Like most mathematicians, I hear confessions from complete strangers: the inevitable “I was always bad at math.” I suppress the response, “You are forgiven, my child.” Why does it feel like a sin to struggle in math? Why are so many traumatized by their mathematics education? Is learning math worthwhile? Sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, André and Simone […] … learn more→

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy envisions a world in which artificial intelligence bots can be made into subject matter experts that are “deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages.” Through this vision, the bots would be available to “personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand.” The embodiment of […] … learn more→

Education should prepare young people to face the challenges of their time. To keep up with the changing world, this means that education has to keep adjusting. But unfortunately, our education systems have fallen out of sync with the times. Environmental decay is arguably the greatest challenge facing humanity today. However, education systems are failing to […] … learn more→

People share common traits; however, as unique beings, it is normal for us to be different. During childhood and adolescence, these differences can become enormous and that is why each course and each classroom are a miniature world : no two students are the same, nor are there two groups of students the same . But diversity is not a scourge of the […] … learn more→

Australians know public schools are underfunded. There are media reports of schools needing to fundraise to build essential infrastructure such as school halls and provide playground shade cloths and textbooks. This comes alongside other reports of elite private schools building pools and theatres with multimillion-dollar budgets (helped by their tax exemptions and subsidies) and ongoing concerns about funding disparities between Australian school systems. In […] … learn more→

The ability to teach and conduct research free from political interference is the cornerstone of higher education and its contribution to the public good. Academic freedom, however, has become increasingly threatened. V-Dem Institute, a global research organization that monitors indicators of democracy around the world, determined that academic freedom has “substantially worsened” in the United States […] … learn more→

Math education outcomes in the United States have been unequal for decades. Learners in the top 10% socioeconomically tend to be about four grade levels ahead of learners in the bottom 10% – a statistic that has remained stubbornly persistent for 50 years. To advance equity, policymakers and educators often focus on boosting test scores and grades […] … learn more→

If you search most primary or high school websites, you will likely find a images of happy, smiling children. Students images are also used publicly for school newsletters, social media accounts and other school publications like annual reports. Parents could reasonably expect schools and educations departments have conducted thorough checks and evaluations to do this. […] … learn more→

Surely on more than one occasion we have had to answer the question of whether we are “science or humanities” as if there were no other way to classify ourselves. Or we have resorted to the explanation: “It’s that I am a science (or humanities) person” to get around an uncomfortable situation or justify our […] … learn more→

Texas once had a law that allowed public schools to charge tuition for undocumented immigrant families to send their children to school. The rationale was that taxpayer dollars should not be spent educating children whose families were not in the U.S. legally. When the Supreme Court struck down the law  in 1982, it held that young […] … learn more→