Education
Great minds lead to great solutions. Our education section features solutions and innovations directed at strengthening educational systems around the world.
Thousands of children in Malawi are learning how to grow food at school
The Malawi Schools Permaculture Clubs, a recipient of the 2018 Lush Spring Prize, provides basic gardening kits and lesson packs to teachers in order to teach valuable agricultural Read More...
Striking teachers are fighting for the future of public schools
Even as they face threats–a looming lawsuit in Arizona; jail time in Colorado–public school teachers continue to strike. The two western states are just the latest to join a movement that began in West Virginia to call for higher pay and better benefits for public employees. The Read More...
This liberal arts school prepares students for the jobs of tomorrow
Colleges have always been about getting students prepared for a career, but all too often, the education given at liberal-arts schools isn’t so useful for getting and maintaining a career. A small college in Maine is trying to change that by embedding the idea of “purposeful work”—broadly Read More...
West Virginia showed how necessary—and difficult—striking is
After nine days of arriving at 7 a.m. to the picket lines, Emily Comer, a Spanish teacher at South Charleston High School, was “mentally and emotionally and physically exhausted.” Word came on a Tuesday morning that a deal between the state and the striking public employees was imminent. Read More...
Can this four-minute brain hack turn you into an optimist?
Everyone has that friend who’s so cheerful it’s almost annoying. But while some people just happen to be more positive than others, optimism isn’t strictly a personality trait–it’s a learnable Read More...
How these teenage girls took over a village in rural India
In Thennamadevi, a village sheltered by banana trees and nestled amid rice paddies and sugar cane fields in India’s southern Tamil Nadu state, girls have moved beyond discussions of the challenges they face. They’re taking action. Bold action. Frustrated by the many do-nothing men who seemed Read More...
Yale’s beloved happiness class is now on the internet for free
Happiness, they say, is infectious. Perhaps that is why the most popular course ever to be taught at Yale University—this semester enrolling 1,200 students, or a quarter of the undergraduate student body—is one titled “Psychology and the Good Read More...
What this sculptor can teach us about bouncing back after failure
When a 41-year-old self-taught sculptor was given the task of creating a statue of Cristiano Ronaldo for his hometown, it was a dream come true. The dream, however, quickly turned into the stuff of nightmares after his statue was unveiled. The statue looked like a goofier version of the famous Read More...
Striking Oklahoma teachers win historic school-funding increase and keep on marching
Allie Newcomb, who teaches sixth-grade math at Mayfield Middle School, in Oklahoma City, was initially on the fence when teachers in her state started talking about walking off the job in protest of education cuts. But something shifted for her a couple of weeks ago, when there was an emergency Read More...
Following West Virginia, teachers in other U.S. states are walking out
Teachers in two more states, Oklahoma and Kentucky, are taking matters into their own hands this week, going on strike en masse and staging large Read More...