Education

Professors Prank Their University to Protest Crappy Education System

College is incredibly expensive, but the quality of undergraduate classroom experiences has gone downhill. That’s because universities aren’t spending any money to hire professors. Now, a group of Canadian professors have become overnight legends for pulling a prank that called attention to this sorry situation. Are these four awesome professors equivalent to one administrator? Here’s…

Teaching Creationism As Science Now Banned In All UK Public Schools

In what’s being heralded as a secular triumph, the UK government has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all existing and future academies and free schools. The new clauses, which arrived with very little fanfare last week, state that the… …requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced…

Wyoming Says Teaching Climate Change Would Wreck The State’s Economy

Earlier this year, the Wyoming legislature became the first in the U.S. to reject new science standards for schools. Lessons on climate change, lawmakers said, would brainwash kids against the state’s coal and oil industries. Now, parents, scientists and even churches are fighting the decision. Aerial view of a Wyoming mine by Christopher Boyer The…

LeVar Burton Enlists the Internet To Help Resurrect Reading Rainbow

You loved Reading Rainbow as a kid. Everyone did! But since the show went off the air in 2006, your ol’ pal LeVar Burton’s now trying to bring it back via the internet. He just needs a little Kickstarter help to do it. Two years ago, children’s literacy hero and former PBS staple Burton came…

An Interactive Chart Of Which Jobs Your College Degree Actually Gets

What was your major in college and what jobs can it really get you? This interactive chart answers that question for all the most popular college degrees. It’s the work of Ben Schmidt, an Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. Schmidt used census data to generate the chart, which you can look at either…

Newly updated census data reveals dramatic inequalities in public school spending across the U.S. The nine states in the Northeast all rank among the top 15 states by per-pupil spending. Of the 20 states spending the least, 18 are in either the South or West.

Animation teaches you all that happened in World War II in 7 minutes

I really wish YouTube and the Internet as we know it today existed when I was in high school. So instead of reading textbooks and taking notes in class, I could just watch YouTube videos and Wikipedia entries on any test I had coming up. Seriously, I could have dozed off in class and just…

This Is the Very Best Graduation Present Ever

In Chile, where students have been protesting the outrageous fees at for-profit universities for decades, college grads received a fantastic gift from local artist Papas Fritas. He broke into the Universidad del Mar, stole $500 million in student loan documents, and burned them. Then, he made a video explaining what he’d done. The Washington Post…

Anti-Evolution Bills Are Defeated In Missouri

Two proposed pieces of legislation—including one that would have required school districts to allow parents to have their children excused from learning about evolution—were left to die in committee when the Missouri state legislature adjourned. The news comes as a relief to educators who said the legislation would have “eviscerated the teaching of biology” in…

The Simplest Explanation of What the World Wide Web Is That You’ll See

We all know someone who still manages to confuse the Internet and the World Wide Web, and no amount of frustrated, rambling description seems to help them understand the difference. Now, you can just show them this video. This explainer by TED-Ed describes the World Wide Web as a city, where skyscrapers are web servers,…

Watch Japanese Children Design New Life Forms

We’ve come a long way from Tamagotchi. A company called teamLab has launched a play center called the “Sketch Aquarium,” where kids can design a fish and then interact with it in a virtual tank. It’s adorable — and very mad sciencey. This new self-dubbed “future park” offers children an alternative to the Japanese education…

Are Religious Beliefs Going To Screw Up First Contact?

Are humans really prepared to meet an extraterrestrial civilization in this century? A new study suggests we’re psychologically ill-prepared for this monumental event — and that the prominence of religious beliefs has a lot to do with it. Despite the eerie Great Silence, there’s good reason to suspect we’ll eventually make contact with aliens. Our…

Why Neglecting Math Can Be Hazardous To Your Life

Last year, more than 510,000 international students took part in survey focusing on mathematics. Of the 65 countries involved, the US ranked 36th — a poor result that points to the growing problem of innumeracy. Here’s why we need to be literate in math, and why our failure to do so is spelling bad news…

Possible News on Kidnapped Girls in Nigeria

An unspecified number of the schoolgirls kidnapped from their final exams in Nigeria have been forcibly married to strangers, but Boko Haram might peacefully release the rest. This is painfully low on confirmed facts, but at least it’s not being reported that they’re dead. Mothers of the kidnapped daughters demonstrate for their return. Photography credit:…

Harsh Reality Break: 234 Girls Kidnapped from Physics Test (Updated)

Warning: this is a horrible story. 234 young women were abducted from a physics test in Nigeria, specifically to keep them from getting an education. Nothing is being done to find them. Collective public outrage is the only tool that can possibly get a search started. Updates at the bottom. Over 200 students were abducted…

Oklahoma Biology Teachers Don’t Understand Evolution

Much of the debate about evolution in public schools concerns the content of textbooks. But a new study points to another worrisome trend: teachers who have misconceptions about evolution might be passing those ideas along to their students. Researchers surveyed Oklahoma high school biology teachers, and found that 23 percent of them misunderstand several key…

300 empty desks were placed in the street outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters earlier today as part of a protest demanding extra funding for disadvantaged youth. The 300 desks are meant to represent the approximate number of students who drop out of LAUSD every month. [Photo by Richard Vogel/AP]

Creationists Invited To Give Commencement Speech At Montana Tech

A group of students and faculty at Montana Tech are organizing an unprecedented graduation boycott to protest the university’s decision to invite two commencement speakers who are prominent supporters of a young earth creationist museum. Montana power couple Greg and Susan Gianforte are engineers who have founded several tech companies and made donations to computer…

Which is Worse: A Game of Thrones Spoiler, or Detention?

A French mathematics teacher is said to have devised a powerful technique for keeping classroom chatter to a minimum: Whenever his class gets too noisy, he simply writes a spoiler from Game of Thrones on the board. As in: “Oh, you haven’t finished reading A Storm of Swords? LET ME TELL YOU EVERYONE WHO DIES.”…

One Laptop Per Child Isn’t Quite Dead Yet

Fans of the One Laptop Per Child program were shocked and saddened to hear of the organization’s imminent demise this week. There’s only one problem: OLPC isn’t actually dead. Despite what some blogs are reporting, the organization is alive and well… just not as alive and well as it once was. On Tuesday, Wayan Vota…