one that teaches logic, reasoning, and critical thinking. Education often treats students like robots instead of humans. Instead maybe we should leave the robotic work to AI.

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Students use calculators to do math. Let them use ChatGPT to write

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Once students master the basics of math, they are allowed to use calculators. The same should be true of writing and ChatGPT.

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A Guardian article, reporting on how US schools are sending ever-increasing numbers of students to psychiatrists due to their fear of violence.

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A Guardian article, reporting on how US schools are sending ever-increasing numbers of students to psychiatrists due to their fear of violence.

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The nine-year-old had been drawing images of guns at school and pretending to point the weapons at other students. He'd become more withdrawn, and had stared angrily at a teacher. The principal suspended him for a week. Educators were unsure whether it was safe for him to return to school - and, if so, how best to support him.

So, as schools around the country are increasingly inclined to do amid heightened concern over school violence and threats, administrators sent the child to meet with a psychiatrist. There the child sat, in a chair a bit too big for his small frame, fidgeting as he listened to the psychiatrist over a video call.

"Some people in the school asked me to talk with you to try to figure out how we can make school easier for you and understand what happened," the psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport told him, according to a recording of the call. She had documented the session, anonymizing some details, to share it as a case study with a room full of hundreds of child psychiatrists who faced similar requests.

They had come from across the country, gathering at an annual professional meeting of the US's child and adolescent psychiatrists last October, to learn how to conduct similar evaluations effectively. Many were seeing more children wind up in their offices and emergency rooms, pushed into psychiatric evaluations by their schools. Sometimes their young patients had made threats or been violent in class. Other times, the catalyst was less clear; perhaps the school had called police to take the child to the hospital during a behavioral or mental health crisis, or told a parent that their child would not be allowed back without a doctor's sign-off. They needed to know how to respond.

"None of us can predict violence - we don't really have a future [predicting] ball," Rappaport, who is also a psychiatry professor at Harvard, said later. When assessments are deployed well, she explained, they can be essential to preventing violence in schools and mobilizing resources for a struggling student. But determining which child could pose a threat to themselves or others is a delicate process that schools frequently misuse and misunderstand, according to Rappaport and other experts familiar with the process.

Psychiatrists emphasize that schools need well-trained teams of mental health professionals and administrators who work alongside clinicians to assess whether students pose a threat and support children in crises. But, they say, relatively few districts have that level of resources. Instead, schools often offload the responsibility of evaluation and intervention on to outside psychiatrists and even emergency rooms.

The practice can keep students out of school for weeks or even months, and cast children into an already overburdened youth mental health system that families must often navigate without any assistance from schools. Family advocates say that even sending a child to an emergency room for an evaluation can become a days-long ordeal.

Without clear policies, transparency and staff support for schools and clinicians, many experts say these outsourced evaluations can result in a cycle of removals that leave children in crisis and schools with a false sense of security.

When you ask an emergency room: 'Is this child safe to be in school?' it's the wrong question

Dr Nancy Rappaport

"When you ask an emergency room: 'Is this child safe to be in school?' it's the wrong question," Rappaport said. "It gives the schools a false sense of confidence and, many times, it indicates that the school doesn't have in place what needs to happen."

No comprehensive national data exists about how often districts require such evaluations. But for many psychiatrists, the seemingly ever-spreading use of these evaluations without preventive measures or follow-up support for students is setting off alarm bells.

"The focus can't just be on identifying potential school shooters," said Deborah Weisbrot, a clinical psychiatry professor at Stony Brook University medical center who also helped lead the training session. "The focus needs to be about the underlying mental health and characteristics of all the hundreds and hundreds of kids who make threats, who will never become school shooters, and what are their needs."

Dorri Auerbach wishes her district had offered that broad focus.

Her grandson, Carter, is a bubbly child with diagnosed ADHD and lots of energy. At the beginning of his first grade year in 2021, Auerbach asked his Long Island elementary school in New York to evaluate him for special education services, but he was found ineligible, according to Auerbach and a school therapist's report. At school, he did well in math and reading but often struggled to sit still in his chair and became frustrated when he felt misunderstood by other kids, she said. He met regularly with the school therapist to learn better coping strategies.

Then, midway through the school year, things started to go downhill. At times, the six-year-old became physically aggressive toward other students and threatened to hurt them, according to Auerbach and the report. Twice in the span of two months, administrators at Verne W Critz Elementary insisted he go to a hospital or crisis center for a psychiatric evaluation; both times he was taken there by police.

Each time, the process meant an hours-long wait in the local hospital's psychiatric emergency center. When he was finally seen, the doctor was brief, evaluating the child and clearing him for discharge. And each incident was paired with a suspension - at first just for a few days. But then, he was placed on home instruction long-term and prohibited from returning to school "until such time as the District has completed and reviewed the results of a Psychiatric Evaluation", according to the district's stipulation notice.

After each incident, it became clear to Auerbach that the school's approach to supporting Carter wasn't working. "They promised and promised that they had everything in place," she said. "And then, when it came down to it, they didn't know what to do with him and then kicked him out again."

A spokesperson for the South Country school district said the district cannot comment on individual student matters. The district did not respond to questions about its approach to risk assessments or psychiatric evaluations more generally.

Advocates for families say Auerbach's experience is increasingly common, as schools face intense pressure to ensure they don't underreact to students who may make a threat or demonstrate violence.

However, data and research that is available show that evaluations have been used inequitably. Some schools send Black children to psychiatric emergency rooms at disproportionately high rates, and disability advocates worry such assessments also frequently target children with special needs and keep them out of the classroom.

"The schools are not doing these types of evaluations or processes preventively and pre-emptively," said Dan Stewart, a managing attorney for the National Disability Rights Network. "They're just telling parents that the kids can't return."

That approach, advocates say, can have a detrimental effect on a student's long-term wellbeing and academic progress. Oftentimes, the process to ensure communication between schools and hospitals after the referral is murky at best, and nonexistent at worst.

"Initially, the response of most schools is that it's a mental healthcare emergency, not an education emergency," said Cheryl Theis, a senior education advocate at the Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund. "And of course, that's a completely false dichotomy."

For Carter, the district's requirement that he receive a full psychiatric evaluation before returning to class kept him out of school for months as a first grader. After his suspension, the district failed to schedule the more thorough psychiatric evaluation, Auerbach said. She reached out to several psychiatrists on her own to arrange an evaluation but was told they weren't taking new patients - a common occurrence amid a nationwide shortage in child mental healthcare providers.

This is a kid that needed help. Whatever he was showing you, he needed help. And they failed him

Dorri Auerbach

After five months of Auerbach's pleas for assistance, and after she got in touch with a local legal advocate, the district re-evaluated Carter's educational needs. It found him eligible to attend a more-supportive educational program, transferring him to a new school while the thorough psychiatric evaluation remained pending.

At that point, half a year had passed since he had last been in a classroom. "This is a kid that needed help," Auerbach said. "Whatever he was showing you, he needed help. And they failed him."

Child psychiatrists say evaluations work best when schools are equipped to work with clinicians to help determine how best to support a child and keep a school safe.

In the first study to examine the characteristics of students referred to outpatient threat assessment, published last year, Weisbrot and a team of researchers analyzed more than 150 evaluations of children and teens on Long Island. Only 8% of the students were deemed to be potentially dangerous, but most had other educational and psychiatric needs, many of which could be addressed by accommodations such as smaller class sizes or regular meetings with a therapist.

When things go right, Weisbrot explained, a child identified for a psychiatric threat assessment might be given further assistance in school and more robust mental health support. The student may also benefit from a special education assessment, or the school may need to intervene in bullying or other dynamics affecting the child's wellbeing.

Crucially, these steps would ensure that the psychiatric evaluation is only one part of the process, with schools sharing relevant information with clinicians and implementing further support once a child is discharged. That way, Weisbrot said, "it's not an endless chain of suspensions and other kinds of disciplinary actions without an intervention for what's causing these problems".

Some legislators are also looking into the issue. In New Jersey, a bill first introduced last year would have created a statewide policy on psychiatric clearances of students and require the state's education department to collect annual data on the number of students removed from school mental health evaluations. The legislation addressed some of the concerns of local parents and advocates, who said such assessments were being used more frequently after students returned to school when pandemic restrictions eased. The bill has not made it out of committee.

As for Carter, he's now a third grader in a supportive school on Long Island, where the school day is designed around helping students who may have more educational or behavioral needs. While Auerbach is glad that he has settled into the school, she hopes that at some point down the line, he'll be able to return to a mainstream class. And she worries about the way the removals and isolation may have already affected Carter - the police taking him to the hospital in a squad car, the long waits to be seen by doctors, and the months out of school.

What haunts her most is the sense that none of this had to happen. If the district had found Carter eligible for special education support earlier, when she first requested the evaluation, perhaps he would have been helped rather than sent to the hospital, she said. And if the school had implemented better interventions after Carter was sent to the hospital, then, maybe he wouldn't have been suspended.

"I feel that if he had the support before, he probably would have been okay," Auerbach said. "It wouldn't have gotten to this point."
This story about psychiatric evaluations was produced by The Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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US schools are sending more kids to psychiatrists out of fears of violence. Clinicians are concerned

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Psychiatric evaluations are meant to keep students safe, but experts say schools often misuse and misunderstand them

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A Conversation article, asserting that university rankings are unscientific and bad for education.

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A Conversation article, asserting that university rankings are unscientific and bad for education.

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University rankings are unscientific and bad for education: experts point out the flaws

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We all need to understand that ranking is not objective and true. University rankings are massively overvalued, and reinforce global, regional and national inequalities.

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A Guardian article, assessing the benefits of studying alongside international students.

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A Guardian article, assessing the benefits of studying alongside international students.

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The focus of recent articles on international student numbers ( Warnings of economic damage to UK as international student numbers fall by a third, 29 February; Are international students taking over UK universities? No - in fact, they're propping them up, 31 January) has been on their overall value to the UK economy or to universities' financial positions, or their impact on opportunities for British students. But it's also fair to ask what impact they have on the British students that they study alongside.

Our recent peer-reviewed study looked at the entire English higher education system and found that having foreign peers has zero impact on how likely home students are to graduate or how well they do in their degree, and no impact on their chances of finding employment afterwards.

British students with top A-level grades even get a salary premium on average from studying alongside international students. So in this regard also there is no reason to restrict international student numbers.
Dr Angus Holford University of Essex; Dr Greta Morando University College London and University of Bath; Dr Julián Costas-Fernández University of Surrey

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The value of studying alongside international students | Letter

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Letter: Dr Angus Holford , Dr Greta Morando and Dr Julián Costas-Fernández respond to news about falling numbers of overseas students coming to Britain

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A Wired article, looking at whether it is possible to ‘vaccinate’ people against fake news.

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A Wired article, looking at whether it is possible to ‘vaccinate’ people against fake news.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What personal motivation does Sander van der Linden have for devoting himself to the prevention of misinformation? How do ‘psychological vaccines’ work - and what examples does the article give of them? Why does success in this field depend on the cooperation of social media companies (the “guardians of the online flow of information”), and how easy is it to gain this? To wrap up: In what ways is the TOK course a ‘vaccine against brainwashing’?

KEY TERMS Controlled exposure, Misinformation, Indoctrination, Cognitive immunizing agent, psychological vaccine, psychological vaccine

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The approach hinges on the idea that by the time we've been exposed to misinformation, it's too late for debunking and fact-checking to have any meaningful effect, so you have to prepare people in advance-what van der Linden calls "prebunking." An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

When he published the findings in 2016, van der Linden hadn't anticipated that his work would be landing in the era of Donald Trump's election, fake news, and post-truth; attention on his research from the media and governments exploded. Everyone wanted to know, how do you scale this up?

Van der Linden worked with game developers to create an online choose-your-own-adventure game called Bad News, where players can try their hand at writing and spreading misinformation. Much like a broadly protective vaccine, if you show people the tactics used to spread fake news, it fortifies their inbuilt bullshit detectors.

But social media companies were still hesitant to get on board; correcting misinformation and being the arbiters of truth is not part of their core business model. Then people in China started getting sick with a mysterious flulike illness.

The coronavirus pandemic propelled the threat of misinformation to dizzying new heights. Van der Linden began working with the British government and bodies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations to create a more streamlined version of the game specifically revolving around Covid, which they called GoViral! They created more versions, including one for the 2020 US presidential election, and another to prevent extremist recruitment in the Middle East. Slowly, Silicon Valley came around.

A collaboration with Google has resulted in a campaign on YouTube in which the platform plays clips in the ad section before the video starts, warning viewers about misinformation tropes like scapegoating and false dichotomies and drawing examples from Family Guy and Star Wars. A study with 20,000 participants found that people who viewed the ads were better able to spot manipulation tactics; the feature is now being rolled out to hundreds of millions of people in Europe.

Van der Linden understands that working with social media companies, who have historically been reluctant to censor disinformation, is a double-edged sword. But, at the same time, they're the de facto guardians of the online flow of information, he says, "and so if we're going to scale the solution, we need their cooperation." (A downside is that they often work in unpredictable ways. Elon Musk fired the entire team who was working on pre-bunking at Twitter when he became CEO, for instance.)

This year, van der Linden wrote a book on his research, titled Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. Ultimately, he hopes this isn't a tool that stays under the thumb of third-party companies; his dream is for people to inoculate one another. It could go like this: You see a false narrative gaining traction on social media, you then warn your parents or your neighbor about it, and they'll be pre-bunked when they encounter it. "This should be a tool that's for the people, by the people," van der Linden says.
This article first appeared in the September/October 2023 edition of WIRED UK.

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This Psychologist Wants To Vaccinate You Against Fake News

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Controlled exposure to misinformation can help protect people from falling for it in the future, according to new research.

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An FT article, considering what we can learn about large-scale tragedies (such as the Israel-Hamas war) from the work of George Orwell. 

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An FT article, considering what we can learn about large-scale tragedies (such as the Israel-Hamas war) from the work of George Orwell. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What event is prompting Simon Kuper to reflect on the difficulties of accessing the truth about the world? What ‘heuristic’ has he arrived at? Which two ‘knowledge heroes’ does Kuper use to help him interpret events and issues objectively? What is it about Orwell that made him so reliable (hint: use the word ‘apostate’ in your answer)? To wrap up: Does focusing on the views of ‘apostates’ give us more chance of accessing the truth about the world?

KEY TERMS Truth, Identity, Heuristic, Empathy across ethnic divides, Apostates

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

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Cookies on FT Sites

We use cookies and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our Sites are used.

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Orwell and Nelson Mandela are reliable models for truth-seeking in a time of tragedy

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A Vox article, exploring whether affirmative action at West Point in the USA will continue.

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A Vox article, exploring whether affirmative action at West Point in the USA will continue.

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The Supreme Court showdown over whether the military’s officer corps isn’t white enough, explained

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The guy behind the Harvard lawsuit attacking affirmative action turns his ire on the service academies.

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A Big Think article, which looks at how video games have changed us as story-tellers, via an analysis of The Last Of Us. 

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A Big Think article, which looks at how video games have changed us as story-tellers, via an analysis of The Last Of Us. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE According to Adam Frank, why does The Last Of Us game deserve to be regarded as ‘high art’? How effectively has it been adapted for television? Why does he assert that the game is “brilliant and compelling, but you cannot say that it’s fun”? Overall, how can “technological and artistic development [in this case, video games] can reshape the way we satisfy our ancient need for stories”? Answer with reference to video games - and other forms of art.

Key terms Depict the world through narratives, New dimensions in storytelling, High art, Compelling, Emotional resonance

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“The Last of Us” shows how technology has changed humans as storytellers

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Video games matter. Their continued technological and artistic development is reshaping the way we satisfy our ancient need to tell stories.

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A Conversation article, which explores how we become more objective when we use social media with someone from an opposing perspective. 

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A Conversation article, which explores how we become more objective when we use social media with someone from an opposing perspective. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What example does the article open with of how different perspectives lead us to either accept or reject online information? Why does misinformation matter, and what examples does the article give of how it manifests itself? What are the difficulties of researching the way people process online information, and how has the author of the article tried to overcome these? How does To wrap up: “Understanding that different perspectives determine the way we process information is the first step in overcoming the challenge of online misinformation.” Do you agree?

KEY TERMS Fact check, Perspective, Cultural identity, Political polarization, Bringing together people, Contentiousness, Experimental situations

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People dig deeper to fact-check social media posts when paired with someone who doesn’t share their perspective – new research

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A new study unexpectedly found a way to help people assess social media posts with less bias and more care – pairing them up with partners who have a different perspective.

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A Big Think article, assessing the impact of digital texts on children's comprehension skills.

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A Big Think article, assessing the impact of digital texts on children's comprehension skills.

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Will there ever be another Harry Potter? Between 1997 and 2007, it seemed like every child (and even their parents) was reading J.K. Rowling's timeless fantasy novels about a skinny, bespectacled teenager's adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Kids worldwide attended midnight parties for the launch of new installments, dressed as witches and wizards for Halloween, and spent long hours reading the thick hardcovers two, three, four, or more times.

But since the dawn of the 21st century, when digital reading of website articles, blogs, emails, social media posts, and chats began supplanting print reading, the rate of children who read for fun has plummeted. We may never again see another book series capture kids' attention as Harry Potter did.

In addition to lessening books' influence in the youth cultural zeitgeist, the broader switch to digital reading may be having a more pernicious effect: adversely affecting kids' reading comprehension skills, a recently published meta-analysis finds.

Digital reading and comprehension

In 2011, scientists reviewed 99 studies exploring the effect of print reading on children's comprehension skills. As one would expect, they found a sizable one. The more that kids were exposed to print reading, the better able they were to understand and recall what they were reading. Moreover, print reading appeared to promote a virtuous cycle: As young readers consumed longer and more complex texts, their reading skills improved, prompting them to pursue even more complex written works, further boosting their abilities.

For the new meta-analysis, scientists at the University of Valencia in Spain aggregated 26 studies with close to 470,000 participants. Each study explored the effect of leisure-time digital reading on comprehension. They found that digital reading improves comprehension skills, but the beneficial effect is between six and seven times smaller than print reading, and it's smallest for children.

"Great [exposure] to digital reading activities... may detract early readers from building a strong reading foundational base... in a critical period when they are shifting from learning to read to reading to learn," the authors wrote.

Why does digital reading appear to be far less beneficial? The authors cited numerous speculations from the literature. First, the linguistic quality of digital text tends to be of much lower quality. When chatting, we often use informal language with simplified vocabulary, and we ignore grammar rules. Content is also typically far shorter, not requiring the focus and retention to understand and fully enjoy longer works with intricate narratives and numerous characters.

According to Naomi S. Baron, an emerita professor of world languages and cultures at American University, a book's physical properties might also uniquely boost information retention.

"With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages. People often link their memory of what they've read to how far into the book it was or where it was on the page," she wrote.

The physical properties of a book or magazine - the smell, the looks, the feel - can also make reading more pleasurable, she added in an email interview with Big Think.

"If readers find pleasure in a reading medium, it wouldn't surprise me that such pleasure would lead to greater comprehension. For sure, as many study participants informed us, print led to becoming more absorbed in stories."

Lastly, when reading content on digital sources, distractions from social media, YouTube, and video games are often just a click away, hampering full comprehension of texts. In a recent study of undergraduates at West Virginia University, two-thirds admitted checking social media "often" or "very often" while reading. Just over half of respondents said that social media negatively impacted their reading habits, while 45% said it had a neutral effect and 2.5% said it had a positive effect.

Because youth tend to have impaired impulse control, they can be more susceptible than adults to distractions when engaging in digital reading. They also are less likely to have mastered vocabulary and grammar rules, meaning they will be exposed to more rudimentary writing on social media and in chats with friends. It's for these reasons that the authors recommend that parents and teachers limit kids' time with digital content, or at least emphasize printed works or using basic e-readers with ink-screens. (A 2019 study for the most part showed no difference in reading comprehension when reading works in print form versus on a Kindle, though readers were not as efficient at locating events in the temporality of the story.)

Reading into the future

Will teens follow their elders' advice? Baron cited data suggesting they might.

"Recent data from the American Library Association point up some surprising choices by today's Generation Z (ages 13-25) compared with those of Millennials (ages 26-40). According to their study, Gen Zers are not only reading more books per month (presumably for pleasure) than are Millennials, but are reading more print than their older brethren."

She also noted some of her own research showing that most students readily acknowledge that they learn and concentrate better when reading print.

Could subsequent generations come back to print? Time will tell.

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The loss of deep reading: How digital texts impact kids' comprehension skills

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Reading printed texts is associated with greater comprehension skills than reading digital texts, especially for children.

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A Wired article, exploring how video games can help to combat teen depression and suicide.

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A Wired article, exploring how video games can help to combat teen depression and suicide.

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In the face of lackluster mental health support, especially for children of marginalized groups, technology and video games can be used to meet young people where they are.

One of my most traumatizing moments was when my best friend Terry got gunned down outside my projects. As a 9-year-old in Chicago, I remember always speaking to him about whether he thought we would ever make it out of The Hood. "Of course we will, bro!" he'd always tell me. And yet, he never made it to 10. One day he was here smiling, the next I couldn't look at my own face in the mirror without crying. Looking back, all I can think of is how much pain I must have been in in order to want to take my own young life.

A troubling statistic from 2018 notes that Black children between the ages of 5 and 12 are more than twice as likely to die by suicide than their white counterparts. I wanted to learn more about youth suicide and what technology and games may be able to do to help us curb it.

Talking about youth mental health and suicide used to carry a historical stigma, but that is changing dramatically. I spoke with Rebecca Benghiat, former president and COO at  the Jed Foundation (JED), a leading nonprofit that works to protect emotional health and prevent suicide among our nation's teens and young adults. Benghiat mentioned some of the tools JED is using to strengthen schools, equip individuals, and encourage communities to raise awareness and understanding and to take action for young adult mental health. Among them, she says, is JED's Mental Health Resource Center.

"By having direct access to evidence-based content, resources, guides, and tips, JED is able to offer essential information on common emotional health issues to show teens and young adults ways they can best support one another, overcome challenges, and make a successful transition to adulthood," said Benghiat. "Questions ranging from 'What do you do if your friend wants to harm themselves?' to 'What if you're feeling suicidal?' work to normalize, elevate, and encourage conversations around help-seeking and help-giving and let individuals know they are not alone."

Benghiat believes that this can be achieved by meeting young people where they are. This includes at school, home, and in digital spaces like the metaverse. With this in mind, JED issued a comprehensive, new report, titled " Can the Metaverse Be Good for Youth Mental Health? ", to understand the interactions between these spaces and youth mental health while providing actionable recommendations to various stakeholders, including policymakers, tech companies, caregivers, and young people. The report identified a list of rights to which youth are entitled in a metaverse ecosystem, including the creation of a safe, supportive space where psychological safety is priority, a clear understanding of what content is prohibited and the procedures for reporting violations, mental health promotion and supports by developers in partnership with clinical experts, the freedom for young people to be their authentic selves and feel a sense of belonging, and having privacy and ownership of their own data as well as control and creativity of their own content.

"We can expand the benefit and safety of online spaces and work toward a future in which positive mental health is a priority in the design and building of online experiences," said Benghiat. "At the same time, it is also essential to create communities of care-in the real world-that are purposefully inclusive and supportive, while providing protective factors for the emotional well-being of all youth."

As for the role that schools play in the lives of students, she highlights JED's core belief in a comprehensive, public health approach to promoting mental health and preventing suicide. "There's appropriate data-driven training and decades of impactful results that serve as the blueprint on how to successfully assess, identify, and improve programs and resources at schools to help every student-deliberately and intentionally," said Benghiat. "We feel strongly that we will be able to say that we're helping to create a more equitable environment."

Benghiat noted some common frustrations with the current state of youth mental healthcare in America. "The inability and inequality for some young people to access care is worrisome," she said. "We, as a society, need to look at systems, methods, and resources on the local, state, and federal levels to implement real, positive change during this challenging time."

During the Covid-19 pandemic, domestic violence spiked in what the UN has called a " shadow pandemic," as violence toward women took a backseat to the much more vocal threat of Covid. As domestic abuse spiked, millions of children who went through distance learning fell off the map, either due to a lack of access to reliable internet access, or simply because they weren't required to come to school.

Youth Support Systems Are Lacking

Benghiat feels that positive mental health for youth should be the responsibility of both the school and parents. "Education and support look different between schools and home life. There shouldn't be a hierarchy. We will look differently at home systems than in school systems. We shouldn't position this, either, as an either-or." As for schools, she highlights the role they play at JED. "There's appropriate training for this ... We'd love to see faculty and staff show their willingness to have the conversation. We do that kind of thing through lanyards or pins. We feel strongly that we are making a more approachable environment."

Ending life by suicide is already the second leading cause of death among youth between the ages of 10 and 24, and LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely than their straight peers to end their own lives. Janis Whitlock, founder and director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery in 2003, is also a senior adviser to JED. The research program was created to address nonsuicidal self-injury, a behavior that began appearing about two decades ago and which is now widely understood as a common risk factor for suicidal thoughts and behaviors among youth. When asked how we can change youth suicide risk, Whitlock suggested that it will be vital to help youth understand that they do not need to end their lives to feel more whole and connected to things that matter.

Whitlock said: "The biggest drivers of youth suicide [are] not feeling authentically seen and cared about, and not having a sense of purpose and mattering. Feeling stigmatized and judged also contributes to feeling disconnected and uncared about. If we want to lower risk of suicide in youth, we will need to collectively face the many ways in which society is structured to foster a sense of disconnection and not mattering."

And where do many young people turn to feel that sense of belonging? The internet. "The truth is that in this landscape, the internet can be a real safe haven," Whitlock explains. It can be "a place where connection and sense of mattering happens. It's possible to make vital and healthy connections with other people online, such as happens for some youth in gaming. It can at least give youth a place to start." There is, of course, the flip side, Whitlock says. Relying on the internet to foster a sense of connection can also lead young people to exposure to harmful or hateful content, or harassment and bullying from others.

Games May Be Able to Help

An indie psychological-horror game called The Cat Lady delves into the deeply-tortured mind of a protagonist who starts off by committing suicide. The game doesn't shy away from getting really grim, really fast, and in one deeply troubling scenario, it presents the player with the very legitimate premise many suicidal patients face: being told they aren't capable of knowing what's wrong with them, because doctors know best.

The game doesn't try to be preachy or condescending. It gives players a barebones look into how medical professionals have a history of infantilizing or gaslighting those with mental health issues which can precipitate suicide. Obviously, it's not a game for everyone. But it does shed light on the practice and malpractice present in many settings in America.

Crystal Widado is a mental health organizer and student journalist. In high school, Widado was the COO and writing director of Each Mind Matters, a student-run mental health publication focused on BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled community issues relating to mental health, for which they were awarded the JED Foundation's 2022 Student Voice of Mental Health Award.

Widado says that they have never found it difficult to speak about their experiences. They know that their words will help others-a great impetus to speak about their trauma. "I entered the whole advocacy space really early, prematurely," they say. "The gaming community made my story a bit easier to talk about. I was going through a lot of suicidal ideations, and dealing with difficult issues during seventh and eighth grade. And I used Minecraft servers to grow closer to a lot of people, one of whom was a verified moderator. I opened up to her." At first, Widado shared their own experiences openly for the sake of wanting to help others and feeling desperate for support in their own struggles. Sometimes this included opening up to the wrong communities." Widado was groomed as a 12-year-old, and this event forever tainted their view on life and made them question the motives of adults. "It was something that shaped me in bad ways, and so I don't want that part to be rosy."

Many youth feel that people pay more attention to you once you've died, or that there's glory in it. Many suicides are impulsive-suicidal crisis can be short-lived, and if we can get people through without hurting themselves, they will seek out help and support. Suicidal crises often escalate quickly. According to research, 48 percent of people who made a serious suicide attempt said they had first thought about making that attempt within 10 minutes of attempting, and 71 percent within an hour. This means that, during an acute crisis, a person's survival may come down to what methods are available to them in those critical moments and how lethal they are. Ninety percent of people who attempt don't go on to die by suicide later, so part of it is getting them through the moment.

Highly-acclaimed games like Celeste uses 2D platforming and a thoroughly challenging and thought-provoking narrative to present the trans protagonist as more than just a victim of severe anxiety and depression, but someone who can overcome it with the help of the player.

The award-winning, national Seize the Awkward campaign-a joint effort between the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) and JED in collaboration with the Ad Council -encourages and equips young people aged 16 to 24 with the tools to start and sustain the sometimes-awkward, always-necessary conversations that support friends who may be struggling with their mental health.

More than anything, it's important for young people to know that there are resources available to help, especially in a world where the internet itself seems to be out to target young, often marginalized people, because of how toxic and dangerous it can be. We all need help, and children and young adults are no different.

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for free, 24-hour support from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line. Outside the US, visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for crisis centers around the world.

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Tech and Games Can Help Curb Youth Suicide

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In the face of lackluster mental health support, especially for children of marginalized groups, technology and video games can be used to meet young people where they are.

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A Big Think article, arguing that standardized tests play an important part in university entrance. 

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A Big Think article, arguing that standardized tests play an important part in university entrance. 

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One of the most stressful times in a young person's life occurs when they're still a teenager: when they make their decisions surrounding applying to college. Should they apply, and is college right for them? Where should they apply, and what steps should they take and avoid taking in the application process? In recent years, that second question has also included the notion of whether or not those prospective college students should take a standardized test - such as the SAT or ACT - as those tests:

However, the goal of the college admissions process is for admissions officers to make distinctions between applicants who are likely to meet with academic success in college (and beyond) and those who are likely to struggle in college. Although it is true that standardized test scores alone tend to favor wealthy applicants, those tests remain a unique and powerful way for colleges and universities to identify students from schools without deep resources that nevertheless have the potential for extraordinary academic success. Here's why colleges should - responsibly - include standardized testing as part of their admissions process.
The basics: what is a standardized test?
On the surface, the idea of a standardized test is simple, straightforward, and compelling. In an ideal world, you could devise a universally applicable skills assessment test that measures a students current comprehension and problem solving skills in any subject area you like, with mathematical ability (math) and language-and-literature skills (verbal) being the two most prominent subject areas providing the foundation for many future career fields that one can pursue. To that end, the most popular skills assessment tests, the SAT and the ACT, are generally used around the country to attempt to measure precisely that.

However, starting in 2020 - when, notably, the pandemic prevented many scheduled standardized testing sessions from taking place - many colleges around the country switched from requiring the SAT or ACT to making them optional: students could submit them if they liked, but were no longer required to. This decision came around right as these standardized tests were being criticized for highlighting already existing inequities in terms of performance:

students from higher-income (and predominantly white) schools, on average, score higher on these tests,

that more time, effort, and resources spent studying for the test improve outcomes on the test,

and that students from schools with fewer resources, on average, score lower,

and so it was thought that removing the test requirement would help remove and reduce those inequities. However, as any scientist could tell you, the simple existence of biases built into the data doesn't mean the data is useless; it means those biases must be accounted for if the data is to be used responsibly.
The dangers of using test score results alone
If the only metric you used in college admissions were these standardized test scores, you'd wind up with an extremely biased population at your college. Higher scores are known to correlate with wealth of the student's family and with the affluence of the school - whether public, private, charter, and religious or non-religious - as in addition to smaller class sizes and individual teacher attention, that wealth also confers:

more rigorous and varied course offerings at schools,

available additional tutoring,

and dedicated test practice and preparation,

among other advantages. Conversely, lower-income students rarely receive any of these benefits, and so on average they perform far worse on these tests.

Research done in the early 2000s through the mid 2010s clearly pointed this out, showing that the entire test score distribution was shifted, with lower-income students having a lower average SAT/ACT score, and even at the tail ends of the distribution, there were fewer high-scoring low-income students at every score threshold on those tests. Using only test scores as a criteria for college admissions would have created, arguably, a pool of admitted applicants that was even more biased toward high-income students, further disenfranchising those from low-income areas.
The even worse dangers of not using test scores at all
However, it's been well-established that raw test scores, alone, are not necessarily the best predictive tool for future success, especially for students from low-income backgrounds. Furthermore, it's in a college or university's best interest to admit a diverse pool of applicants, as the very idea of a college or university is rooted in the principle that it's a merit-based system designed to provide opportunity to bright young minds irrespective of their backgrounds. Relying solely on a biased indicator, like standardized test scores, would clearly violate the spirit of providing exactly that type of opportunity to students regardless of their socioeconomic background.

The other criteria used (besides standardized test scores) by college admissions offices typically include:

high school academic performance,

letters of recommendation from teachers/mentors,

personal statements and admissions essays submitted by the student,

and extracurricular activities,

which typically signify to those working in admissions, as best as possible, a profile of a student's college readiness. However, many of these "signals of achievement," including advanced courses such as AP classes, are again similarly tilted in favor of students from high-resource backgrounds. As Yale University recently noted, students of low socioeconomic status "quickly exhaust the available course offerings [at their schools], leaving only two or three rigorous classes in their senior year schedule. With no test scores to supplement these components, applications from students attending these schools may leave admissions officers with scant evidence of their readiness for Yale."

Since 2020, when many colleges and universities, including the Ivy League schools (generally held up as the paragon of what a college or university should aspire to), moved away from requiring standardized tests, they struggled to identify which students from low-resource backgrounds would meet with the most success in college. Because of the difficulty in comparing one student's academic performance to another's across schools, colleges frequently used what's known colloquially as "affirmative action" to help select which students they should offer admissions to.

However, with the recent, 2023 supreme court decision requiring the complete removal of affirmative action from the college admissions process, students from low-resource schools and of low socioeconomic status had little at their disposal to signal to admissions officers their capacity for high achievement. That decision continued to even further disadvantage students from low-resource schools and students of low socioeconomic status because it simultaneously left intact the most unfair and biased criterion used in college admissions - legacy admissions considerations - enabling mediocre students from the wealthiest backgrounds to receive spots that they did not earn based on merit.

Put bluntly: an inherently unfair system that removes mechanisms by which disadvantaged competitors can shine through their innate talent or ability only becomes more unfair as a result.
Surprising research finds
Of course, there are many ideas about how the college admissions process should work, and what criteria would be the most fair and equitable for imposing as far as admitting the best students. Perhaps because of that glut of ideas, the only way to truly identify which solutions are most effective is to take large amounts of data and look at the actual outcomes that have occurred when various metrics are considered. In July of 2023, social scientists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman compiled anonymized admissions data from many public and private colleges to study which criteria for admissions were most relevant to selecting students that went on to achieve academic and post-academic success.

Individual schools then began following suit, with first Dartmouth and then Yale becoming the first two Ivy League schools to reinstitute a policy of requiring standardized test scores as part of an admissions package. In fact, what the data showed, both when aggregated across colleges and for individual colleges reporting solely on their own data, is incredibly surprising to many. It turns out that, overall, standardized test scores from students from low-resource schools are actually the single best predictor of future academic success: better than high school grades, letters of recommendation, personal statements, or any other metric. Furthermore, during the "test optional" period of college admissions, the researchers were ably to identify numerous cases where applicants:

did not submit their scores due to the test-optional policies,

where had they chosen to submit their score,

those applicants would have, according to Dartmouth economics professor Bruce Sacerdote, "helped that student tremendously, maybe tripling their chance of admissions."
Using standardized testing responsibly
Certainly, when admissions officers at selective colleges and universities are assembling a profile of a prospective student, they don't simply base their decisions off of one criterion and one alone. Instead, they assemble as complete a profile as they can, often historically including:

parent income,

race,

gender,

legacy status,

status as a recruited athlete,

High School GPA,

and, potentially, a standardized test (such as SAT) score.

Assembling a profile in this fashion enables researchers to go back to that data and control for each of those factors, isolating the impact of any one of them in a fashion where the bias induced by the other factors are accounted for.

It turns out, when those researchers do precisely that, they find that it is the standardized test score, and only the standardized test score, that allows admissions officers to identify students who stand out among their peers in demonstrating academic potential and college readiness. In practical terms, if you are a student from:

a household where neither parent attended college,

a school in an extremely rural area,

an underfunded school in a low-income area,

or a low-income household in general,

a standardized test gives you an opportunity to shine in a way that highlights your academic potential, above and beyond any other metric. While performance on a standardized test may only be able to identify a mix of talent, skills, and experience, you can only pay to develop skills and experience. Talent, as much as some may hate to admit it, is not only innate, but is something that standardized tests can often help to identify, particularly when it appears in unexpected places.
To all high achievers: yes, share your scores!
There has been a debate, when one takes a standardized test, over whether you should or should not select the box that allows the testing service to share your score with colleges. The emphatic answer to that question, particularly for students who will likely score relatively high on those tests, is an unequivocal yes, you should. These services, such as the Student Search Service for the SAT and the Educational Opportunity Service for the ACT, can provide a tremendous opportunity for students in under-resourced households, schools, or environments in general.

Sending your scores to colleges means, again in practical terms, that if you score above a certain threshold (that, yes, admissions officers will adjust for your particular circumstances), they may identify you as a strong candidate of interest. If they do, it's not uncommon for elite colleges, including Ivy League schools, to reach out to you (and other candidates) to strongly encourage you to apply to their school.

Enrolling in the SAT's Student Search Service (or the ACT's Educational Opportunity Service) can, in a very real and tangible way, provide opportunities for students to "get noticed" by elite colleges, including by colleges that they never would have otherwise thought could have been an option for them. Prospective students - particularly from rural areas, under-resourced schools, or first-generation households - can be found by colleges (that can often help tremendously with financial aid) in a unique fashion through services such as these.
Who are elite colleges most at-risk of passing over?
If colleges aren't kept entirely blind as to the identity and background of a student, including their family's wealth status, socioeconomic background, and the level of resources available at their High School, we already know who colleges would be most likely to admit. They are most likely to admit students:

who come from wealthy families,

who attend resource-rich (well-funded, high-opportunity) schools,

who have legacy connections to the school itself, and

who participate in the multi-billion dollar independent educational consultant industry. (That offers tutoring, test preparation, and other ways of "sculpting" kids into templates that will be attractive to Ivy League schools, where consultants frequently charge $120,000+ per year for their services.)

These traits, of course, don't apply to most students who apply to college. If you, yourself, aren't from a wealthy background and don't attend a resource-rich school, however, can you still compete against students who do have all of those advantages? Yes, and moreover, a high standardized test score can identify you as a standout in a way that no other measurement can.

In fact, whether you include or exclude all high school fixed effects (removing variation in student background from the data), the data compiled by various researchers shows the same strong correlation between SAT performance and college success. The high achievers on standardized test scores won't capture everyone that you want to admit, and all high-achievers don't go on to achieve that desired in-college as well as post-college success, but neither do all members of any group. When looking at the high performers on standardized tests, they're definitely among the students a college wants to admit.
Standardized tests as a tool for educational justice
The central idea of the United States, and of a capitalist society in general, is that our society is founded on the principle of equality of opportunity: where the system itself is primarily merit-based, and the highest achievers, based on their own merits, will be the ones who succeed in this world. (Whether this is true, and how true this is, is often debated, but as an ideal, this is a part of our society's very fabric.) If:

your parents didn't go to college (you would be a first-generation student),

if you don't have good academic grades and/or extracurriculars,

and/or if you weren't fully aware of and prepared for the various criteria that admissions officers look for,

a high standardized test score can be the gateway to an educational opportunity that no other avenue offers. As policy analyst Matt Bruenig put it,

"There is a reason why the scandals surrounding the SAT and ACT generally take the form of rich people paying a ringer to fraudulently take the test for their kid. It's because dim rich kids can't outcompete brighter poor kids in that specific arena. There's real value in that."

None of this is to say that only students who go to Ivy League (or similar) schools go on to achieve great success in life. Yes, it's absolutely possible to get a great education and have a great career and a successful life by attending local colleges with open admissions policies that don't require standardized testing. However, the goal of all colleges and universities is to give students a merit-based opportunity to compete at all levels, including at the very top. For that reason, as well as in the spirit of fairness, it's important to give everyone, particularly those with fewer resources to compete, an equal opportunity to show what they can do. A standardized test, as the research shows, accomplishes this in a fashion that no other measurement metric can match.

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Colleges should include standardized testing in admissions

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There are many problems with relying on SAT and ACT scores for college admissions. But removing them entirely creates less opportunity.

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A Big Think article, which looks at three great untruths we tell children, and why we need to stop telling them.

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A Big Think article, which looks at three great untruths we tell children, and why we need to stop telling them.

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In 2018, prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, and journalist Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, released their co-written book The Coddling of the American Mind. In it, they convincingly argued that the current generation of parents and educators are leading kids astray. By perpetuating three great untruths - (1) "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker"; (2) "Always trust your feelings"; and (3) "Life is a battle between good people and evil people" - the old are letting down the young, leaving kids ill-prepared to face a complex world.

Haidt sat down with Big Think to further explain the untruths and their pernicious effects.

Untruth #1: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker

The first untruth, "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker," seems to be a complete reversal of a more empowering adage: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Parents and educators today are increasingly worried about inflicting any sort of "trauma" on kids, worried that it might leave lasting mental scars. Trigger warnings and helicopter parenting are byproducts of this desire to shield kids from any potential source of harm, either physical or emotional.

But this rising tendency goes against decades of research showing that the young tend to be remarkably resilient to adverse experiences. Rather than being fragile, they are " anti-fragile," Haidt said. Just like bones and muscles need to be used and pushed to stay strong, and the immune system must be exposed to pathogens to remain in tip-top shape, kids' psyches need to be challenged to keep them balanced and healthy.

"By over-protecting our children we are setting them up to be weak, to be more easily damaged, to be more easily discouraged," Haidt told Big Think. "When we protect children from unpleasantness, from conflicts, from insults, from teasing, from exclusion, we're preventing their social psychology, we're preventing their social abilities, we're preventing their strength from developing."

Untruth #2: Always trust your feelings

A second untruth that Haidt and Lukianoff expounded upon is "always trust your feelings."

"What we've begun seeing on campus is that students are encouraged to follow their feelings; if they feel offended by something then they have been attacked. They're supposed to not question those feelings," Haidt said.

Fancy phrases like "personal truth" and "lived experience" are now utilized all too often to place feelings on the same echelon as facts. But they aren't remotely on the same level. Feelings are subject to the hundreds of cognitive biases that plague human thinking. Facts, on the other hand, are facts.

"We need to be teaching young people at all stages to question their first interpretations, look for evidence, and improve the way they interpret the world," Haidt stated.

Untruth #3: Life is a battle between good people and evil people

The final great untruth, "the worst and most dangerous and darkest of all," according to Haidt, is that life is a battle between good people and evil people. This untruth feeds on humanity's ingrained susceptibility to tribalism.

"We evolved in small-scale societies that were locked in struggle with other small-scale societies," Haidt explained. "Human nature is really, really finely tailored for inter-group conflict, for tribal warfare."

So when educators and students distill people down to their various identities, and elevate the notion that their actions and views are determined almost entirely by those identities, they are reinforcing the notion that humans are black-or-white automatons rather than complex individuals in varying shades of gray.

"On some college campuses and in some high schools we see forms of education, forms of training that teach students to make more and more distinctions, to see more and more binary dimensions between people," Haidt elaborated. "The more we encourage people to see the people around them as good versus evil, the harder it's going to be to create an inclusive, diverse environment."

Here's the bottom line, Haidt concluded:

"Children are anti-fragile, we are all prone to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, and we're all prone to tribalism and black-and-white thinking. If we want to raise a generation of kids who can deal with diversity of all kinds, who can go out into a world that's physically actually quite safe and yet full of offensive content, we need to get our educational practices in line with these three psychological principles."

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3 great untruths to stop telling kids - and ourselves

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Kids are fragile. They should trust their feelings. The world is a battle between good and evil. We should stop repeating these untruths.

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A Big Think article, looking at how the metaverse will revolutionize education. 

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A Big Think article, looking at how the metaverse will revolutionize education. 

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There are many things we can teach through books and lectures but giving students highly realistic, "hands-on" experience through a virtual world isn't one of them. But that future is coming very soon, and it will revolutionize K-12 and higher education.

To give but one example, we can teach kids to multiply numbers and generate a result in the billions, but it's very difficult - if not impossible - to teach the vastness of a billion stars, the profound smallness of a billion atoms, or the relevance of pumping 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But immersive technology will allow us to foster a sense of intuition in students, and thereby engendering a much deeper understanding of the world.

In the metaverse, we could give students first-person experiences as if they were shrunk down to the size of a virus or inflated to the size of a galaxy. We could have students float through the circulatory system so they can appreciate the size and scale of arterial walls as plaque builds up due to heart disease. We could transport students through time and space so they can stroll the busy streets of ancient Rome or help build the Great Wall of China. The examples are endless.

As someone who has been involved in virtual and augmented reality for over 30 years, I have always believed that immersive education is one of the most important uses. But it wasn't until my recent visit to Dreamscape Learn in Culver City, California that I experienced immersive content that is poised to revolutionize mainstream learning from K-12 to college. Formed as a partnership between the VR entertainment company Dreamscape Immersive and Arizona State University, Dreamscape Learn has combined the power of movie-quality storytelling and cinematic visuals with deeply thoughtful educational principles and clearly defined learning goals.

"Hands-on" learning in a virtual world

Their objective is not to replace traditional classroom education but to supplement it with "hands-on" labs conducted in VR. In fact, their labs are structured to provide 15 minutes of immersive experiences for every three hours of traditional learning. As described to me by Dreamscape Learn CEO Josh Reibel, they are pushing for "radical transformation of what hands-on learning means."

So, what does radical transformation look like? To find out, I visited Dreamscape headquarters, put on a VR headset, and jumped into their educational world. Their first learning module is a set of six labs designed to support college-level biology, and it doesn't involve any students spending a full hour just to glance at an amoeba under a microscope. Instead, it's a VR experience called "Biology in the Alien Zoo" that transports students to an intergalactic wildlife sanctuary where they must solve a mystery of why alien creatures are dying. Having tried this myself, I can report that it draws you in, not as an observer but a participant who really wants to explore the world and solve the problem.

Most impactful for me is how the technology can transport you not just to different times and places but to different scales, allowing you to gain intuition about the very large and very small. During my visit to Dreamscape Immersive, their founder and the former head of DreamWorks Motion Pictures, Walter Parkes, took me on a journey using a tool they call the Immersive Classroom. Almost like a magic carpet ride, it allows an instructor to take an entire classroom to different places.

First, we visited a landscape with creatures the size of a brontosaurus. For the first time in my life, I truly appreciated how small we really are compared to dinosaurs. He then shrunk us down and took us on a trip through the bloodstream, viewing red and white blood cells in their perfect proportions. We then watched as macrophages attacked a cancer cell, gaining intuition as to their relative sizes and the manner in which they behave. Walter and I were able to discuss what we were looking at in real-time, each of us represented as VR avatars. Finally he took me to visit some world heritage sites, where I could appreciate the true grandeur of ancient structures without having to get on a plane. To me, this capability to attain first-person perspective is revolutionary in education. It simply cannot be done with flat media.

Another educational VR experience I recently had was at Stanford University in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab run by Jeremy Bailenson. He demonstrated a variety of learning experiences ranging from an earthquake simulator that literally shook the floor below my feet to an amazing use of 3D video that allows college-level quarterbacks to practice "reading the defense" when lined up for a play. But most impactful was a module called "1000 Cuts" that lets students feel what it's like to be a person of color in a series of discriminatory experiences. Developed by Courtney Cogburn of Columbia University in collaboration with Dr. Bailenson, it literally lets you engage the world in someone else's shoes. Like transporting you to a different time, place, or scale, it allows students to see the world through different eyes, which could be profoundly valuable for teaching everything from history to current events.

The "intuition effect"

At a high level, the metaverse will transform education from a set of lessons that students watch to a set of experiences that students live. This will produce deeper learning, instilling not just knowledge but intuition.

I first experienced the "intuition effect" 25 years ago when running the VR company Immersion Corporation. As CEO, I had to give countless demos of our surgical training products. After showing a group of doctors how to perform a bronchoscopy in VR, one of them asked where I went to medical school. I was confused, so he explained that I was quite skilled at the procedure. This shocked me, as I had no medical training. But that's the amazing thing: by having first-person experiences in VR, I had accidentally learned the anatomy of the lungs and developed the complex skills needed to find a tumor and perform a biopsy. The learning was not factual, it was intuitive, which was far more impactful.

Researchers at ASU recently completed a first set of studies to compare the Alien Zoo experience to traditional labs. They found that students who used VR scored 9% higher when graded on the learning goals and reported higher enjoyment and engagement. And they are just getting started. In the spring semester of 2023, ASU expects to have over 5,000 students using the VR modules. Next year, it's expected that many additional universities will use them as well.

Virtual apprenticeship

Immersive experiences in education can be so realistic and interactive that students will develop knowledge, skills, and intuition that becomes second nature - more like having a virtual apprenticeship than taking a course. The future of education is here.

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How the metaverse will revolutionize K-12 and higher education

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There are many things we can teach through books and lectures but giving students highly realistic, "hands-on" experience through a virtual world isn't one of them. But that future is coming very soon, and it will revolutionize K-12 and higher education.

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A Guardian article, looking at how education is the key to unlocking Africa's potential.

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A Guardian article, looking at how education is the key to unlocking Africa's potential.

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The African Union (AU) is marking 2024 as its first Year of Education. This could not have come at a better time. Commitment to education has marked the continent's progress since the 1960s era of independence. Now more than ever, this resolve must transform Africa into the world's powerhouse for the 21st century.

In 60 years Africa has made considerable progress in education, with more children finishing school. Primary school completion rates across the region between 2000 and 2022 rose from 52% to 67%. High school dropout rates slowed too, with 50% of pupils completing lower secondary, up from 35%, and 33% in upper secondary education, up from 23%, while the number of tertiary education students has risen from fewer than 800,000 in 1970 to above 17 million today. More girls are in school than ever before.

But as we usher in this year of education, we must acknowledge that any hard-won gains fall short of preparing for tomorrow's opportunities and risks.

After the Covid pandemic, millions of children, adolescents and youth were out of school across sub-Saharan Africa. Only one in five children achieve the minimum proficiency level in reading by the end of primary education. Girls are particularly disadvantaged in the only region in the world not to have achieved gender parity in enrolment at any level in the education system, with one in three girls married before they turn 18. This trend, while troubling, is not irreversible.

To build the Africa we want, we must finance quality education that equips all our children with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the labour market of tomorrow, and to secure a peaceful, prosperous and stable future.

National budgets remain the principal source of education funding, but these often struggle to cover essentials such as teacher training, salaries, books and administrative costs.

Today, 40% of all Africans are under 14. Another 100 million will be born by 2050. With education, young Africans can fuel a colossal powerhouse

Since 2020, education budgets in nearly half of low-income countries diminished by an average of 14%. At the same time, more than 20%of total spending went to servicing debt. While the pandemic affected education budgets, before the crisis only about 20% of governments on the continent met international benchmarks for spending between 2017 and 2019.

While trimming education spending might relieve budgets in the short term, it is depriving economies of long-term prosperity.

To support domestic financing of education and prevent this backsliding, donors, multilateral institutions and the private sector can step up, pursuing all possible means - including debt relief - to help finance the quality education that African children need. For African governments, spending smarter is also imperative.

Without it, our continent's development will stagnate when it should be racing ahead, powered by its youth, natural resources and green energy. Africa is the world's youngest and fastest-growing continent. It currently accounts for 14% of the world's working-age population. That is set to rise to 42% by the end of the century.

Today, 40% of all Africans are under 15. Another 100 million children will be born here by 2050.With education, young Africans can fuel a colossal powerhouse. Yet, of the 1 million Africans entering the labour market every month, fewer than 25% find a job in the formal economy.

Since the Global Education Summit in 2021, 21 African heads of state have signed the Declaration on Education Financing that demands exemplary levels of investment. The AU year of education can re-energise members in committing to adequate domestic financing.

Multilateralism is essential to finance transformative education, which is why we support multi-stakeholder collaborations such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Over 20 years, GPE has contributed $6bn (£4.8bn) to support education funding in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, African influence is asserting itself globally - the AU has a seat at the G20. This influence can expand with its growing young population if matched with a quality education that unlocks the potential of every girl and boy.

Nelson Mandela recognised the foundational importance of learning when he said: "It is not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education. Those who do not believe this have small imaginations."

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Africa is the world's youngest continent - education is key to unlocking its potential | Nana Akufo-Addo and Jakaya Kikwete

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With 40% of all Africans aged under 15, smarter funding for schools can help young Africans fuel a colossal powerhouse

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A Wired article, exploring the 'AI Detection Arms Race', and how college students are developing the weapons. 

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A Wired article, exploring the 'AI Detection Arms Race', and how college students are developing the weapons. 

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And college students are developing the weapons, quickly building tools that identify AI-generated text-and tools to evade detection.

Edward Tian didn't think of himself as a writer. As a computer science major at Princeton, he'd taken a couple of journalism classes, where he learned the basics of reporting, and his sunny affect and tinkerer's curiosity endeared him to his teachers and classmates. But he describes his writing style at the time as "pretty bad"-formulaic and clunky. One of his journalism professors said that Tian was good at "pattern recognition," which was helpful when producing news copy. So Tian was surprised when, sophomore year, he managed to secure a spot in John McPhee's exclusive non-fiction writing seminar.

Every week, 16 students gathered to hear the legendary New Yorker writer dissect his craft. McPhee assigned exercises that forced them to think rigorously about words: Describe a piece of modern art on campus, or prune the Gettysburg Address for length. Using a projector and slides, McPhee shared hand-drawn diagrams that illustrated different ways he structured his own essays: a straight line, a triangle, a spiral. Tian remembers McPhee saying he couldn't tell his students how to write, but he could at least help them find their own unique voice.

If McPhee stoked a romantic view of language in Tian, computer science offered a different perspective: language as statistics. During the pandemic, he'd taken a year off to work at the BBC and intern at Bellingcat, an open source journalism project, where he'd written code to detect Twitter bots. As a junior, he'd taken classes on machine learning and natural language processing. And in the fall of 2022, he began to work on his senior thesis about detecting the differences between AI-generated and human-written text.

When ChatGPT debuted in November, Tian found himself in an unusual position. As the world lost its mind over this new, radically improved chatbot, Tian was already familiar with the underlying GPT-3 technology. And as a journalist who'd worked on rooting out disinformation campaigns, he understood the implications of AI-generated content for the industry.

While home in Toronto for winter break, Tian started playing around with a new program: a ChatGPT detector. He posted up at his favorite café, slamming jasmine tea, and stayed up late coding in his bedroom. His idea was simple. The software would scan a piece of text for two factors: "perplexity," the randomness of word choice; and "burstiness," the complexity or variation of sentences. Human writing tends to rate higher than AI writing on both metrics, which allowed Tian to guess how a piece of text had been created. Tian called the tool GPTZero -the "zero" signaled truth, a return to basics-and he put it online the evening of January 2. He posted a link on Twitter with a brief introduction. The goal was to combat "increasing AI plagiarism," he wrote. "Are high school teachers going to want students using ChatGPT to write their history essays? Likely not." Then he went to bed.

Tian woke up the next morning to hundreds of retweets and replies. There was so much traffic to the host server that many users couldn't access it. "It was totally crazy," Tian says. "My phone was blowing up." A friend congratulated him on winning the internet. Teens on TikTok called him a narc. "A lot of the initial hate was like, 'This kid is a snitch, he doesn't have a life, he never had a girlfriend,'" says Tian with a grin. "Classic stuff." (Tian has a girlfriend.) Within days, he was fielding calls from journalists around the world, eventually appearing on everything from NPR to the South China Morning Post to Anderson Cooper 360. Within a week, his original tweet had reached more than 7 million views.

GPTZero was a new twist in the media narrative surrounding ChatGPT, which had inspired industrywide hand-wringing and a scourge of AI-generated ledes. (Researchers had created a detector for GPT-2 text in 2019, but Tian's was the first to target ChatGPT.) Teachers thanked Tian for his work, grateful they could finally prove their suspicions about fishy student essays. Had humanity found its savior from the robot takeover?

Tian's program was a starting gun of sorts. The race was now on to create the definitive AI detection tool. In a world increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, the thinking went, we'll need to distinguish the machine-made from the human-made. GPTZero represented a promise that it will indeed be possible to tell one from the other, and a conviction that the difference matters. During his media tour, Tian-smiley, earnest, the A student incarnate-elaborated on this reassuring view that no matter how sophisticated generative AI tools become, we will always be able to unmask them. There's something irreducible about human writing, Tian said: "It has an element that can never be put into numbers."

Life on the internet has always been a battle between fakers and detectors of fakes, with both sides profiting off the clash. Early spam filters sifted emails for keywords, blocking messages with phrases like "FREE!" or "be over 21," and they eventually learned to filter out entire styles of writing. Spammers responded by surrounding their pitches with snippets of human-sounding language lifted from old books and mashed together. (This type of message, dubbed "litspam," became a genre unto itself.) As search engines grew more popular, creators looking to boost their pages' rankings resorted to "keyword stuffing"-repeating the same word over and over-to get priority. Search engines countered by down-ranking those sites. After Google introduced its PageRank algorithm, which favored websites with lots of inbound links, spammers created entire ecosystems of mutually supporting pages.

Around the turn of the millennium, the captcha tool arrived to sort humans from bots based on their ability to interpret images of distorted text. Once some bots could handle that, captcha added other detection methods that included parsing images of motorbikes and trains, as well as sensing mouse movement and other user behavior. (In a recent test, an early version of GPT-4 showed that it knew how to hire a person on Taskrabbit to complete a captcha on its behalf.) The fates of entire companies have rested on the issue of spotting fakes: Elon Musk, in an attempt to wriggle out of his deal to buy Twitter, cited a bot detector to boost his argument that Twitter had misrepresented the number of bots on its site.

Generative AI re-upped the ante. While large language models and text-to-image generators have been evolving steadily over the past decade, 2022 saw an explosion of consumer-friendly tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E. Pessimists argue that we could soon drown in a tsunami of synthetic media. "In a few years, the vast majority of the photos, videos, and text we encounter on the internet could be AI-generated," New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose warned last year. The Atlantic imagined a looming " textpocalypse " as we struggle to filter out the generative noise. Political campaigns are leveraging AI tools to create ads, while Amazon is flooded with ChatGPT-written books (many of them about AI). Scrolling through product reviews already feels like the world's most annoying Turing test. The next step seems clear: If you thought Nigerian prince emails were bad, wait until you see Nigerian prince chatbots.

Soon after Tian released GPTZero, a wave of similar products appeared. OpenAI rolled out its own detection tool at the end of January, while Turnitin, the anti-plagiarism giant, unveiled a classifier in April. They all shared a basic methodology, but each model was trained on different data sets. (For example, Turnitin focused on student writing.) As a result, precision varied wildly, from OpenAI's claim of 26 percent accuracy for detecting AI-written text, up to the most optimistic claim from a company called Winston AI at 99.6 percent. To stay ahead of the competition, Tian would have to keep improving GPTZero, come up with its next product, and finish college in the meantime.

Right away, Tian recruited his high school friend Alex Cui as CTO and, over the following weeks, brought on a handful of programmers from Princeton and Canada. Then, in the spring, he onboarded a trio of coders from Uganda, whom he'd met four years earlier while working for a startup that trains engineers in Africa. (A global citizen, Tian was born in Tokyo and lived in Beijing until age 4 before his parents, both Chinese engineers, moved the family to Ontario.) Together the team began working on its next application: a Chrome plug-in that would scan the text of a web page and determine whether it was AI-generated.

Another threat to GPTZero was GPTZero. Almost immediately after it launched, skeptics on social media started posting embarrassing examples of the tool misclassifying texts. Someone pointed out that it flagged portions of the US Constitution as possibly AI-written. Mockery gave way to outrage when stories of students falsely accused of cheating due to GPTZero began to flood Reddit. At one point, a parent of one such student reached out to Soheil Feizi, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. "They were really furious," Feizi said. Last fall, before GPTZero debuted, Feizi and some other Maryland colleagues had begun putting together a research project on the problems with AI detectors, which he'd suspected might not be reliable. Now GPTZero and its imitators got him thinking they could do more harm than good.

Yet another headache for Tian was the number of crafty students finding ways around the detector. One person on Twitter instructed users to insert a zero-width space before every "e" in a ChatGPT-generated text. A TikTok user wrote a program that bypassed detection by replacing certain English letters with their Cyrillic look-alikes. Others started running their AI text through QuillBot, a popular paraphrasing tool. Tian patched these holes, but the workarounds kept coming. It was only a matter of time before someone spun up a rival product-an anti-detector.

In early March, a Stanford University freshman named Joseph Semrai and some friends were driving down the Pacific Coast Highway to LA when they got locked out of their Zipcar in Ventura. They walked to a nearby Starbucks and waited for roadside assistance. But as the wait dragged on for hours, Semrai and a friend wondered how to make up for the lost time. Semrai had an essay due the following week for a required freshman writing class. It was his least favorite type of assignment: a formulaic essay meant to show logical reasoning. "It's a pretty algorithmic process," says Semrai.

ChatGPT was the obvious solution. But at the time, its responses tended to max out at a few paragraphs, so generating a full-length essay would be a multistep process. Semrai wanted to create a tool that could write the paper in one burst. He also knew there was a chance it could be detected by GPTZero. With the encouragement of his friend, Semrai pulled out his laptop and ginned up a script that would write an essay based on a prompt, run the text through GPTZero, then keep tweaking the phrasing until the AI was no longer detectable-essentially using GPTZero against itself.

Semrai introduced his program a few days later at Friends and Family Demo Day, a kind of show-and-tell for Stanford's undergraduate developer community. Standing before a roomful of classmates, he asked the audience for an essay topic-someone suggested "fine dining" in California-and typed it into the prompt box. After a few seconds, the program spat out an eight-paragraph essay, unoriginal but coherent, with works cited. "Not saying I'd ever submit this paper," Semrai said, to chuckles. "But there you go. I dunno, it saves time." He named the tool WorkNinja and put it on the app store two months later. With the help of a promotional campaign featuring the Gen Z influencer David Dobrik and a giveaway of 10 Teslas to users who signed up, it received more than 350,000 downloads in the first week; sign-ups have slowed since then to a few hundred a day, according to Semrai. (Semrai wouldn't say who funded the campaign, only that it was a major Silicon Valley angel investor.)

Semrai's Zoomer mop and calm demeanor belie a simmering intensity. Whereas Tian bounces and bubbles his way through the world, Semrai comes across as focused and deadpan. The 19-year-old speaks in the confident, podcast-ready tone of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sees the world in terms of problems to be solved, ending every other sentence with, "Right?" Listening to him wax on about defensible moats and the "S-curve" of societal growth, it's easy to forget he can't legally drink. But then, occasionally, he'll say something that reveals the wide-eyed undergrad, open to the world and still figuring out his place in it. Like the time he and a friend walked around the Santa Monica pier until 3 am, "talking about what we value." Semrai thinks a lot about how to find balance and happiness. "I think, while I'm young, it probably lies more in exploring the derivative," he says, "chasing the highs and lows."

Growing up in New York and then Florida, his parents-a firefighter father from Yonkers and a homemaker mother from China-gave him a long leash. "I was kinda left during childhood to pursue what genuinely excited me," he said. "The best way to do that was to make stuff on the computer." When Semrai was 6 he created a plug-in to assign permission levels for Minecraft servers, and at 7 he wrote a program that patched Windows 7 so you could run Windows XP on it. "It just makes me genuinely happy to ship things for people," he says.

His family moved from Queens to Palm City when he was 9, and Semrai saw the difference between the public school systems. The basic computer literacy he'd taken for granted in New York schools was scarce in Florida. He started writing programs to help fill gaps in education-a trajectory that allows him to say, at 19, that he's been "working in ed tech my entire life." Freshman year of high school, he created an online learning platform that won startup funding in a local competition. Prior to Covid, he'd created a digital hall pass system that became the basis for contact tracing and was adopted by 40 school districts in the Southeast.

Semrai is fundamentally a techno-optimist. He says he believes that we should speed the development of technology, including artificial general intelligence, because it will ultimately lead us toward a "post-scarcity" society-a worldview sometimes described as "effective accelerationism." (Not to be confused with effective altruism, which holds that we should take actions that maximize "good" outcomes, however defined.) Semrai's case for WorkNinja rests on its own kind of accelerationist logic. AI writing tools are good, in his view, not because they help kids cheat, but because they'll force schools to revamp their curricula. "If you can follow a formula to create an essay, it's probably not a good assignment," he says. He envisions a future in which every student can get the kind of education once reserved for aristocrats, by way of personalized AI tutoring. When he was first learning how to program, Semrai says, he relied largely on YouTube videos and internet forums to answer his questions. "It would have been easier if there was a tutor to guide me," he says. Now that AI tutors are real, why stand in their way?

I recently used WorkNinja to generate a handful of essays, including one about Darwin's theory of evolution. The first version it gave me was clumsy and repetitive, but workable, exploring the theory's implications for biology, genetics, and philosophy. GPTZero flagged it as likely AI-generated.

So I hit WorkNinja's Rephrase button. The text shifted slightly, replacing certain words with synonyms. After three rephrasings, GPTZero finally gave the text its stamp of humanity. (When I tested the same text again a few weeks later, the tool labeled it a mix of human and AI writing.) The problem was, many of the rephrased sentences no longer made sense. For example, the following sentence:

Darwin's theory of evolution is the idea that living species evolve over time due to their interaction with their environment.
had morphed to become:
Darwin's theory of evolution is the thought that living species acquire over clip due to their interaction with their surroundings.
At the very least, any student looking for a shortcut would have to clean up their WorkNinja draft before submitting it. But it points to a real issue: If even this janky work in progress can circumvent detectors, what could a sturdier product accomplish?

In March, Soheil Feizi at the University of Maryland published his findings on the performance of AI detectors. He argued that accuracy problems are inevitable, given the way AI text detectors worked. As you increase the sensitivity of the instrument to catch more AI-generated text, you can't avoid raising the number of false positives to what he considers an unacceptable level. So far, he says, it's impossible to get one without the other. And as the statistical distribution of words in AI-generated text edges closer to that of humans-that is, as it becomes more convincing-he says the detectors will only become less accurate. He also found that paraphrasing baffles AI detectors, rendering their judgments "almost random." "I don't think the future is bright for these detectors," Feizi says.

" Watermarking" doesn't help either, he says. Under this approach, a generative AI tool like ChatGPT proactively adjusts the statistical weights of certain interchangeable "token" words-say, using start instead of begin, or pick instead of choose -in a way that would be imperceptible to the reader but easily spottable by an algorithm. Any text in which those words appear with a given frequency could be marked as having been generated by a particular tool. But Feizi argues that with enough paraphrasing, a watermark "can be washed away."

In the meantime, he says, detectors are hurting students. Say a detection tool has a 1 percent false positive rate-an optimistic assumption. That means in a classroom of 100 students, over the course of 10 take-home essays, there will be on average 10 students falsely accused of cheating. (Feizi says a rate of one in 1,000 would be acceptable.) "It's ridiculous to even think about using such tools to police the use of AI models," he says.

Tian says the point of GPTZero isn't to catch cheaters, but that has inarguably been its main use case so far. (GPTZero's detection results now come with a warning: "These results should not be used to punish students.") As for accuracy, Tian says GPTZero's current level is 96 percent when trained on its most recent data set. Other detectors boast higher figures, but Tian says those claims are a red flag, as it means they're "overfitting" their training data to match the strengths of their tools. "You have to put the AI and human on equal footing," he says.

Surprisingly, AI-generated images, videos, and audio snippets are far easier to detect, at least for now, than synthetic text. Reality Defender, a startup backed by Y Combinator, launched in 2018 with a focus on fake image and video detection and has since branched out to audio and text. Intel released a tool called FakeCatcher, which detects deepfake videos by analyzing facial blood flow patterns visible only to the camera. A company called Pindrop uses voice "biometrics" to detect spoofed audio and to authenticate callers in lieu of security questions.

The siren call of AI says, It doesn't have to be this way. And when you consider the billions of people who sit outside the elite club of writer-sufferers, you start to think: Maybe it shouldn't be this way.

AI-generated text is more difficult to detect because it has relatively few data points to analyze, which means fewer opportunities for AI output to deviate from the human norm. Compare that to Intel's FakeCatcher. Ilke Demir, a research scientist for Intel who has also worked on Pixar films, says it would be extremely difficult to create a data set large and detailed enough to allow deepfakers to simulate blood flow signatures to fool the detector. When I asked whether such a thing could eventually be created, she said her team anticipates future developments in deepfake technology in order to stay ahead of them.

Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender, says his company's detection tools are unevadable in part because they're private. (So far, the company's clients have mainly been governments and large corporations.) With publicly available tools like GPTZero, anyone can run a piece of text through the detector and then tweak it until it passes muster. Reality Defender, by contrast, vets every person and institution that uses the tool, Colman says. They also watch out for suspicious usage, so if a particular account were to run tests on the same image over and over with the goal of bypassing detection, their system would flag it.

Regardless, much like spam hunters, spies, vaccine makers, chess cheaters, weapons designers, and the entire cybersecurity industry, AI detectors across all media will have to constantly adapt to new evasion techniques. Assuming, that is, the difference between human and machine still matters.

The more time I spent talking with Tian and Semrai and their classmate-colleagues, the more I wondered: Do any of these young people actually ... enjoy writing? "Yeah, a lot!" said Tian, beaming even more than usual when I asked him last May on Princeton's campus. "It's like a puzzle." He likes figuring out how words fit together and then arranging the ideas so they flow. "I feel like that's fun to do." He also loves the interview process, as it gives him "a window into people's lives, plus a mirror into how you live your own."

In high school, Tian says, writing felt like a chore. He credits McPhee for stoking his love and expanding his taste. In June, he told me excitedly that he had just picked up a used copy of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life.

Semrai similarly found high school writing assignments boring and mechanistic-more about synthesizing information than making something new. "I'd have preferred open-format assignments that would've sparked creativity," he says. But he put those synthesizing skills to work. Sophomore year, he wrote an 800-page instructional book called Build for Anything, intended "to take someone from knowing nothing to knowing a little bit of almost everything" about web development. (He self-published the book on Amazon in 2022 and sold a few hundred copies.) Semrai said it's the kind of prose ChatGPT now excels at. "I don't think the book falls into the category of meaningful writing," he says.

After almost 20 years of typing words for money, I can say from experience, writing sucks. Ask any professional writer and they'll tell you, it's the worst, and it doesn't get easier with practice. I can attest that the enthusiasm and curiosity required to perpetually scan the world, dig up facts, and wring them for meaning can be hard to sustain. And that's before you factor in the state of the industry: dwindling rates, shrinking page counts, and shortening attention spans (readers' and my own). I keep it up because, for better or worse, it's now who I am. I do it not for pleasure but because it feels meaningful-to me at least.

Some writers romanticize the struggle. McPhee once described lying on a picnic table for two weeks, trying to decide how to start an article. "The piece would ultimately consist of some five thousand sentences, but for those two weeks I couldn't write even one," he wrote. Another time, at age 22, he lashed himself to his writing chair with a bathrobe belt. According to Thomas Mann, "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." "You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-only then-it is handed to you," writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. She offers this after a long comparison of writing to alligator wrestling.

The implication is that the harder the squeeze, the sweeter the juice-that there's virtue in staring down the empty page, taming it, forcing it to give way to prose. This is how the greatest breakthroughs happen, we tell ourselves. The agony is worth it, because that's how ideas are born.

The siren call of AI says, It doesn't have to be this way. And when you consider the billions of people who sit outside the elite club of writer-sufferers, you start to think: Maybe it shouldn't be this way.

May Habib spent her early childhood in Lebanon before moving to Canada, where she learned English as a second language. "I thought it was pretty unfair that so much benefit would accrue to someone really good at reading and writing," she says. In 2020, she founded Writer, one of several hybrid platforms that aims not to replace human writing, but to help people-and, more accurately, brands-collaborate better with AI.

Habib says she believes there's value in the blank page stare-down. It helps you consider and discard ideas and forces you to organize your thoughts. "There are so many benefits to going through the meandering, head-busting, wanna-kill-yourself staring at your cursor," she says. "But that has to be weighed against the speed of milliseconds."

The purpose of Writer isn't to write for you, she says, but rather to make your writing faster, stronger, and more consistent. That could mean suggesting edits to prose and structure, or highlighting what else has been written on the subject and offering counterarguments. The goal, she says, is to help users focus less on sentence-level mechanics and more on the ideas they're trying to communicate. Ideally, this process yields a piece of text that's just as "human" as if the person had written it entirely themselves. "If the detector can flag it as AI writing, then you've used the tools wrong," she says.

The black-and-white notion that writing is either human- or AI-generated is already slipping away, says Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, we're entering an era of what he calls "centaur writing." Sure, asking ChatGPT to spit out an essay about the history of the Mongol Empire produces predictably "AI-ish" results, he says. But "start writing, 'The details in paragraph three aren't quite right-add this information, and make the tone more like The New Yorker,'" he says. "Then it becomes more of a hybrid work and much better-quality writing."

Mollick, who teaches entrepreneurship at Wharton, not only allows his students to use AI tools-he requires it. "Now my syllabus says you have to do at least one impossible thing," he says. If a student can't code, maybe they write a working program. If they've never done design work, they might put together a visual prototype. "Every paper you turn in has to be critiqued by at least four famous entrepreneurs you simulate," he says.

Students still have to master their subject area to get good results, according to Mollick. The goal is to get them thinking critically and creatively: "I don't care what tool they're using to do it, as long as they're using the tools in a sophisticated manner and using their mind."

Mollick acknowledges that ChatGPT isn't as good as the best human writers. But it can give everyone else a leg up. "If you were a bottom-quartile writer, you're in the 60th to 70th percentile now," he says. It also frees certain types of thinkers from the tyranny of the writing process. "We equate writing ability with intelligence, but that's not always true," he says. "In fact, I'd say it's often not true."

On a cloudless day in May, Tian and I strolled across Princeton's campus; big white reunion tents seemed to have landed like spaceships on the manicured lawns. At my request, Tian invited a handful of classmates to join us for lunch at a Szechuan restaurant off campus and talk about AI.

As some schools rushed to ban ChatGPT and tech CEOs signed letters warning of AI-fueled doom, the students were notably relaxed about a machine-assisted future. (Princeton left it up to professors to set their own ground rules.) One had recently used ChatGPT to write the acknowledgments section of her thesis. Others, including Tian, relied on it to fill in chunks of script while coding. Lydia You, a senior and computer science major who plans to work in journalism, had asked ChatGPT to write a poem about losing things in the style of Elizabeth Bishop-an attempt to re-create her famous poem "One Art." ("The art of losing isn't hard to master.") The result was "very close" to the original poem, You said, and she found that the chatbot did an even better job analyzing the original and describing what made it so moving. "We've seen a lot of panic about almost everything in our lives," said You, citing TikTok, Twitter, and the internet itself. "I feel like people of our generation are like, We can figure out for ourselves how to use this."

Sophie Amiton, a senior studying mechanical and aerospace engineering, jumped in: "Also, I think our generation is lazier in a lot of ways," she said, as You nodded in agreement. "I see a lot more people who don't want traditional jobs now, don't want a nine-to-five."

"They're disillusioned," You said. "A lot of jobs are spreadsheets."

"I think that came out of Covid," Amiton continued. "People reevaluated what the purpose of work even is, and if you can use ChatGPT to make your life easier, and therefore have a better quality of life or work-life balance, then why not use the shortcut?"

Liz, a recent Princeton graduate who preferred not to use her surname, sent me a paper she'd written with the help of ChatGPT for a class on global politics. Rather than simply asking it to answer the essay question, she plugged in an outline with detailed bullet points, then had it write the paper based on her notes. After extensive back-and-forth-telling it to rewrite and rearrange, add nuance here and context there-she finally had a paper she was comfortable submitting. She got an A.

I copied and pasted her paper into GPTZero. The verdict: "Your text is likely to be written entirely by a human."

In early May, just a few weeks before Tian and his classmates put on their black graduation gowns, the GPTZero team released the Chrome plug-in they'd been developing and called it Origin. Origin is still rudimentary: You have to select the text of a web page yourself, and its accuracy isn't perfect. But Tian hopes that one day the tool will automatically scan every website you look at, highlighting AI-generated content-from text to images to video-as well as anything "toxic" or factually dubious. He describes Origin as a "windshield" for the information superhighway, deflecting useless or harmful material and allowing us to see the road clearly.

Tian was unflaggingly optimistic about the company; he also just felt fortunate to be graduating into a job he actually wanted. Many of his friends had entered Princeton planning to be entrepreneurs, but belt-tightening in the tech sector had changed their plans.

"We've seen a lot of panic about almost everything in our lives. I feel like people of our generation are like, We can figure out for ourselves how to use this."

As a rising sophomore with three years left to go at Stanford, Semrai approached the summer with a more footloose attitude. On a blistering Thursday afternoon in June, on the rooftop of Pier 17 near Wall Street, Semrai, wearing a green patterned shirt and white Nikes, spoke to me brightly about the future-or at least the next few weeks. His summer was still taking shape. ("I'm rapidly thesis-testing.") But for now he was in New York, crashing with friends while cranking on a couple of AI-driven projects. The previous night, he'd slept in a coworking space in SoHo. Now he was standing in the shaded VIP section of an event put on by Techstars New York City, a startup accelerator, while hundreds of sweat-stained attendees milled around in the glare.

Nearby, New York City mayor Eric Adams stood onstage wearing aviators and a full suit, praising the glories of coding. "I'm a techie," Adams said, before encouraging guests to seek out diverse collaborators and use "source code" to fix societal problems like cancer and gun violence. He then urged the singles in the crowd to find themselves a "shorty or a boo and hook up with them."

Semrai was taking a see-what-sticks approach to building. In addition to WorkNinja, he was developing a platform for chatbots based on real celebrities and trained on reams of their data, with which fans could then interact. He was also prototyping a bracelet that would record everything we say and do-Semrai calls it a "perfect memory"-and offer real-time tips to facilitate conversations. (A group of classmates at Stanford recently created a related product called RizzGPT, an eyepiece that helps its wearer flirt.)

He expected the summer to give rise to an explosion of AI apps, as young coders mix and cross-pollinate. (Eric Adams would approve.) "I think a constellation of startups will be formed, and five years from now we'll be able to draw lines between people-the start of an ecosystem," he said.

By summer, Tian had a team of 12 employees and had raised $3.5 million from a handful of VCs, including Jack Altman (brother of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman) and Emad Mostaque of Stability AI. But over the course of our conversations, I noticed that his framing of GPTZero/Origin was shifting slightly. Now, he said, AI-detection would be only one part of the humanity-proving toolkit. Just as important would be an emphasis on provenance, or "content credentials." The idea is to attach a cryptographic tag to a piece of content that verifies it was created by a human, as determined by its process of creation-a sort of captcha for digital files. Adobe Photoshop already attaches a tag to photos that harness its new AI generation tool, Firefly. Anyone looking at an image can right-click it and see who made it, where, and how. Tian says he wants to do the same thing for text and that he has been talking to the Content Authenticity Initiative-a consortium dedicated to creating a provenance standard across media-as well as Microsoft about working together.

One could interpret his emphasis on provenance as a tacit acknowledgment that detection alone won't cut it. (OpenAI shut down its text classifier in July "due to its low rate of accuracy.") It also previews a possible paradigm shift in how we relate to digital media. The whole endeavor of detection suggests that humans leave an unmistakable signature in a piece of text-something perceptible-much the way that a lie detector presumes dishonesty leaves an objective trace. Provenance relies on something more like a "Made in America" label. If it weren't for the label, we wouldn't know the difference. It's a subtle but meaningful distinction: Human writing may not be better, or more creative, or even more original. But it will be human, which will matter to other humans.

In June, Tian's team took another step in the direction of practicality. He told me they were building a new writing platform called HumanPrint, which would help users improve their AI-written text and enable them to share "proof of authenticity." Not by generating text, though. Rather, it would use GPTZero's technology to highlight sections of text that were insufficiently human and prompt the user to rewrite it in their own words-a sort of inversion of the current AI writing assistants. "So teachers can specify, OK, maybe more than 50 percent of the essay should still be written in your own words," he said. When I asked whether this was a pivot for the company, Tian argued that it was "a natural extension of detection." "It was always a vision of being the gold standard of responsible AI usage," Tian said, "and that's still there." Still, the implication is clear: There's no stopping AI writing; the only option is to work with it.

When Tian was first testing out GPTZero, he scanned a 2015 New Yorker essay by McPhee called " Frame of Reference." In it, McPhee riffs on the joys and risks of making cultural references in one's writing. "Mention Beyoncé and everyone knows who she is. Mention Veronica Lake and you might as well be in the Quetico-Superior," he writes coyly. He runs down a list of adjectives he's used to describe mustaches, including "sincere," "no-nonsense," "gyroscopic," "guileless," "analgesic," "soothing," "odobene," and "tetragrammatonic." He concludes with an anecdote about battling an editor to include a reference to an obscure British term used by upper-class tourists to India during the Raj. (He won.) It's classic McPhee: scalpel-precise, big-hearted if a tad self-satisfied, gleefully digressive, indulgent until he gets to the just-right point. GPTZero determined that the article was "the most human on all metrics," Tian said. I called McPhee to ask what he thought it meant that his writing was especially human.

"I really have no very good idea," McPhee told me over the phone. "But if I were guessing, it's that my pieces get at the science, or the agriculture, or the aviation, or whatever the topic is, through people. There's always a central figure I learn from." Indeed, McPhee writes through the eyes of experts. The reader comes away with not just some esoteric knowledge about geology or particle physics or oranges, but a sense of the person studying the subject, as well as McPhee studying the person.

McPhee, now 92 , said he's unconcerned about AI replacing human writers. "I'm extremely skeptical and not the least bit worried about it," he said. "I don't think there's a Mark Twain of artificial intelligence."

But, I asked, what if years from now, someone designs a McPheeBot3000 trained on McPhee's writing, and then asks it to produce a book on a fresh topic? It might not be able to ford streams with environmental activists or go fly-fishing with ichthyologists, but couldn't it capture McPhee's voice and style and worldview? Tian argued that machines can only imitate, while McPhee never repeats himself: "What's unique about McPhee is he comes up with things McPhee a day ago wouldn't have."

I asked McPhee about the hypothetical McPheeBot3000. (Or, if Semrai has his way, not-so-hypothetical.) "If this thing ever happens, in a future where I'm no longer here," he said, "I hope my daughters show up with a lawyer."

This article appears in the October 2023 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

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The AI Detection Arms Race Is On-and College Students Are Building the Weapons

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And college students are developing the weapons, quickly building tools that identify AI-generated text-and tools to evade detection.

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A BBC Future article, looking at the way Microsoft Word has influenced the way we use language on the 40th anniversary of its launch. 

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A BBC Future article, looking at the way Microsoft Word has influenced the way we use language on the 40th anniversary of its launch. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Focus on the following points made about the impact of Microsoft Word on language: 1. Helping to establish English as the global language of business; 2. Undermining writing diversity; 3. Making it harder to learn a language; 4. Marginalizing regional nuance; 5. increasing Americanisation of English; 6. Emphasizing clarity at the cost of stylistic or poetic flair; 7. Empowering people with dyslexia and dysgraphia to easily type with their voice; 8. Promoting greater essay-writing prowess; 9. Reducing the cognitive load of writing; Outline each one. To wrap up: Does technology such as Microsoft Word empower or restrict us when it comes to our ability to express ideas and knowledge?

KEY TERMS  Global language, Diversity, Nuance, Clarity vs. Flair, Empowering, Cognitive load

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For 40 years there's been an invisible hand guiding the way many of us write, work, and communicate. Its influence has been pervasive, yet its impact has been subtle to the extent that you've likely never noticed. That invisible hand is Microsoft Word.

At its launch in October 1983, this influential software was known as Multi-Tool Word, and not long after, changed to Microsoft Word for Dos. Back then, there were more than 300 word processing programs across multiple platforms. People of a certain age will remember WordStar or WordPerfect, yet in a little over a decade Word eclipsed these rivals. By 1994, Microsoft says it had claimed a 90% share of the word-processing market, making it one of the most successful, well-known software products in history.

While establishing how many people use Word is tricky, recent filings show there are 1.4 billion Windows devices in use each month, and more than 90% of the Fortune 500 use the software. If only a third of those people used Word, it would still be more than the population of North America.

This context is important because it helps to explain why, and how, Word has had such influence on our lives.

Ironically, given its ubiquity, Word has rarely been a pioneer when it comes to features. As mentioned, it was far from the first word processor. It's often credited with introducing grammar tools, despite the fact these were developed decades earlier. And the idea behind "track changes" - where you can see edits to a document - wasn't a Microsoft invention.

Yet Word's superpower was using smart, simple design choices to make such features accessible to a global audience, not just techies. Its "What You See is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) design philosophy is now commonplace in software and on the internet. Word introduced line breaks, along with bold and italic fonts on screen. It revolutionised typeset-quality printing, as well as the use of templates. And it was in these templates that Word's early impact on communication emerged.

Before word processors on personal computers sprang onto the scene, entire teams of typists were a common presence in offices (Credit: Getty Images)

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"Word templates led people to use the same formatting in communications, and eventually, this has become instantiated as a norm," says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where she studies human-computer interaction. If you work in finance, there's a specific way reports are expected to be laid out. Letters follow a set pattern, memos are largely formatted in the same way. "Users know where to find information in these standardised documents; they don't need to spend time trying to find what they need."

If you take this idea of professional conformity a step further, Word has also been significant in helping establish English as the global language of business. While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word's ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance.

"Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation."

Word's spell-checker and grammar features have become subtle arbiters of language, too. Although seemingly trivial, these tools "promote a sense of consistency and correctness", says Wolf, and this uniformity comes at the cost of writing diversity. "Writers, when prompted by the software's automated norms, might unintentionally forsake their unique voices and expressions."

This becomes even more invasive when you look at the role and impact of autocorrect and predictive text. Today, when typing on Word, the software can automatically correct your spelling, and make suggestions for what to write next. These suggestions aren't (yet) based on your personal writing style and tone - they're rule-based. The suggestions you see will be the same as millions of others. Again, this may feel innocuous but it's another example of how Word standardises language by loosely guiding everyone down the same path.

"Without auto-completion, a person might check a thesaurus when searching for a word," says Mark. "With auto-completion, it can lead to more rote use of language and may not encourage original writing."

Clippy: the assistant that users loved to hate

Wolf adds that by promoting uniformity in written communication, grammar and spelling features in word processors such as Word "enforce established language norms".

"Word may not recognise vocabulary or grammar conventions that are part of local dialects, and will try to correct them," she says. This can effectively marginalise regional nuance, she adds. On an individual scale, these impacts may seem minimal but they become magnified when repeated on a software that has millions, if not billions of users.

Such tools play a broader role in the evolution of language more generally, too. Because Word defaults to US-English, so too do its spellchecking features. Write a word ending in "-ise" and it will suggest changing it to "-ize", unless you've taken the time to change the default settings.

Of course, it is worth remembering that Word isn't just available in English. It supports around 100 languages, including European Spanish and Latin-American Spanish.

But when the differences between dialects are subtle, the suggestions made by the software become less noticeable and more persuasive.

Take the word "trialing/trialling" for instance. "Trialing" is considered the US-English spelling. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) doesn't even recognise "trialing" as a word, instead, opting for the use of the double-L common in British-English. Despite such a clear distinction by the OED, the American spelling regularly makes its way into British-English publications and style guides. There's an argument that this is because of increasingly global audiences and would again be an overstatement to lay the increasing Americanisation of English entirely at the feet of a piece of word processing software, but as part of influence of American culture has had on language more generally, it may have played a role.

Similarly, the efficiency brought about by standardisation can shape how we write, not just what we write. When clarity is put ahead of stylistic or poetic flair - Word's grammar checker has a specific "clarity" refinement option - it can have implications for how we value forms of creativity.

Based on a quick, albeit arbitrary, experiment, if Harper Lee had used Word to write To Kill a Mockingbird, the software's clarity refinement would have suggested changing: "I never loved to read. One does not love breathing," to "I never loved to read. Breathing is necessary." Does this remove the poetry and depth of the original? The example is somewhat facetious, but it illustrates the effects using such tools can have. In an age where clarity and readability are prioritised by search engines, and in which the glut of online content is said to be shrinking our attention span, such seemingly subtle shifts could potentially have far-reaching impact on creative writing.

Clippy the paperclip was intended to be a helpful assistant for users, but was a divisive tool that was eventually retired (Credit: Getty Images)

Yet there's no denying Word has improved accessibility and diversity in myriad other ways. By bringing word processing into people's homes, it has empowering more people to write, create and contribute. This increases diversity of voice, rather than impeding it. In 2018, Microsoft added dictation features into Word to empower people with dyslexia and dysgraphia to easily type with their voice. It is one of a number of accessibility features in the software.

In the early days of its adoption, word processing was even linked with promoting greater, not worse, essay-writing prowess. In a 1992 study, essays written on a word processor were rated "significantly higher" than those written by hand. Word processing allowed students to make "microstructural rather than macrostructural" changes to their work, and by being able to continuously revise their writing, the end result was seemingly improved.

According to Wolf, word processing has taken some of the cognitive load out of writing, which allows more space for creativity. For example, while spell-check may not promote spelling retention, "when used mindfully, spell-checkers serve as valuable aids by enhancing language proficiency and communication", says Wolf. "They enable users to focus on word choice and strategy of communication rather than spending time and energy pinning down the correct spelling."

This has the potential to become even more impactful as artificial intelligence (AI) is integrated into word processing. But opinion is divided. On one hand, by removing technical aspects of spelling, sentence construction and so on, AI may free people up to be even more creative. Its ability to learn and understand a person's unique writing style could lead to an era of highly personal, unencumbered imagination. "[Generative AI] cannot be entirely relied upon to produce accurate prose every time, but it can reduce the process of creating text to editing," according to Ed Challis, head of AI strategy at UiPath, which develops robotic automation software. He believes this will "lead to innovations across all areas of content creation and communication".

That said, a potential over-reliance on automation could discourage users from actively learning and improving their linguistic and written skills, believes Wolf. If large language models are being trained on decades of increasingly homogenised content, there's the risk this will make things worse, not better.

Whatever happens, the next 40 years are likely to continue the push-pull effect Word has had on language and society over the previous 40.

"Microsoft Word's impact on linguistic evolution is a complex interplay between standardisation and diversification," says Wolf. "It can homogenise language but also enables expression in various languages. The ultimate impact depends on how individuals and communities choose to use this powerful tool in the evolving landscape of global communication."

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The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

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As Microsoft Word turns 40, we look at the role the software has played in four decades of language and communication evolution.

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A Guardian article, looking at how mental health leave is being offered to highly pressurised Taiwanese students.

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A Guardian article, looking at how mental health leave is being offered to highly pressurised Taiwanese students.

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Mental health leave offered to Taiwanese students as youth suicides double

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Scheme allows three days off each term as high school stress and depression rates soar

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A Big Think article, which looks at why Carl Sagan believed children lose their sense of wonder about the world. 

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A Big Think article, which looks at why Carl Sagan believed children lose their sense of wonder about the world. 

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Celebrated science communicator Carl Sagan had a way of speaking and writing that instilled listeners and readers with wonder and nurtured the human drive to explore. It was partially for this reason that the Cornell University scientist and narrator of the timeless PBS documentary was often invited into schools to guest-teach kids of all ages.

In his book, The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan shared how regularly impressed he was with kindergartners and first-graders. "Many of these children are natural-born scientists - although heavy on the wonder side and light on the skepticism. They're curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them."

We lose our wonder

But at the same time, Sagan noted a disconcerting transformation that consistently occurs by the time kids grow to become seniors in high school:
"They memorize 'facts.' By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They've lost much of the wonder and gained very little skepticism. They're worried about asking 'dumb' questions; they're willing to accept inadequate answers..."
Sagan speculated on why this invariably happens. "I'd guess that it's partially peer pressure not to excel; partly that society teaches short-term gratification; partly the impression that science or mathematics won't buy you a sports car; partly that so little is expected of students..." he wrote.

Are adults to blame?

But, according to Sagan, those myriad factors all pale in comparison to a more pernicious reason: the indifference of adults when confronted with a young child's effervescent wonder.

"Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else... Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys the grown-ups. A few more experiences like it, and another child has been lost to science," Sagan wrote.

What would be a better way to handle kids' frequent bursts of inquisitiveness? The obvious response, Sagan said, is simply to try to answer their queries. "Even an incomplete attempt constitutes a reassurance and encouragement," he noted.

If you truly have no idea where to begin when a child forces you to grapple with why the grass is green or how the Earth formed, you can look it up on your phone and translate the facts as best you can. Better yet, you could voyage to the local library or, if possible, run an experiment that addresses their query. And if their question doesn't yet have a satisfactory answer? Sagan suggested a reply for this scenario as well.

"Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first to find out."

Perhaps one essential way that humanity advances is through turnover. As generations of people pass, others grow to take their place, bringing novel questions, fresh ideas, vibrant energy, and often a burning drive to change the world for the better. In this model, there may be nothing more precious than an adolescent filled with wonder. Affirming kids' fundamental urge to explore is fertilizer for their brains.

"Bright, curious children are a national and world resource," Sagan wrote. "They need to be cared for, cherished, and encouraged."

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Why kids lose their sense of wonder, according to Carl Sagan

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Kids are natural scientists, Carl Sagan wrote, but as they grow, they often lose their sense of curiosity. Sagan blamed adults.

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A Conversation article, exploring the dangers of reading too much into IQ tests, and how they fail to measure crucial cognitive skills.

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A Conversation article, exploring the dangers of reading too much into IQ tests, and how they fail to measure crucial cognitive skills.

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Many people object to intelligence tests. Some say IQ test scores are too often abused. They says it's unfair that when children "fail" these tests it can mean they receive a worse secondary education than their more successful peers - sentencing them to a lifetime of disadvantage.

Some object to IQ tests for quite personal reasons and remember how stressed they were by sitting a test. Many doubt their result was a fair reflection of their future potential. But how useful are IQ tests really - and what skills and qualities do they miss?

More than 30 years ago, I discovered a half-forgotten, unique archive of more than 89,000 IQ-type tests from 1932. This comprised a near-complete national sample of Scottish children born in 1921 who - at the time - would have been about 76 years old.

My aim was simple: to find local people to match with the archive and compare their current mental ability with their test result from 1932. A picture quickly emerged linking lower IQ scores with earlier than expected age at death and earlier onset dementia.

The second world war yielded some strong unexpected anomalies. Young men with higher childhood IQ scores more often died on active service. Girls with higher scores more often moved away from the area.

I cycled around Aberdeen to learn more about its social history, becoming familiar with the primary schools where the children had sat their tests in 1932. Average IQ scores often differed substantially between schools. Those pupils attending schools in overcrowded districts tended to perform less well on the test.

Our later research showed that people with higher IQ were engaging in more intellectually stimulating activities, such as reading complex novels or learning musical instruments. But we can't know whether having a high IQ leads people to seek out such activities or whether intellectually curious people develop higher IQ because they engage in cognitively complex tasks throughout life.

And that's an important question. People from poorer backgrounds, such as the disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the city of Aberdeen, may not have the opportunity to pursue intellectual interests due to a lack of time and resources.

To better inform my work, I sought out local residents with long experience of teaching in Aberdeen. Their views were echoed by current workers in public health and psychology.

Teachers warned me not to forget that IQ tests have been used over the years to advance " scientific racism" and that they feared that before too long, right-wing advocates of IQ testing would want to use these rediscovered Scottish data to search for the genetic basis of intelligence. Alarmed and now forewarned, I looked back at the reasons for undertaking the 1932 survey of the mental ability of Scottish schoolchildren.

The survey was funded by the Eugenics Society (eugenics is the science of improving the human race through the selection of "good" hereditary traits) with some help from the Rockefeller Foundation. Their shared priority was to show a link between large family size and below average mental ability.

At the time, this negative relationship between a mothers' IQ and having children was easy to show. But post-1945 educational reforms, which led to more girls completing higher education, produced much more complex relationships between maternal IQ, educational achievements, age at first childbirth and lifetime fertility.

This fed into contemporary public concerns that the average mental ability of the general population was lowered by the loss of so many young men of presumed above average ability during the first world war war. Newspapers argued that schoolboys would need to be assessed and selected to better educate those most likely to benefit.

This only goes to show that while IQ tests can tell us something about academic success or dementia risk, they miss a lot of a nuance. There's no denying they have long been used for murky reasons - often as an excuse to direct less funding to certain types of school, thereby creating a two-tier system.

The majority of children, those who do not take or pass IQ-style entrance exams to private or grammar schools, will have many qualities not measured on an IQ test. They may also just be late developers.

What IQ tests don't measure

So what do IQ tests miss? Research suggests that IQ scores rose by about 3 points per decade over much of the 20th century, but may have dropped over the past 30 years or so.

Some experts argue this reflects changes in the school curriculum or maybe just the complexity of modern life. The acquisition of "content knowledge" (reading and memorising) once formed a cornerstone of public examinations and is related to IQ test performance.

We know for example that working memory is related to IQ test performance. But research has since uncovered that self-discipline is actually better predictor of exam results than IQ.

Nowadays, children in the west are taught collective scientific problem-solving, combined with interpersonal skills and teamwork, which requires less memorisation (rote learning). This may actually make students less likely to score highly on IQ tests, even though these methods are helping humanity as a whole get smarter. Knowledge keeps growing, often as a result of giant research collaborations.

This type of "procedural learning" leads to mature self-awareness, emotional stability, recognition of the thoughts and feelings of others and an understanding of an individual's impact on the performance of a group. Critically, a lack of these skills can hinder rational thinking. Research shows that when we ignore or fail to understand our feelings, we are more easily manipulated by them.

High IQ doesn't necessarily protect against bias or error either. In fact, research shows that people with high IQ can be particularly vulnerable to mistakes such as spotting patterns even when there aren't any, or they are irrelevant.

This may lead to confirmation bias and difficulty giving up on an idea, solution or project even when it is no longer working. This can also get in the way of rational reasoning. But such weaknesses are missed by IQ testing.

Many great leaps in human ingenuity were driven by creativity, collaboration, competition, intuition or curiosity rather than just individual IQ. Take Albert Einstein, who is often hailed as a genius.

He never took an IQ test, but people are constantly speculating about his IQ. Yet he often credited curiosity and intuition as the core driving forces of scientific success - and these are not qualities measured by an IQ test.

The ethos of a modern school is rightly not driven by a preference to educate only those children who on selection meet a minimum standard on a mental test. Schools acknowledge that educational outcomes are not determined solely by any innate ability but are equally affected by all prior experiences that affect emotional competences, motivation, intellectual curiosity, insightfulness and intuitive reasoning.

When local participants in the 1932 survey were interviewed in late life, they spoke warmly of their schooldays - particularly about friendships. They rarely mentioned their education though. The learning of content knowledge, with threats of physical punishments, simply weren't well regarded. Some remembered sitting the IQ test in 1932 and were pleased most schools no longer test children that way.

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IQ tests: the danger of reading too much into them - and the crucial cognitive skills they don't measure

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The majority of children who do not take or pass IQ-style entrance exams to private- or grammar schools, will have many qualities not measured on an IQ test. They may also just be late developers.

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A Conversation article, exploring how Scandiavian schools approach the 'problem' of the Snow White story.

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A Conversation article, exploring how Scandiavian schools approach the 'problem' of the Snow White story.

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In Stockholm's Nicolaigarden pre-school, the teachers do not read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the students. Rather, its library holds children's books that show different types of heroes and a diversity of family models (including those with single parents, adoptive children, and same-sex parents).

Titles include One More Giraffe, about two giraffes caring for an abandoned crocodile egg, and Kivi and Monsterdog, whose protagonist, Kivi, is a child of unspecified gender. The idea is to present a more diverse and realistic image of the world kids live in and to avoid representations that reproduce gender stereotypes.

They present a stark contrast to classics of children's literature, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which has recently come under scrutiny for the way it portrays women and, to a lesser extent, men. The heroine is naïve (she is tricked by her stepmother twice) and lacking personality (she has to be told what to do and not to do by the dwarfs), while the evil stepmother is obsessed with beauty.

Prince Charming, sweeping in at the last minute to save his future wife, is only attracted to her physical appearance. This is clear because she is thought to be dead when he first sees her.

At Nicolaigarden, teachers don't just avoid tales such as that of Snow White. The pre-school is one of five that are rethinking their entire pedagogical approach to ensure equality between genders. Egalia, perhaps the best known of the group, has had numerous documentaries made about it in recent years.

Gender-neutral pedagogy is the latest trend in trying to remove gender bias in education, along with other initiatives such as single-sex schooling. And the efforts of Scandinavian countries have lessons for everyone when it comes to gender equality in education.

The Scandinavian model

Sweden consistently ranks as one of the world's most gender-egalitarian countries in the world, as do its Scandinavian neighbours. According to the World Economic Forum's 2016 Global Gender Gap Report, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden have had the most success at closing the gender gap. That's the "gap" prohibiting full equality between men and women in education, health, the economy and politics.

Although some have questioned their inclusivity, Scandinavian countries' success in working towards gender equality has been attributed to the efficiency of policies tackling the issue.

In Sweden, for example, the 1998 amendments to the Education Act called for schools to adopt "gender-aware education" guidelines. These suggested that it was the schools' responsibility to provide children with equal opportunities regardless of gender, to work against sex-based discrimination and to "counteract traditional gender patterns".

To implement the guidelines, Nicolaigarden teachers filmed their interactions with their six-year-old pupils, and realised that they acted differently with boys and with girls.

Come recess, they let the boys run into the playground, while asking girls to wait patiently for help zipping their coats. They spent more time comforting girls who had hurt themselves, while quickly exhorting boys to "go back and play". The results were a wake-up call for teachers, who considered themselves proponents of gender equality.

Under director Lotta Rajalin, Nicolaigarden school staff developed a gender-neutral pedagogy with the goal of insuring no child is limited by gender expectations.

All children are given equal access to a variety of games, toys and costumes, in the same play space. Library books present strong male and female protagonists in similar proportions. Hiring practices encouraging male applicants have led Nicolaigarden to have up to 30% male caretakers, the highest rate for preschools in the country.

Schools also aim to use gender-neutral language, to avoid gendering whenever it is not necessary. The pronoun hen - a genderless alternative to " hon" (she) and " han " (he) - is one of many ways to refer to children, along with the word friends, or calling them by their first names. Other preschools in Stockholm have also adopted these inclusive guidelines.

The Scandinavian model of gender equality in schools is not limited to gender-neutrality initiatives such as the ones developed at Nicolaigarden or Egalia, nor to young children.

Gender constructs

The Macho Factory program ( Machofabriken) provides schools and associations with training aimed at 13- to 25-year-olds. Its objective is to help them question prevailing gender norms and to break the association between masculinity and violence.

The program is based on 17 short films providing participants and educators with a basis for discussing the downsides of hegemonic masculinity.

The short film På golvet (On the floor) is presented first in the training session. The boxes in the film represent society's expectations of how men should behave.

Like the adolescent in the short film, teenagers tend to adopt gender standards without questioning them, boxing themselves in with conceptions of masculinity or femininity they haven't necessarily chosen. By highlighting the social construction of masculinity, Machofabriken gives teenagers the tools to question how limiting dominant gender norms can be.

Teachers' gendered expectations

The models put forth by schools such as Nicolaigarden and Egalia, or in programs such as the Macho Factory, underscore the very real problems documented by studies on the different school experiences of girls and boys.

Decades of research based on classroom observations indicate that teachers interact differently with boys and girls, though they're convinced they give them equal treatment. They call on boys more often, involving them with new learning materials and giving them extensive feedback. They turn to girls when it comes to social topics or support learning, having them repeat what has been previously discussed. Even nonverbal teacher behaviours, such as smiles, have been shown to favour boys over girls.

Teachers are not explicitly trained on gender socialisation, and it shows. Such gender biases penalise all pupils. According to a 2013 study, teachers' gendered assessment of their students worked both in favour and against boys.

Researchers found that boys who held a negative attitude toward learning were downgraded compared to girls who had performed similarly. Boys who performed well and showed a positive attitude toward schooling, however, received better grades than girls in the same boat did.

Teachers' gender biases also do girls a disservice. If teachers consistently expect girls to be good, they may not pay attention to those with behavioural problems, or act more harshly toward them.

"Our kids are not neutral"

Still, initiatives to create more gender-neutral environments for kids often receive ferocious criticism. In 2015, for instance, the US-based chain Target decided to remove gender divisions from their toy sections, opting instead for classification by type of toy (such as construction or costume). Evangelical Christian Reverend Franklin Graham responded by saying, "Our kids are not neutral, they are boys and girls as God has created them." He asked his followers to boycott the stores.

In France, Système U stores launched a Christmas publicity campaign called Noël sans préjugés (Gender Free Christmas) in 2015. It presents children explaining on camera how they know if a toy is intended for boys or for boys.

This ad, televised nationally, put the chain at the centre of a Twitter storm in December 2015, with hashtags #NoëlSansSystèmeU (Christmas without Système U) and #BoycottSuperU proliferating.

Detractors against gender-neutral initiatives tend to say things like a child is either a boy or a girl, and this difference should necessarily come with distinct preferences.

Between the lines, one can discern a certain apprehension that these initiatives might encourage homosexuality, especially in young boys. "A little boy who plays doll and wears makeup isn't shocking to you? Well it is to me! Wake up, for Pete's sake" read one Tweet after the 2015 Système U campaign.

Other comments suggest such initiatives cause damaging gender confusion. This is clear from these tweets about Egalia's work: "Pathetic, but mostly sad. So a child is no longer a he or a she, but a this?" and "We are talking about experimenting on an entire generation of kids. I can't help but think we will raise a lot of confused individuals".

Such comments fail to acknowledge that these initiatives no more impose a model than does regular store signage indicating that one set of toys is appropriate for girls and another for boys. They are no more confusing than someone who's expected to act a certain way that just doesn't feel right.

Part of the success of the so-called Scandinavian approach to gender equality might lie in its willingness to question and uncover everyone's role in imposing gender expectations on others.

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The problem with Snow White, and what Scandinavia can teach us about it

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Scandinavia's innovative education models present a more diverse and realistic image of the world we live in, and steer clear of gender stereotypes.

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A Big Think article, exploring how a school which sets no homework achieves a 98% college acceptance rate. 

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A Big Think article, exploring how a school which sets no homework achieves a 98% college acceptance rate. 

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How's that saying go again... too many cooks?

That's what Diane Tavenner, co-founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, discovered was happening in her own kitchen.

Tavenner and her husband initially had a great idea: have their teenage son, Rett, cook one of the family's meals per week. This would give them a night off and help Rett gain a pretty important life skill.

But, being pretty good cooks themselves, they soon found themselves not so much guiding Rett through the cooking process as much as doing things for him.

"We forgot what it was to be a novice," Tavenner says, "and so, he would ask a simple question, and next thing you know, one of us is in the kitchen doing it for him. And he's sort of standing back and on the side, and we realize we just took over, we weren't actually supporting. We were just doing it for him."

Pulling back, they gave Rett tips, but let him take charge.

"I had to take the initiative," Rett says.

Sure, there were burnt dishes and some undercooked dishes, but there was also the chance to learn how to learn; a chance to improve by building off his mistakes.

As the weeks progressed, Rett saw his skills develop. He returned to recipes he cooked in the past, and saw how his techniques had gotten better- this family chore had turned into a real-world, edible aptitude test.

Tavenner, a former teacher, saw this "spoon-fed" approach to learning as being a problem not just in her family kitchen, but in the American educational system.

So, she created Summit Public Schools, a charter school system with a new approach to education: students have numerous opportunities to improve their grade.

What they don't have? Assigned homework.

A new recipe

It begins with the will to start something new.

"If we want to truly prepare our kids to have a chance to live their best life, we need to radically rethink the education we grew up with, and the message it's sending," Tavenner says.

To keep it in the kitchen, think of the traditional public education system as handing students a recipe and the ingredients.

The message is: here's what you need to know and if you're successful, you'll get an "A" on your first test.

But in the real world, things aren't so straight forward - so, Summit takes a different approach.

Students "have the ingredients, but we must learn how to make the recipe," Rett, who was also a student at Summit, says.

"People can help you along the way with learning the recipes, but ultimately you must take center stage. That is what self-directed learning is."

At Summit, students are given the opportunity to change a grade over time if they show continuous improvement.

By allowing students to continue working on subjects to improve their grades, Summit builds in the chance to "fail forward" - to learn from your mistakes. (Like, say, making sure to grease a pan the next time you cook.)

Each student is mentored weekly by an assigned teacher. The mentors stay with students throughout their academic career, providing continued support and offering parents a constant point of contact. According to Tavenner, research has found that mentoring improves a student's sense of belonging and success beyond grade school.

Those mentors help kids actively engage in their hands-on, project-based work. Through these projects, students may design a house to put principles of geometry to work, grow their own plants, or build a model rocket.

"Project-based learning is real world learning," Tavenner says. "Authentic learning. It's the type of learning where kids are getting really hands-on. They're asking big questions."

In addition to its regular curriculum, Summit offers an eight week guided learning program where the students choose the field they're interested in and get to ask the big questions they want to ask - a freedom not always found in the current public education system.

The foundation of all of this is giving students agency and autonomy in their educational journey.

"When you give kids responsibility, they become invested because they actually know that what they are doing means something and that it's dependable and accountable and all of that leads to growth," Rett says.

Finding the ingredients

While attending Summit, Rett felt he had space to learn - the ability, and responsibility, to shape his learning in ways that best fit him.

Learning how to learn was one of the central aspects of my learning environment.

That environment allowed him to explore one of his passions: history. In one class, Rett and his classmates were split into eight groups representing different countries on the eve of World War I. Each country had its needs, goals, and certain rules to follow, but the students had the freedom to interact among themselves.

Pushing and pulling against each other made the events come alive: it stopped being just events and dates on a textbook page.

"I think I remember the causes and effects of World War I... far better than I would have if I were in a traditional environment," he says.

Summit's ten West Coast campuses have drawn plaudits from the tech industry, and earned her a seat on the board of trustees at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The public charter schools are free to attend, with enrollments on a rolling basis.

Summit's approach to education may not work for every student - and Tavenner says that's ok. She says asking whether an approach to learning can be applied across the board to all students isn't the right question to be asking.

"The question we should be asking ourselves is, 'does what work? For whom? Under what circumstances?'" Tavenner says.

"And the power of those three questions is actually asking about each individual student."
This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink.

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The school with no homework and a 98% college acceptance rate

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How's that saying go again... too many cooks? That's what Diane Tavenner, co-founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, discovered was happening in her own kitchen. Tavenner and her husband initially had a great idea: have their teenage son, Rett, cook one of the family's meals per week.

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A Conversation article, investigating how increasing intolerance is threatening free inquiry and open debate in India’s universities.

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A Conversation article, investigating how increasing intolerance is threatening free inquiry and open debate in India’s universities.

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'Your nationalism is not my democracy' read the banners of a protest in Delhi against intimidation on campuses. February 28, 2017. Cathal McNaughton/Reuters

Higher education in India is going through a critical phase. The country has witnessed tremendous growth in the sector since independence, and now has 750 universities, 35,000 colleges and 30 million of students. But none of its best institutions have managed to secure a place in the list of the world's top 200 universities.

This is particularly worrying as some of India's leading institutions are now facing drastic cuts in employment and resources. The prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), for instance, has just announced an 83% cut in its research funds and a reduction in the number of students accepted for doctoral and masters degrees for the academic year 2017-2018.

And on March 25, the Tata Institute for Social Science, another centre of research excellence, issued termination letters to 25 members of its faculty.

Both moves have come under scrutiny, leading, in the case of JNU, to a massive strike by students.

These are dark times for India's higher education system. Not only because of the poor showing of universities, but especially because of the shrinking space for genuine intellectual freedom on the nation's campuses.

Universities under attack

In fact, the very idea of what universities are meant to be is under severe attack in India. For the past couple of years, universities in the country have been the theatre of various upheavals.

In 2016, protests erupted in JNU after an event organised by students turned into a political controversy over the Kashmir conflict and led to a countrywide debate on nationalism.

In February 2017, Hyderabad University students, who had taken part in a national solidarity movement in 2016 when Rohith Vemula, a young Phd candidate and a liberal student activist committed suicide over caste discrimination, were barred from taking exams.

The same month, Ramjas College, which is part of Delhi University, witnessed violent protests by the nationalist student organisation Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) against a seminar. The group is an offshoot of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The event, which was called off after the protest, was actually titled Cultures of Protest. It had triggered the ire of the conservative organisation because the list of speakers included two JNU students, Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid, who were deemed to be part of the clash that shook JNU in 2016.

Disruption of free speech

The incidents at Ramjas College and JNU are not one-off episodes. Rather, such clashes have become the new norm in Indian universities.

Just a week before the Ramjas incident, Professor Rajshri Ranawat of the Jai Narain Vyas University, Jodhpur (Rajasthan) was suspended after a protest - once again led by the ABVP - simply for inviting JNU professor Nivedita Menon for a talk.

She had allegedly made some controversial remarks about Kashmir and the Indian Army, questioning India's role in the disputed territory. A police complaint was also lodged against her in Jodhpur.

In 2015, the ABVP-led Delhi University Students' Union disrupted the screening of the film Muzaffarnagar Abhi Baki Hai at Kirori Mal College. The film is a documentary about the Muzaffarnagar riots, which involved violent clashes between Muslims and Hindus in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in 2013.

These are attacks on what universities stand for. Threats to free enquiry emanate from both hardline university vice chancellors - some of whom are accused of punishing teachers with different opinions from their own - and neo-nationalist organisations such as the ABVP, which are quickly offended by any idea they disagree with.

Neo-nationalists and the right-wing government

Why have such incidents become so common, destroying the culture of debate and dissent in India's universities?

After the BJP's historic 2014 win in the Indian central legislative ( Lok Sabha) elections, which brought Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power, the ABVP and other RSS affiliates, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal have become bolder.

The ABVP, in particular, has resolutely pursued the BJP agenda of expanding its base in top universities, which have traditionally been considered the bastion of the Left. That's because the majority of faculty members who enjoy considerable influence on students are left-oriented and members of the Communist Party of India.

Now, right-wing student organisations champion their own brand of nationalism with the help of the government. Consider the case of JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumar. He was arrested on February 22 2016 by the Delhi Police on charges of sedition initiated by BJP member of parliament Mahesh Giri.

Students have also alleged that police often stand by and don't help them, as was the case with the violent events at Ramjas College.

At the same time, the government seems to ensure that high positions at universities are only occupied by those who lean towards the RSS and promote its agenda. Professor Vijay Bhatkar, the newly appointed vice-chancellor of the Nalanda University, for instance, was president of RSS-affiliated private outfit Vijnana Bharati, which promotes swadeshi (homegrown) science.

And in 2015, BJP member Gajendra Chauhan was appointed director of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), triggering protests by students.

As she was about to formally take up the role in January 2016, Oxford University vice chancellor Louise Richardson said:

Education should be about confronting ideas you find really objectionable, figuring out why it is you find them objectionable, fashioning a reasoned argument against them, confronting the person you disagree with and trying to change their mind, being open to them changing your mind. That isn't a comfortable experience, but it is a very educational one.

The only way out of the current state of tension for Indian universities is for the institutions to learn to tolerate everything except intolerance. Universities exist for the sake of free inquiry and uninhibited debate. If that's not what they are doing, they may as well cease to be.

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Growing intolerance is threatening free inquiry and open debate in India's universities

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Intolerance is rising on Indian campuses, where clashes initiated by right-wing student groups have slowly become the norm and freedom of speech is under threat.

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A Conversation article, looking at how war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

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A Conversation article, looking at how war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

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Gaza's education system has suffered significantly since Israel's bombardment and assault on the strip began. Last month, Israel blew up Gaza's last standing university, Al-Israa University.

In the past four months, all or parts of Gaza's 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed.

Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors.

Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.

But the assault on Palestinian educational and cultural institutions did not begin in response to the Oct. 7 attack. Israel has a long record of targeted attacks on Palestinian institutions that produce knowledge and culture. That history includes targeting and assassinating Palestinian intellectuals, cultural producers and political figures.

What is scholasticide?

The destruction of education systems and buildings is known as "scholasticide," a term first coined by Oxford professor Karma Nabulsi during the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza. Scholasticide describes the systemic destruction of Palestinian education within the context of Israel's decades-long settler colonization and occupation of Palestine.

Recently, a group of scholars working under the name Scholars Against the War on Palestine broadened the definition to include a more comprehensive picture of what is happening during the current war. They outline the intimate relationship between scholasticide and genocide.

They say scholasticide includes the intentional destruction of cultural heritage: archives, libraries and museums. Scholasticide includes killing, causing bodily or mental harm, incarcerating, or systematically harassing educators, students and administrators. It includes besieging, closing or obstructing access to educational institutions. It can also include using universities or schools as a military base (as was done with Al-Israa University).

The magnitude of destruction has led them to conclude: "Israeli colonial policy in Gaza has now shifted from a focus on systematic destruction to total annihilation of education."

As genocide scholar Douglas Irvin-Erickson says: the original definition of genocide as first drafted by Raphael Lemkin in 1943 included the idea that "attacking a culture was a way of committing genocide, and not a different type of genocide."

The International Court of Justice

During the recent genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), South Africa argued that Palestinian academics were being intentionally assassinated.

Legal representative for South Africa, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, told the court:

"Almost 90,000 Palestinian university students cannot attend university in Gaza. Over 60 per cent of schools, almost all universities and countless bookshops and libraries have been damaged and destroyed. Hundreds of teachers and academics have been killed, including deans of universities and leading Palestinian scholars. Obliterating the very future prospects of the future education of Gaza's children and young people."

On Jan. 26, in a landmark ruling, the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza.

Attempting to eliminate Palestinian futures

Scholasticide is not an event. It's part of a colonial continuum of attacking and destroying a people's educational life, knowledge systems and plundering material culture and cultural heritage.

The targeted killing of the educated class is intended to make it difficult for Palestinians to restore the political and socio-economic conditions needed to survive and rebuild Gaza.

This systematic destruction is at the core of the settler colonial " logic of elimination." It has also been applied to Indigenous Peoples in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. This logic drives a settler population to replace Indigenous peoples in their aim to establish a new society.

For example, this logic was exercised during the 1948 Nakba. Thousands of Palestinian books, manuscripts, libraries, archives, photographs, cultural artifacts and cultural property were looted, destroyed or damaged by Zionist militias. In 1948, Palestinian schools were destroyed or damaged or later appropriated for use by the new Israeli state.

Resistance: Palestinian history and culture

Despite the ongoing attempts to erase Palestinian history, culture and memory, Palestinians have found ways to resist their erasure. In the 1960s and '70s, an anti-colonial revolutionary tradition, produced and influenced by intellectual and political thought, was strengthened.

It helped to create infrastructures for the survival, mobilization and development of the Palestinian people and their national movement. It cultivated transnational relationships of solidarity. It helped displaced Palestinians, separated across geographies, to preserve their identity and reorganize themselves politically.

The intellectual and political thought of this period was passed onto the generations that followed. It influenced educational and political programs, cultural development and practices of resistance. Especially during the First Intifada from 1987-1993. This enabled Palestinians to stay steadfast in their struggle against colonial violence across time and space. Palestinian education and culture form the backbone of the right to self-determination. This is why Israel frequently targets Palestinian education and culture.

Palestinians have endured several periods of intense attacks on their cultural and educational life. This includes the June 1967 war, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon during which a number of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's institutions were destroyed and the First and Second Intifadas.

Following Israel's destruction of the Palestine Research Center in Lebanon in 1982, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said:

"He who steals land does not surprise us by stealing a library. He who kills thousands of innocent civilians does not surprise us by killing paintings."

The colonial theft continues unabashed. Cultural heritage has been annihilated, damaged or plundered in this war. During the bombing of Al-Israa University in January, Israel also targeted the National Museum. Licensed by the Ministry of Antiquities, the museum housed over 3,000 rare artifacts, which were looted.

Most academic institutions around the world remain silent about Israel's scholasticide. But others are speaking out. Globally, this includes Librarians and Archivists with Palestine and some academic associations and faculty groups. The ICJ's recent order to Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza may motivate other scholars and institutions to consider breaking their silence on scholasticide.

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The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine's education and knowledge systems

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Scholars say Israel's destruction of Gaza's schools, universities and museums are part of an ongoing project to destroy Palestinian people, identity and ideas.

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A Conversation article, exploring why John Dewey’s vision for education and democracy still resonates today

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A Conversation article, exploring why John Dewey’s vision for education and democracy still resonates today

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John Dewey was one of the most important educational philosophers of the 20th century. His work has been cited in scholarly publications over 400,000 times. Dewey's writings continue to influence discussions on a variety of subjects, including democratic education, which was the focus of Dewey's famous 1916 book on the subject. In the following Q&A, Nicholas Tampio, a political science professor and editor of a forthcoming 2024 edition of Dewey's "Democracy and Education," explains why Dewey's work remains relevant to this day.
Why revisit John Dewey's philosophy on education and democracy now?

I think it is time to revisit Dewey's philosophy about the value of field trips, classroom experiments, music instruction and children playing together on playgrounds. This is especially true after the pandemic when children spent significantly more time in front of screens rather than having whole body experiences.

Dewey's philosophy of education was that children "learn by doing." Dewey argued that children learn from using their entire bodies in meaningful experiences. That is why, in his 1916 text, " Democracy and Education," Dewey called for schools to be "equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens."

Dewey argued that planting seeds, measuring the relationship between Sun, soil, water and plant growth, and then tasting fresh peas made for a seamless transition between childhood curiosity and the scientific way of looking at things. Dewey also encouraged schools to create time for " dramatizations, plays, and games."

In his 2014 book, " An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind," the political scientist Jesse H. Rhodes shows how business groups and certain civil rights groups advocated federal laws that required states to administer high-stakes tests. This focus on tested subjects means that public school students in places such as Texas have less time for arts education.

What role did Dewey see for public schools in preserving democracy?

For Dewey, modern societies can use schools to impart democratic habits in young people from an early age. He argued that the "intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment." Dewey was writing as millions of European immigrants were arriving in the United States between 1900 and 1915. Dewey believed that schools could teach immigrants what it means to be a citizen and incorporate their experiences into American culture.

Dewey's view of the schools remains relevant today. In the 2020-21 school year, more than a third of the country's children attended schools where 75% of the student body is the same race or ethnicity - hardly the ideal conditions for Dewey's vision of democracy.

Dewey opposed "racial, color, or other class prejudice." Segregated schools violate Dewey's ideal of treating all students as possessing intrinsic worth and dignity. Dewey believed that democracy means "that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has." Democratic schools, for Dewey, empower every child to develop their gifts in ways that benefit the community.

How closely does today's education system resemble Dewey's vision for education?

I would argue that the education system resembles the vision of modern testing pioneers like Edward Thorndike more than Dewey's.

Dewey thought that standardized tests serve a small role in education. He believed that "the child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education." Dewey maintained that teachers need to use student interest as the fuel to propel students to learn math, reading and the scientific method, and standardized tests serve mainly to help the teacher identify where each student "can receive the most help." In his lifetime, Dewey opposed proponents of intelligence testing, such as Thorndike.

But the testing proponents seem to be winning. According to a 2023 Education Week survey of teachers, nearly 80% feel moderate or large amounts of pressure to have their students perform well on state-mandated standardized tests. According to one principal, "There's too much pressure put on these kids for testing, and there's too much testing."

Dewey's vision of education is teachers nurturing each child's passions and not using tests to rank children. For many teachers, U.S. public schools are far from realizing that vision.

How popular are John Dewey's views today?

Dewey's ideas were controversial during his lifetime. They remain so to this day.

In 2023, Richard Corcoran, the president of New College of Florida, criticized " the Dewey school of thought" for training students to become "widget makers." According to Corcoran, Dewey thought that "if we can teach (people) just enough skills to get on the assembly line and help us with this Industrial Revolution, everything will be great." Corcoran is right that Dewey thought that schools should teach children about industry, including with hands-on tasks. But Dewey opposed vocational education that slotted children from a young age into a career path.

"I am utterly opposed," Dewey explained, "to giving the power of social predestination, by means of narrow trade-training, to any group of fallible men no matter how well-intentioned they may be." Dewey thought that children could learn about history and economics from using machinery in schools. However, he opposed a two-tiered education system that denied working-class children a well-rounded education or that equated human flourishing with making widgets.

Educators and scholars such as Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier and Yong Zhao cite Dewey and apply his insights to current education debates. Those debates include topics such as the place of standardized testing in schools, the freedom of the classroom teacher and the need for schools to build trust with families and community members.

Zhao, for instance, argues that Dewey outlined a way to address education inequity that does not rely on closing gaps in test scores. Dewey's idea, according to Zhao, is that all children should have a chance to express and cultivate individuality, learn through experiences and make "the most of the opportunities of present life."

Dewey believed that " democracy is a way of life." He also believed schools could teach that lesson to young people by allowing people in the school to have a meaningful say in the aims of education. For many people who read Dewey today, his call for democracy in education still resonates.

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Why John Dewey's vision for education and democracy still resonates today

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Educational philosopher John Dewey saw America's schools as a place for students from different backgrounds to learn from one another.

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A Conversation article, looking at what we can learn from francophone Africa on the benefits of dual-language learning.

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A Conversation article, looking at what we can learn from francophone Africa on the benefits of dual-language learning.

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Children living in multilingual communities often learn in a language at school that does not match the language they speak at home. This mismatch makes it challenging for them to participate in classroom discussions and learn to read. In turn, this contributes to poor learning outcomes, grade repetition, and dropping out of school.

Bilingual education programmes that include mother tongue languages have become increasingly popular for improving learning outcomes. Bilingual education is associated with better language and literacy skills, reduced grade repetition and school dropout rates across the globe. Including mother tongue languages in education also places value on children's cultural identities, improving confidence, self-esteem and learning.

But simply providing bilingual education does not guarantee better learning results. This is the conclusion of a recent paper we published in which we reviewed bilingual programmes in six francophone west African countries: Niger, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon.

We found mixed results, across and within countries and programmes.

We identified two sets of factors that constrain or contribute to the quality of bilingual education. These were:

implementation factors, such as teacher training and classroom resources

socio-cultural factors, such as perceptions of mother tongue languages in education.

Our findings emphasise the need to consider the local context when applying bilingual education programmes.

Bilingual education in francophone west Africa

Our research team conducted research in Côte d'Ivoire from 2016 to 2018. We measured children's language and reading skills in both their mother tongue and in French, and compared outcomes between children attending French-only or bilingual Projet École Intégrée schools.

Children in French-only schools outperformed their peers from bilingual schools on the language and reading assessments. Teachers revealed they had better teaching resources and felt better prepared in French-only schools.

We were interested in whether bilingual education programmes in other francophone countries in the region had had similar experiences. In 2022, we searched academic databases for literature in English and French that discussed programme implementation and measured learning and schooling outcomes within bilingual education programmes. We reviewed nine programmes from six countries: Niger, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Cameroon.

These countries are former French colonies or territories. French is the official or working language and often the language of instruction in school. However, these countries are highly multilingual. About 23 living languages are spoken in Niger, 39 in Senegal, 68 in Mali, 71 in Burkina Faso, 78 in Côte d'Ivoire and 277 in Cameroon.

Our review showed that children can benefit from learning in two languages. This is true whether they are two official languages like in Cameroon's Dual Curriculum Bilingual Education (French and English) schools, or in a mother tongue and French, like in Mali's Community Schools. Children can also benefit regardless of whether they are gradually introduced to a language throughout primary school or whether both languages are introduced at the same time.

But a lack of resources, and a failure to take into account local conditions, affected the outcomes. The programmes that resulted in positive schooling and learning outcomes recognised and targeted common school-related and community-related challenges.

Teacher training and resources

One common school-related challenge was teachers not having teaching materials in all languages of instruction.

The Pédagogie Convergente programme in Mali, for example, ensured teachers had materials in both French and the mother tongue. Children had better French and maths scores.

But some teachers from the same programme did not always have teaching materials in mother tongue languages. And some children struggled with literacy and writing skills.

Another common challenge was teachers not feeling prepared to teach in all languages, as teacher training often occurred in an official language, like French. The Programme d'éducation bilingue in Burkina Faso, for example, made an effort to train teachers in the mother tongue language so they felt confident following the bilingual curriculum.

Children in bilingual Burkina Faso schools had higher than average pass rates on the primary certificate exam, repeated grades less, and stayed in school more than children in traditional French schools.

Both examples are in contrast to the bilingual schools in Côte d'Ivoire, where teachers lacked materials and training in mother tongue languages. In turn, children demonstrated worse language and reading skills compared to their peers in French-only schools.

Socio-cultural factors

We identified common community-related challenges, particularly related to community buy-in and perceptions of mother tongue instruction.

For example, families with higher socioeconomic status were worried that Niger's Ecole Experimentale schools would hinder children's French proficiency and compromise their entry into secondary school.

Programmes such as the Support Program for Quality Education in Mother Tongues for Primary Schools in Senegal worked to combat negative perceptions by educating families about the benefits of bilingual education. Children in the Senegalese programme outperformed their peers in traditional French schools in all school subjects.

The same programmes sometimes experienced different outcomes depending on the community. For example, although children in Burkina Faso's bilingual schooling showed favourable outcomes, parents felt that French programmes were better suited for continuing to secondary school.

What does this mean for bilingual education?

Efforts to provide teachers with the resources they needed, and efforts to foster community support, were both consistently linked with positive schooling and learning outcomes in our review.

However, these efforts might work better in some communities compared to others, due to different resource constraints and socio-cultural differences. Studies that found poorer outcomes also found common challenges present. Therefore, bilingual education has the potential to facilitate positive learning outcomes if efforts are made to overcome common challenges based on communities' needs.

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Learning in two languages: lessons from francophone Africa on what works best

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Bilingual education can improve learning outcomes but it's important to consider local context.

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A Conversation article, exploring the additional pressures for trans children when starting school. 

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A Conversation article, exploring the additional pressures for trans children when starting school. 

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A new group of young children has just started school for the first time, with many excited about new friends, uniforms and being at "big school".

But for trans kids, starting school can be a much more daunting process.

They have likely gone from preschools and daycare where they had the freedom to wear what they want and play what they want, whether that was dinosaurs, dolls or dress ups. The boy who likes to be Rapunzel was probably viewed as "cute" and the girl always playing pirates was encouraged to do so.

But school culture is much more cisnormative. This means schools tend to assume children can be sorted into boys and girls and everyone is comfortable in what category they are in.

Read more: Explainer: what does it mean to be 'cisgender'?

You can see this in formal ways, with boys' and girls' uniforms and toilets and in informal ways, with boys and girls making different friendship groups and playing different games at lunch.

This makes it difficult for trans children to feel as though they belong at school. Trans students often have lower levels of wellbeing and lower educational outcomes than non-trans students.

My research looks at what schools can learn from preschools and other early learning settings such as daycare centres about how to support trans students.

Read more: 4 out of 5 parents support teaching gender and sexuality diversity in Australian schools

My research

In 2023 I partnered with P-TYE, an advocacy network for parents of trans children. The study, which is currently in peer review, looked at how we can integrate support for trans children across a range of services including education, medical and mental health.

Through P-TYE and wider networks, we recruited 12 families with trans children. The children had an average age of 13 and had been recognised as trans between two and ten years.

Though interviews, I spoke to them about their experiences of childcare and school. Three themes emerged.

1. The importance of being 'child-centred'

Early education services are "child-centred". This means educators are trained to place a child's "belonging, becoming and being" at the centre of their curriculum (as per the Early Years Learning Framework). This includes freely exploring gender and their identity.

As one parent told us their trans girl "had an incredible teacher" for preschool

who'd take old curtains and make things [...] these three-tiered skirts that were heavy and they made beautiful sounds and they caressed you when you wore them and [my child] found such joy in these creations.

Another child showed her foster parents a photo of herself at daycare

in a dress up pushing a pram around with a baby in it. And she's got a handbag on, jewellery and everything. She's about three years old in the picture. And she says, this is the first time I knew I was a girl.

In contrast, trans identity in schools often means "breaking the rules". Parents in the study described examples of schools not letting trans students express their identity.

every day she was asking, 'why can't I wear a dress to school'? Why do I have to go to the boys' toilets? They're mean to me when I'm in there.

2. Not categorising kids by gender

Parents in the study also reported how children weren't categorised into genders by pre-school routines. As one interviewee said:

all the kids use the same toilet [...] they [were called the] 'cockatoos' and the 'koalas' or whatever [...] they weren't ever separated by gender.

But at school, children faced daily choices about whether they are a boy or a girl. One parent described how a class had segregated lunch crates for boys and girls. Their trans child stood out with "this pink drink bottle with unicorns on in a sea of dinosaurs".

Children also have to wear the correct uniform, be in the right line for sport and use the assigned toilet and can be bullied by other students when they try.

One child "survived kindergarten by walking". She told her parent

I just realised that if I wasn't still, I was less of a target so I just made sure in kindergarten to keep moving and I never stopped moving.

For non-binary children - who don't feel like a boy or a girl - school brings a more complex set of difficulties.

One parent talked about a lucky dip at the school fete with boy or girl gifts. They said this signals to their child "I have to be one of these things or the other" and "tells my kid that they don't fit in the world".

3. Support for educators

Research shows having teachers who are positive about gender diversity is crucial for the wellbeing of trans students.

My interviews also suggested responses to trans kids often depend on individual educators and schools. Many preschool educators were supportive and "totally fine to change pronouns, like immediately". But as one parent told the study, one educator reportedly said: "I'm not going to play this name game" and refused to use a child's new name.

Some school teachers did make a difference. One wellbeing officer "put out all the uniforms and said, 'which one would you like to wear?'"

At a schools sports day one trans boy was allowed to compete with the boys. As his parent said:

he's never been a sporty kid. He came last and everything, but it made him really happy to to be in with the boys.

Another teacher was "fantastic" but "a bit old school" saying "I've got no idea what to do, what to call her, what to say. I'm really out to sea here."

This suggests both early education and school teachers need access to education and resources, so whether students get support isn't left up to chance.

Read more: 'It's kind of suffocating': queer young Australians speak about how they feel at school and what they think of politicians

What should schools do differently?

Schools should take the lead from early learning environments and stop "sorting" students based on gender.

This could mean:

having a range of uniform items children can select from as some schools already do

more all-gender toilet facilities, where privacy is protected for all students

preferred names and pronouns should be easy to change in school systems and teachers should use these.

Teachers also need access to resources and information so they can confidently have conversations about gender. This needs to be part of a whole-of-school approach to supporting trans students and their families.

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'Why can't I wear a dress?' What schools can learn from preschools about supporting trans children

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Children are often allowed to freely explore their identities in early childhood services. But when they get to school, they are categorised as 'boys' or 'girls'.

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A Scientific American article, exploring whether the 'marshmallow test' is really an useful indicator of future success.

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A Scientific American article, exploring whether the 'marshmallow test' is really an useful indicator of future success.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the ‘marshmallow experiment’ and what does it try to measure? How might culture and social context influence the way children respond to the test? More broadly, how are we shaped by the cultural routines around us? Can we make universal claims about human psychology, or is everything dependent on context?

Key Terms Cultural routines, gratification, self-control, social scaffolding, nuance

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How Culture Affects the 'Marshmallow Test'

A classic test of self-control can carry complex cultural biases

By Yuko Munakata

In 2017 my family and I moved from Boulder, Colo., to live in Kyoto, Japan. My kids immediately noticed many cultural differences. Japanese homes typically do not have central heating, for one. We arrived during an unusually cold February, so my older child would curl up under the kotatsu -a low dining table with a heater affixed underneath-to get warm. After enrolling in the neighborhood elementary school, my kids saw how their peers cleaned classrooms and served food, unlike in the U.S., where specialized workers handle each task.

One of their most memorable lessons occurred during their first school lunch. They lined up with their classmates to be served, carried their lunch tray to their seat and started eating. The other students quickly began shaking their head and waving their hands. My children didn't speak Japanese, but the message was clear; they stopped eating. After every student in the classroom sat down with their food, the students called out in unison, " Itadakimasu "-literally "I humbly receive" and akin to "bon appétit." Then they began eating together. The next day, my kids waited to eat along with all their classmates.

When my children described this situation, it got me thinking. Many studies have looked at the ability to delay a snack as a measure of self-control-and found that such delayed gratification foretells a brighter future. Was it possible that children in Japan had a special advantage?

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The incident inspired me, as a psychologist, to reexamine a classic experiment involving delayed gratification for a food reward. What I learned would shift how I think about self-control, individual differences, human development, equity in science and my heritage.

[Read more about how culture shapes psychology]

The classic marshmallow test, invented by the late psychologist Walter Mischel, involves presenting a child with one marshmallow and explaining that they can have it now or they can have two later if they wait until the marshmallow giver returns. Children sit alone in a room with the tempting treat. Psychologists have generally viewed the length of time kids resist the sweet as a measure of their self-control: how effectively they can inhibit impulsive behaviors and work toward longer-term goals. Some studies have found that better performance on that marshmallow test in childhood predicts better outcomes in school, relationships and health later in life.

Together with Satoru Saito of Kyoto University and Kaichi Yanaoka of the University of Tokyo, my research team revisited this test with a few twists. We worked with 144 children in both the U.S. and Japan. We first ensured that all of these four- and five-year-olds had eaten marshmallows before. We asked parents how often their children waited to eat until others were served and how well their children could suppress impulsive behaviors.

Then the kids faced the classic test: Did they want one marshmallow now or two later? Most children in the U.S. waited less than four minutes before tasting the one marshmallow. Most children in Japan waited for two marshmallows for the maximum possible time-15 minutes!

If we had stopped there, we might have simply concluded that Japanese kids have better self-control. But we conducted another test. We presented children with a wrapped gift and told them that they could open it now or they could have two gifts if they waited. The pattern flipped. Most children in Japan waited less than five minutes before unwrapping the gift, while most children in the U.S. waited the maximum 15 minutes or close to it.

What was going on? It seems that with repeated experiences delaying gratification, children can develop habits that make it easier to wait in the future. According to the reports from their parents, the Japanese children had stronger habits of waiting to eat than the U.S. children. The stronger these habits, the longer the children waited for two marshmallows. But when it comes to opening gifts, children in the U.S. likely experience waiting more consistently. Birthday presents can sit on a table, unopened, until the end of a party. Christmas presents may sit under a tree for days before they can be unwrapped on December 25. In Japan, people give gifts year-round on simple occasions that do not involve traditions of waiting.

Not only did children wait longer when our test of delaying gratification aligned with their cultural experiences, they seemed to rely on different skills. We assessed how sensitive children were to social conventions about how they should behave. The greater their sensitivity, the longer they waited to open the gift in the U.S. and the longer they waited to eat the marshmallow in Japan. How well they could suppress impulsive behaviors no longer mattered.

These findings suggest that delaying gratification isn't just about self-control. Cultural routines-and how sensitive we are to them-make a difference in how long we wait. These routines can vary not just between cultures but within a culture, based on heritage, socioeconomic status and geographical area. So when a child waits for two marshmallows and goes on to succeed in school and life, this may partially reflect their experiences and habits around delaying gratification. These habits may actually supplement their self-control, helping them delay gratification in ways that serve them well in school and beyond. Children learn how to navigate social situations, attend to elders and tackle chores or homework in culturally specific ways that may help them later-if their habits align with the demands they face.

This research also raises big-picture questions for my field. Our study demonstrates how the results from psychology and other sciences sometimes capture cultural nuances that scientists may not even recognize. If we had conducted our study in just one country or with just one reward, we would have reached very different conclusions. How many other studies of human behavior reflect narrow cultural lenses? For that matter, how often has our research and academic culture privileged just a subset of voices and experiences? Without meaning to do so, we as researchers may be comparing people without considering how cultural norms, years of practice and social scaffolding make a particular task significantly harder or easier for some than others.

Fortunately, we can take steps to address this problem. Centering historically marginalized voices in our science can address research misconceptions and gaps. It can also give us a deeper and more equitable understanding of human behavior.

My family and I are living in the U.S. again. Thanks to this study, we now share knowing looks when it comes to dessert. If my husband suggests getting ice cream-as he often does-I tend to propose we hold off and do something to earn it first. I used to think we just differed in self-control. But my parents immigrated to the U.S. from Japan only a few years before I was born, and they raised my sisters and me in their traditions. Delaying gratification for ice cream doesn't feel effortful to me. I see now how old habits run deep.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific American's Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at pitchmindmatters@gmail.com.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of   Scientific American.

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How Culture Affects the 'Marshmallow Test'

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A classic test of self-control can carry complex cultural biases

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A Conversation article, looking at how research in mathematics is a deeply imaginative and intuitive process - aided by AI. 

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A Conversation article, looking at how research in mathematics is a deeply imaginative and intuitive process - aided by AI. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Begin by making sure you know what mathematical conjectures and theorems are - and how you move from one to the other. Why does the article refer to intuition as a “miraculous something”, and why does this present problems to anyone hoping to use AI to support the discovery of mathematical knowledge? Why does the article assert that “intelligence is best thought of as having many dimensions” - and can this be applied to other areas of knowledge?

Key terms Imaginative and intuitive, Conjectures, Theorems, “Miraculous something”, Discoveries, Another dimension

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Research in mathematics is a deeply imaginative and intuitive process. This might come as a surprise for those who are still recovering from high-school algebra.

What does the world look like at the quantum scale? What shape would our universe take if we were as large as a galaxy? What would it be like to live in six or even 60 dimensions? These are the problems that mathematicians and physicists are grappling with every day.

To find the answers, mathematicians like me try to find patterns that relate complicated mathematical objects by making conjectures (ideas about how those patterns might work), which are promoted to theorems if we can prove they are true. This process relies on our intuition as much as our knowledge.

Over the past few years I've been working with experts at artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepMind to find out whether their programs can help with the creative or intuitive aspects of mathematical research. In a new paper published in Nature, we show they can: recent techniques in AI have been essential to the discovery of a new conjecture and a new theorem in two fields called "knot theory" and "representation theory".

Machine intuition

Where does the intuition of a mathematician come from? One can ask the same question in any field of human endeavour. How does a chess grandmaster know their opponent is in trouble? How does a surfer know where to wait for a wave?

The short answer is we don't know. Something miraculous seems to happen in the human brain. Moreover, this "miraculous something" takes thousands of hours to develop and is not easily taught.

The past decade has seen computers display the first hints of something like human intuition. The most striking example of this occurred in 2016, in a Go match between DeepMind's AlphaGo program and Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players.

AlphaGo won 4-1, and experts observed that some of AlphaGo's moves displayed human-level intuition. One particular move ( "move 37") is now famous as a new discovery in the game.

Read more: AI has beaten us at Go. So what next for humanity?

How do computers learn?

Behind these breakthroughs lies a technique called deep learning. On a computer one builds a neural network - essentially a crude mathematical model of a brain, with many interconnected neurons.

At first, the network's output is useless. But over time (from hours to even weeks or months), the network is trained, essentially by adjusting the firing rates of the neurons.

Such ideas were tried in the 1970s with unconvincing results. Around 2010, however, a revolution occurred when researchers drastically increased the number of neurons in the model (from hundreds in the 1970s to billions today).

Traditional computer programs struggle with many tasks humans find easy, such as natural language processing (reading and interpreting text), and speech and image recognition.

With the deep learning revolution of the 2010s, computers began performing well on these tasks. AI has essentially brought vision and speech to machines.

Training neural nets requires huge amounts of data. What's more, trained deep learning models often function as "black boxes". We know they often give the right answer, but we usually don't know (and can't ascertain) why.

A lucky encounter

My involvement with AI began in 2018, when I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. At the induction ceremony in London I met Demis Hassabis, chief executive of DeepMind.

Over a coffee break we discussed deep learning, and possible applications in mathematics. Could machine learning lead to discoveries in mathematics, like it had in Go?

This fortuitous conversation led to my collaboration with the team at DeepMind.

Mathematicians like myself often use computers to check or perform long computations. However, computers usually cannot help me develop intuition or suggest a possible line of attack. So we asked ourselves: can deep learning help mathematicians build intuition?

With the team from DeepMind, we trained models to predict certain quantities called Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials, which I have spent most of my mathematical life studying.

In my field we study representations, which you can think of as being like molecules in chemistry. In much the same way that molecules are made of atoms, the make up of representations is governed by Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.

Amazingly, the computer was able to predict these Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials with incredible accuracy. The model seemed to be onto something, but we couldn't tell what.

However, by "peeking under the hood" of the model, we were able to find a clue which led us to a new conjecture: that Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials can be distilled from a much simpler object (a mathematical graph).

This conjecture suggests a way forward on a problem that has stumped mathematicians for more than 40 years. Remarkably, for me, the model was providing intuition!

Read more: How explainable artificial intelligence can help humans innovate

In parallel work with DeepMind, mathematicians Andras Juhasz and Marc Lackenby at the University of Oxford used similar techniques to discover a new theorem in the mathematical field of knot theory. The theorem gives a relation between traits (or "invariants") of knots that arise from different areas of the mathematical universe.

Our paper reminds us that intelligence is not a single variable, like the result of an IQ test. Intelligence is best thought of as having many dimensions.

My hope is that AI can provide another dimension, deepening our understanding of the mathematical world, as well as the world in which we live.

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Mathematical discoveries take intuition and creativity - and now a little help from AI

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Machine learning systems can now aid human intuition to create mathematical conjectures and proofs.

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A Wired article, reporting on how an Iowa School District Used ChatGPT to Ban Books. 

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A Wired article, reporting on how an Iowa School District Used ChatGPT to Ban Books. 

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For bookworms, reading a headline like "School District Uses ChatGPT to Help Remove Library Books" can be blood boiling. As Vulture put it earlier this week, it creates the sense that the artificial intelligence tool is once again "[taking] out its No. 1 enemy: original work." And it is. Using ChatGPT's guidance, the Mason City Community School District removed 19 titles-including Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Toni Morrison's Beloved -from its library shelves. But there is another truth: Educators who must comply with vague laws about "age-appropriate" books with "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act" have only so many options.

Signed into law by Governor Kim Reynolds in May, Iowa's SF 496 is one of those " parental rights" bills that have become popular with Republican lawmakers of late and seek to limit discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools. (Some have likened Iowa's bill to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation.) Its stipulations are a sweeping attempt at eradicating any discussion of sex or sexuality, and as Mason City School District's assistant superintendent Bridgette Exman explained in a statement to the Mason City Globe Gazette, "it is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements."

Under the surface of this is a unique conundrum. Broad bans on sexual content that use vague language like "age-appropriate" already leave too much room for interpretation. It doesn't matter if what's in the book is the equivalent of softcore slashfic or a harrowing account of childhood molestation. Now, in Iowa, there's a case of AI-which doesn't always fully comprehend nuance in written language-being asked to interpret a law that already lacks nuance.

The result, then, is districts like Mason City asking ChatGPT, "Does [insert book here] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?" If the answer was yes, the book was removed from the district's libraries and stored. But what about when the answer was neither yes nor no? The Bible, for example, "does contain passages that address sexual topics and relationships, but it generally avoids explicit descriptions of sexual acts," according to ChatGPT. The Bible isn't on the list of 19 books that got banned, but you can see how quickly this can get confusing. (David going to bed with Bathsheba isn't a description of a sex act? Uh, OK.)

When I relate this story to Exman, she says she got similar answers, where ChatGPT would say a particular book had sexual depictions but then give context. The example she gives is Patricia McCormick's Sold, about a young girl who gets sold into prostitution. "ChatGPT did give me what I would characterize as a 'Yes, but' answer," Exman says, but "the law doesn't have a 'yes, but.'" Ergo, McCormick's book is one of the 19 on her district's list.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

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How an Iowa School District Used ChatGPT to Ban Books

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Under a new law, schools in Iowa have to remove titles with specific sexual content from libraries. Asking an AI chatbot proved to be the easiest way. It flagged "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Beloved."

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A New Humanist article, looking at why science ‘needs’ intuition. 

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A New Humanist article, looking at why science ‘needs’ intuition. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do the cultural and societal belief systems we belong to, and our own nuanced experiences, shape the way we apply intuition? What does Carlo Rovelli mean when he says, science is “the simultaneous triumph of intuition and the active limiting of intuition”? How does Sara Walker say intuition differs from ‘common sense’? To wrap up: “Intuition is what humanises science, and what separates great scientists from the rest.” What does Conor Feehy mean, and what examples would you offer to support what he says?

KEY TERMS Trusting our gut, Truth, Mysterious, Cultural and societal belief systems, Common sense, Epistemological frailty

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This Smithsonian article tells the story of how one family is trying to revive the indigenous Hawaian language. 

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This Smithsonian article tells the story of how one family is trying to revive the indigenous Hawaian language. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What role does language play in shaping our identity and worldviews? What do we lose when we lose a language? Why do some organizations and agencies seek to deliberately destroy the knowledge associated with indigenous societies?

Key terms Suppressed, Culture, Forced assimilation, Worldview

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Pelehonuamea Suganuma and Kekoa Harman were bright-eyed high schoolers in Honolulu when they first crossed paths, in the 1990s. The two were paired for a performance-a ho'ike, as such shows are known in Hawaiian. Both teenagers had a passion for hula and mele (Hawaiian songs and chants), and they liked performing at the school they'd chosen to attend-Kamehameha High School, part of a 133-year-old private network that gave admissions preference to students of Hawaiian Polynesian ancestry. Still, one part of Hawaiian culture remained frustratingly out of reach for Pele and Kekoa: the language.

Over many generations, the native tongue of the islands had been systematically eliminated from everyday life, and even the Kamehameha Schools weren't able to bring it back. Part of it was a lack of interest-students seemed to prefer learning Japanese, Spanish or French. But more important, Hawaii's educators generally hadn't yet figured out how to teach Hawaiian vocabulary and grammar, or give eager youngsters like Pele and Kekoa opportunities to immerse themselves in Hawaiian speech.

A few years later, Pele and Kekoa found themselves together again. Both of them enrolled in a brand-new Hawaiian language program at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. The two former schoolmates became part of a pioneering cohort that was innovating ways to bring Hawaiian back to life. They helped develop some of the first truly successful Hawaiian language programs throughout the state's islands. Along the way, they started dating, got married and had four children, and raised them to speak fluent Hawaiian.

Today, Pele teaches at a Hawaiian-language K-12 school and Kekoa teaches Hawaiian language and culture at the college they both attended. At home, their family speaks almost exclusively Hawaiian. The Harmans are proud of the revival they helped carry out in just one generation. But Unesco still lists the language as critically endangered, and there's a long way to go before it's spoken again as a part of everyday life. "There's a false sense of security sometimes," says Pele, "that our language is coming back."

* * *

The Hawaiian archipelago-a string of islands born from volcanic activity-was untouched by humans for millions of years. Polynesian navigators discovered it as early as A.D. 400, and by the year 1200, their descendants had organized themselves into settlements called ahupua'a.

The first colonizers arrived in the late 1700s, led by Capt. James Cook, who'd set out on behalf of the British Empire to find a northwest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. These explorers were soon followed by Americans-many of them Protestant missionaries-who settled the islands in large numbers throughout the 19th century. As part of their efforts to convert Hawaiians to Christianity, missionaries needed to teach them how to read the Bible in their native tongue. And that meant introducing palapala -the written word.

For centuries, Hawaiian had been an oral tongue-one steeped in mo'olelo (story, legend, history). But after missionaries helped create a written version of the language, the local people took to it. They established more than 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers, according to some records. By 1834, more than 90 percent of Hawaiians were literate-up from virtually zero just 14 years earlier.

Yet these strides in Hawaiian literacy were soon overtaken by efforts to erase Hawaiian culture altogether. American tycoons had also come to the islands, planting lucrative crops like sugar cane and coffee. To work the fields, they brought in foreigners-especially from Japan, China and the Philippines. (By 1896, people of Japanese descent made up roughly a quarter of Hawaii's population.) A new social and political hierarchy arose, largely with white Americans at the top.

These outsiders helped to phase out the Hawaiian system of governance. They replaced traditional foods like taro with rice and imported wheat. They started issuing fines for performing hula, the ancient Hawaiian form of dance and expression. And as the 19th century was winding down, the Americans overthrew Queen Lili'uokalani, Hawaii's last monarch. They annexed the archipelago as a territory in 1898.

By the time Hawaii became a state, in 1959, fewer than 2,000 people could speak Hawaiian fluently. Most of them were elderly; very few were children. The language seemed on the brink of being forgotten.

* * *

But there were still people left who remembered. Both Pele and Kekoa were close to their great-grandmothers-women born in the early 1900s, who spoke some Hawaiian, even though they were raised to think of their mother tongue as inferior to English. The great-grandmothers were the last members of each family to retain any fluency. Pele's and Kekoa's parents were the first generation to speak no Hawaiian at all.

Kekoa grew up on Maui-an island named after a demigod who's credited in Hawaiian tradition with pulling the entire archipelago up from the ocean floor. When Kekoa was a kid, his grandmother, who passed away a few years ago, used to take him to Hawaiian musical and hula performances. She'd make leis for tourist-targeted luaus, and he'd help her gather and string the flower garlands. "I loved going to those events," Kekoa says. "They fostered a sense of 'It's beautiful. It's fun. I want to be around that.'" Outside of these excursions, he lacked an outlet. He was never drawn to sports or other conventional activities foisted on American boys.

As Kekoa approached his teens, his parents gave him the option of becoming a boarder at Kamehameha Schools' main campus-roughly a hundred miles and several sea channels northwest of Maui, on the island of Oahu. Moving away from home isn't easy for any 13-year-old-not least for a Hawaiian whose life is defined by family, or ' ohana. But Kekoa went. Pele was drawn to Kamehameha Schools for similar reasons. One of her grandmothers was Mary Kawena Pukui, co-author of the Hawaiian Dictionary, the standard reference for the Hawaiian language. Her grandmother had dedicated her life to the study and preservation of Hawaiian culture-yet she was haunted by what Pele calls "the trauma and disconnect" of forced assimilation. Seeing her grandmother wrestle with this inner conflict made Pele hungry to "do Hawaiian things in a school setting."

Kekoa graduated from high school in 1995. He spent a year at college at the University of Puget Sound in Washington, then transferred to the University of Hawaii at Hilo.* Pele, who graduated from high school in 1997, ended up at the same campus around the same time. As it happened, 1997 was the year the Hawaiian legislature mandated a new program at the Hilo campus. It was called Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikōlani, named after Ruth Ke'elikōlani Keanolani Kanāhoahoa, a woman from an ancient Hawaiian dynasty who was the governor of Hawaii during the mid-1800s. She was a defender of Hawaiian culture-although she came from a wealthy family and understood English, she lived in a traditional grass-roofed house and spoke only Hawaiian. The new program at Hilo had the motto O ka 'ōlelo ke ka'ā o ka Mauli: "Language is the fiber that binds us to our cultural identity."

Enrolling in this new program, Pele and Kekoa spoke Hawaiian as much as they could outside of class to become fluent. They "talked story" with their professors in the hallways. Their teachers hosted little get-togethers every week-Pau Hana Fridays, as they were known, the local equivalent of TGIF. ( Pau hana is a popular colloquialism across Hawaii: Pau means finished, while hana means work.) At these gatherings, the students fumbled with the language over card games, with music in the background and snacks on the table. "That's how we got comfortable," Pele says.

Those early days of the Hawaiian language renaissance had a sort of free-for-all flair. With a shortage of fluent Hawaiian speakers in the general population, the burgeoning network of Hawaiian-immersion schools drew on undergraduates from the program Kekoa and Pele were enrolled in. Kekoa started teaching at a preschool, part of a growing network called Aha Pūnana Leo, which means "nest of voices." Pele taught at Ke Kula 'O Nāwahīokalani'ōpu'u Iki, called Nāwahī for short-the first Hawaiian-immersion K-12 charter school, tucked along the slopes of the Big Island's Kilauea volcano, on the Hilo side.

Pele and Kekoa began dating in 1999 and married roughly two years later, on a date that coincided with a full moon. "It was a good day spiritually," Pele said. Hawaiian customs were integrated throughout the gathering-from the pule (blessing) delivered by Pele's great-grandmother and the couple's Hawaiian-language vows to the lei exchange and the guests' ho'okupu (offerings) of music and dance. Pele held a bouquet assembled by the professor who'd hosted the Pau Hana Fridays, comprising various plants found on the Big Island-a sprig from the koa tree, for example, which symbolized strength. Pele performed hula for Kekoa, dancing to a song composed by her great-grandmother.

Pele still teaches at Nāwahī. Its enrollment has increased by 10 percent every year, expanding the student body from 30 to more than 400. She has served as the school's math and social studies teacher as well as its elementary-level Hawaiian-chant and dance teacher. She and Kekoa also run an after-school hula program there. Last year, Nāwahī celebrated its 20th class of high school graduates. Kalāmanamana, the Harmans' eldest daughter, was among them.

This past April, Kekoa earned his doctorate in indigenous language and culture revitalization from the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Because of Covid-19, few people were able to be there in person to see him defend his dissertation, about the late hula master Joseph 'Īlālā'ole. But more than 100 people watched the proceedings over Zoom, many of them wearing aloha shirts and standing against backdrops of misty lawns.

The defense began and ended with mele-the songs and chants he and Pele were learning when they met. Each member of the Harman family performed a dance, including Kalāmanamana, who is now an undergraduate at Dartmouth but had come home to shelter in place with her parents. The defense itself, with questions from UH Hilo scholars, all took place in Hawaiian.

* * *

A decade or so ago, strangers passing the Harmans at the mall or grocery store used to be shocked to hear an entire family conversing in Hawaiian. They sometimes asked with concern whether the children spoke English. These days, the couple's three oldest children are 14, 15 and 19 (their youngest is not yet a year old) and they no longer get "stalked" for speaking Hawaiian. If anything, the onlookers are full of admiration. The number of Hawaiian speakers is markedly on the rise now. The last official estimate in 2016 put the number at 18,400. Back in the late 20th century, that number was around 14,000-and that was when the last generation of native Hawaiian speakers was still alive.

"Given our kids, our own programs, the students we've put out, we've made a lot of waves, a lot of progress," Pele says. The fact that their daughter and many other Nāwahī students have gone on to elite schools thousands of miles away "validates for a lot of people our way of life, the path that we've chosen."

Still, the Harmans worry about the future. Fostering a love of Hawaiian felt more intimate back when they were part of a small band of students, laughing their way through the Friday night dinners. Many of the students at Nāwahī spend Friday nights on Instagram and Fortnite and take their access to Hawaiian as a given. In fact, there's still no guarantee they'll remain fluent. Students have few opportunities to continue speaking Hawaiian after they complete their K-12 schooling.

As the Harmans see it, Hawaiian will survive only if people value the culture around it. After all, Hawaiian doesn't have the same marketing value as a massive international language like Spanish or Mandarin. Hawaiian is a language that describes local geographical features and captures an ancient worldview. It's the language Kekoa's and Pele's older relatives used to speak as they brought little gifts to friends' houses, or shared the mahi mahi caught on a fishing trip, or went holoholo -taking a walk and chit-chatting. "Now we have a generation of Hawaiian speakers, but if we don't also teach them those behaviors and beliefs, that fluency will only go so far," Kekoa says. "Hawaiian isn't just a language but a way of life."
*Editor's Note, December 14, 2020: An earlier version of this story noted that Kekoa attended college in Puget Sound, Washington. In fact, Kekoa attended the University of Puget Sound in Washington.
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The Inspiring Quest to Revive the Hawaiian Language

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A determined couple and their children are sparking the renewal of a long-suppressed part of their ancestors' culture