Transformation
The Center for American Progress has the clearest vision for the post-Trump, new federal government for all of us, not the donor class, especially their strategy around ending Citizens United.
Noted on: July 15, 2026
When writing “Hide and Seek”, Jones was inspired by the work of Alan Watts, particularly on his views of life and death. Jones recalled reading a book from Watts that discussed the concept of explaining the concept of God to a child from the paradigm of Eastern philosophy. He described “Hide and Seek” as a “very spiritual song” about being interconnected with the world. In a 2024 interview, Jones said that “Hide and Seek” was “even more relevant now because of where we are as a world. It’s very easy to give up on things and resign yourself to doom, but it’s very important to feel hopeful and positive about the future. That song is definitely about hope.”
In thinking and talking about change, I (and many others) have always focused on the positives — what change could bring about and enable. I and others spoke about the importance of educational risk-taking, even when those efforts were not a success. I and others made the case repeatedly that deciding to not change was an action in itself — namely choosing to stay put or in fact, fall behind.
What the quoted statement suggests that this focus on the positives of change is flawed; instead of encouraging change for its own sake and the sake of the institutions served by change, we need to focus on the trade-offs. If change is actually about loss, we need to address loss and how to make loss more acceptable.
As psychiatrists and psychologists know, loss and separation (including death) are among the most difficult emotional issues for individuals to handle.
- Read more at The Aspen Institute
When it comes to hiring, many employers still lean toward graduates from name-brand institutions. Yet … too many graduates “don’t get a shot at the high-value jobs they should be getting,” says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education. “That’s a big deal in a liberal democracy.”…
Companies and others spend $1 billion a year on hiring assessments. But most of that testing identifies whether applicants have skills for a specific job, not whether they are critical thinkers. And those targeted tests come into play later in the hiring process, not at the screening stage…
The interest in finding an ideal pre-hire screening test arises from a broader societal push for more hiring based on proven competencies rather than academic pedigrees, with companies like Google and Ernst & Young having famously declared that they would no longer require a degree... In fact, two-thirds of the jobs that call for a bachelor’s degree require problem-solving, critical-thinking, and writing skills.
At the same time, higher education has begun rethinking the way it recognizes students’ skills. More institutions have turned to competency-based degree programs or the use of badges and other new forms of credentials to signal students’ skills to employers and others.
Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014
The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking.
Today in America, fewer than 5 percent of young people train as apprentices, the overwhelming majority in the construction trades. In Germany, the number is closer to 60 percent—in fields as diverse as advanced manufacturing, IT, banking, and hospitality. And in Europe, what’s often called “dual training” is a highly respected career path….
[In Germany,] both employers and employees want more from an apprenticeship than short-term training… “In the future, there will be robots to turn the screws,” one educator told us. “We don’t need workers for that. What we need are people who can solve problems”—skilled, thoughtful, self-reliant employees who understand the company’s goals and methods and can improvise when things go wrong or when they see an opportunity to make something work better…
What makes dual training work, every manager told us, are the standardized occupational profiles, or curricula, developed by the federal government in collaboration with employers, educators, and union representatives…
Mastering [Minecraft] requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn’t working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what’s wrong.
One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked the “on” lever. “I did that wrong,” she said with a frown, and began tracing her way through the circuit. Eventually the problem emerged: A piece of redstone was angled incorrectly, sending the current in the wrong direction.
This is what computer scientists call computational thinking, and it turns out to be one of Minecraft’s powerful, if subtle, effects. The game encourages kids to regard logic and if-then statements as fun things to mess around with. It teaches them what computer coders know and wrestle with every day, which is that programs rarely function at first: The work isn’t so much in writing a piece of software but in debugging it, figuring out what you did wrong and coming up with a fix.
Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater. This is particularly striking given that the game was not designed with any educational purpose in mind.
Excerpt from Campus Technology — March 2016
“If you think the great colleges and universities of the past will be the only great colleges and universities in the future, then you’ve forgotten everything you knew about evolution and you need to up your game,” asserted Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.
“Our society is evolving much more rapidly than any institution of higher education,” Crow said, pointing out that the current production of college degrees in the U.S. is woefully behind population growth. To achieve its goals in graduation rates, higher education needs a new wave of innovation, he said, citing his own university’s efforts to create a new model of education where “full immersion and digital immersion are possible, costs are constrained and the scale is all scales, from individual learner to massive groups of learners, all operating at the same time.”
Crow outlined a framework for innovation wherein knowledge is emphatically at the center of every educational enterprise, “like a black hole of unbelievable intense energy.” Built around that, he said, are immersive, technology-enhanced learning (both on-campus and online), massive-scale learning, and the concept of education through exploration. “Now there are no more teachers, no more professors at the front of the stage — they are engaged in the creation of learning environments that allow people to learn at scales and in ways that have previously been not possible.”…
I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project.
The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.
- Excerpts from NYTimes.com
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.