Why are so many kids struggling with executive function skills?

Several common educational strategies lean into the idea that, in the classroom, challenge is something to embrace.

The value proposition of college is changing.

On a blustery March day five years ago, I locked arms with my mother and walked into a church in Maplewood, New Jersey to bury my brother. Bagpipes played “Amazing Grace.” I remember shivering and worrying: that my dad would slip, my mom would collapse, and that I would botch the eulogy.

A shocking majority of parents have no idea how their kids are doing in school. It’s not their fault.

The architecture of learning is changing.

Girls are closing one gender gap we don’t want: diagnoses of Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Between 2003 and 2011, parents reported an increase of ADHD diagnoses of 55% for girls, compared to 40% for boys, according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

“Are you embedded in your social surroundings?” This is the “core” question, says Alex “Sandy” Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics group at MIT Media Lab.

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, retired from the Chinese e-commerce giant in September to focus on education, which he calls the “most important and critical issue” of our time. His concern: the world is changing fast, but education is not.

For a long time, Helen Kingston had noticed that a lot of her patients seemed dejected. A general practitioner in Frome, a charming English village two-and-a-half hours southwest of London, she had plenty of patients who were understandably worn down by multiple illnesses, who came in up to 80 times a year and needed more than a doctor could offer in a 10-minute appointment.

The results are in for the OECD’s latest global test of 15-year-olds in math, science, and reading. The test, known as PISA (for Programme for International Student Assessment), is administered every three years and used—by some—to measure which countries are best preparing their students for the future.

Americans have a complicated relationship with higher education. They are angry at its staggering cost, and question its value in a fast-changing economy. But data are clear that college graduates earn significantly more than people with no higher education.

British barbers try to prevent male suicide by talking with the men whose hair and beards they cut.

In 2015, Jennifer Nicolaisen was working in consulting and getting by some days on just two hours of sleep. She was a 27-year-old statistician in northern Virginia, basking in what she called “rising star energy”—the glow that came from approval from her boss, her clients, and her peers. It was a thrill, she says.

For nearly two decades, America’s elite universities have tried to convince the public that they are deeply committed to diversifying their student bodies, breaking up the concentration of rich, white kids who have traditionally filled their campuses to usher in something that more closely resembles the country’s racial and socioeconomic makeup.

In 2010, Gustavo Rodríguez was a mergers and acquisitions banker for Merrill Lynch, living in London, where he had moved from New York. Then, he became a father.

Like many new parents, Rodríguez said the day his son was born was both the happiest and the scariest. “I realized how poorly equipped I was to provide this child with all the things he was going to need, especially in the first few years of his life,” he says.

For Heidi Larson, the founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, dispelling vaccine hesitancy means building trust — and avoiding the term “anti-vaxxer.”

For nearly 30 years, Javier Aceves worked as a pediatrician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing primarily on disadvantaged families. His approach was holistic: along with treating children, he did outreach with teens, and helped children’s parents with everything from addiction to learning how to be a supportive caregiver. For all the programs he helped develop, the patterns he kept seeing haunted him.

Before Martin Luther King Jr. Day last year, Celeste Law’s eight-year-old daughter told her mother that she didn’t know much about Martin Luther King Jr. Law recalled seeing an ad for Outschool, a marketplace for small, online classes aimed at middle- and high-school students. She checked it out.

Toad, a 20-year-old Danish woman living in Copenhagen, has been lonely her whole life. She is autistic, and as a child, did not have any friends. When she moved from the country to the city, not much changed. “They says it’s a phase, but a phase becomes a life,” she says, surrounded by six other young adults in a cozy apartment in Copenhagen—all of whom are working on becoming less lonely.