Adults age 65 and older who completed five to six weeks of cognitive speed training — in this case, speed of processing training, which helps people quickly find visual information on a computer screen and handle increasingly complex tasks in a shorter time period — and who had follow-up sessions about one to three years later were less likely to be diagnosed with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, up to two decades later, according to new findings published today in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions.

This National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study is the first randomized clinical trial, and only study of its kind, to assess 20-year links with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, among adults who participated in the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study. Investigators enrolled 2,802 adults into this study in 1998–99 to assess long-term benefits of participants randomized to three different types of cognitive training — memory, reasoning and speed of processing — in comparison to a control group who received no training. In the three training groups, participants received up to 10 sessions of 60–75 minutes of cognitive training that took place over five to six weeks. Additionally, half of participants were randomized to receive up to four additional cognitive training sessions, or boosters, which took place 11 and 35 months after the initial training.

In this 20-year follow-up study, investigators found that 105 out of 264 (40%) participants in the speed-training group with boosters were diagnosed with dementia, which was a 25% reduced incidence compared to 239 out of 491 (49%) adults in the control arm. This was the only intervention with a statistically significant, or meaningful, difference compared to the control group.

Read it all.

A type of cognitive training that tests people's quick recall seems to reduce the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease https://t.co/1ntw4Q2cgE

— New Scientist (@newscientist) February 12, 2026

‘In large corporations and administrations, justification and self-protection have become the primary motive in place of achievement. In this world, intuition is not talked about openly, but relied on surreptitiously.’

–Gerd Gigerenzer, The Intelligence of Intuition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Gerd Gigerenzer:

Why simple rules of thumb often outperform complex models.https://t.co/FrPo8Csqfd

— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) March 2, 2021

I have a friend who teaches in the upper peninsula in Michigan. He has one of those schools that run from kindergarten all the way up through eighth grade, including special ed. One of his students was intellectually slow, couldn’t do very well in classes. And when Christmas Pageant time came he wanted to have a part in the Pageant. What’s more, he wanted a speaking part. He wouldn’t settle for anything less.

So they made into the innkeeper. They figured he could handle that because all he had to do was say, “No room,” twice: once before Mary spoke, once after she spoke. The night of the Pageant, Mary knocks on the door he opens the door, and he says in a brusque fashion, “No room!” Mary says, “But I’m sick, and I’m cold, and I’m going to have a baby, and if you don’t give me a place to sleep, my baby will be born in the cold, cold night.”

He just stood there. The boy behind him nudged him and said, “No room, No room, say, “No room.’” And finally, he turned and he said, “I know what I’m supposed to say, but she can have my room.”

–Anthony Campolo in William H. Willimon Ed, Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p.294

Trina Schart Hyman's illustration for 'A Child's Christmas In Wales' by Dylan Thomas. pic.twitter.com/iZ4vGIiBXW

— Into The Forest Dark (@ElliottBlackwe3) December 25, 2025

Nearly every student clutches a phone in one hand as they traverse the University of Central Florida campus, even while walking in groups. Laptops and tablets are lunchtime companions, and earbuds and headphones are routine accessories. While waiting for class to start, many students sit in silence, drawn into their devices.

It is a familiar and exasperating scene for Seán Killingsworth, 22, a former U.C.F. student. “What is this life I’m signing up for?” he asked himself during his sophomore year. “It was just like, I’m talking to a bunch of zombies.”

Mr. Killingsworth craved a space where he could chat with his peers without feeling as though he was intruding. When he was in high school, he ran into similar conundrums, so he would organize phone-free hangouts with friends.

Why not in college too?

In 2023, he helped bring the idea of no-phone social time to two different Florida campuses — U.C.F. and Rollins College. He called it the Reconnect Movement: During meetings, everyone was required to hand over their phone and socialize without devices, a concept that has become a big draw for like-minded students. Reconnect has now spread to six schools in four states. And in September it broadened its reach beyond students, hosting a phone-free event in New York — soon to be followed by Orlando and Tampa — that anyone could attend.

Read it all.

Can College Students Stand to Ditch Their Phones for an Hour or So? https://t.co/i64o5O5tUJ

— Rajiv Prabhakar (@rajivprab) October 1, 2025

You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card [permanent residence in the United States],” promised Donald Trump on the campaign trail last year. As president, on September 19th, Mr Trump headed in the opposite direction. He proposed a charge of $100,000 on new applications for H-1B visas, a favourite of technology firms hiring foreign graduates. Each year 85,000 are issued by lottery (demand far outstrips that quota). Hitherto the cost of securing one has been about $2,500 in legal and filing fees.

Big tech firms dominate the visas (see chart 1). Amazon alone received more than 14,000 approvals in 2025 (renewals do not count against the 85,000 quota). Indian IT-services giants such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), also routinely rank among the top sponsors. And Indian citizens scoop most of the visas—about three-quarters of them in 2023. Apart from China (12%), no other country secures more than 2%. Many of Mr Trump’s supporters complain that this means jobs that could go to talented Americans go to Indian graduates instead. But the effects of the new charge may be more complicated than they expect.

Over the weekend many of America’s tech giants scrambled to advise employees on H-1B visas not to leave the country until the rules are clarified; whether exemptions will be made for some groups remains uncertain. The announcement has been most keenly felt, though, in India. In August Mr Trump imposed a 50% tariff on Indian goods, sparing only essentials such as electronics and pharmaceuticals. Now he has hit the country’s most successful sector. According to Goldman Sachs, services exports grew from $53bn to $338bn between 2005 and 2023, almost twice the global rate. That growth was driven by a boom in India’s population of engineers, particularly in computer science. The IT firms relied on sending engineers to America under the H-1B programme to serve clients, a cornerstone of their business model. For decades H-1Bs offered Indian techies a route to better-paid jobs in America. That path now looks far less certain.

Read it all.

The perverse consequence of America’s $100,000 visa fees https://t.co/AbOuOhgZi6 via @TheEconomist

— Adi Gaskell (@AdiGaskell) September 23, 2025

American high-school seniors’ scores on major math and reading tests fell to their lowest levels on record, according to results released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department.

Twelfth-graders’ average math score was the worst since the current test began in 2005, and reading was below any point since that assessment started in 1992. The share of 12th-graders who were proficient slid by 2 percentage points between 2019 and 2024—to 35% in reading and 22% in math.

There also were drops in the proportion of students who were able to reach at least a basic level of performance, a tier below proficiency.

The results are from tests that are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered to tens of thousands of students in early 2024.

The declines deepen slides that began before the pandemic, and are the latest in a procession of gloomy data showing that U.S. students are learning less than several years ago. 

Read it all.

Reading & Math scores for high school seniors in America have fallen to their lowest level on record w/ 68% achieving a "basic" level of performance in Reading & 55% in Math. The % of 12th-graders who were "proficient" also fell to record lows: 35% in Reading and 22% in Math. pic.twitter.com/DnRQ1SMwY6

— Charlie Bilello (@charliebilello) September 9, 2025

Back in the 20th century, bored scholars had to make do with flicking rubber bands at their classmates, doodling in their textbooks or staring out of the window. Modern technology has revolutionised slacking. Most teenagers in the rich world own smartphones. Many are allowed to bring them into classrooms, where each provides a bottomless source of apps designed to be as compelling—and distracting—as possible.

A backlash is under way, as parents and teachers worry about the effects on classroom performance. On August 27th South Korea passed a ban on smartphones in classrooms. Governments from China to Finland, as well as dozens of American states, have introduced bans and restrictions of varying severity. The Economist is queasy about micromanaging the job of head teachers to such a degree—but schools that still welcome smartphones would be wise to think again.

This may seem fusty and technophobic. It is not. Even diehard libertarians agree that children do not always know what is in their own interests. Nor does banishing phones from maths lessons mean depriving children of experience with modern technology. They get plenty of that outside school; gaps can be patched up in dedicated lessons.

Read it all.

Smartphones are far from the only problem schools face. But they are one that is easy to solve https://t.co/4ivUs7mZgn

Photo: Shutterstock pic.twitter.com/KlelrkBzHB

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) September 4, 2025

Who (or what) has shaped your faith the most?” 

As a campus minister, I have asked this question to many college students over the years. Lately, I have noticed a shift in their answers. 

Last fall, I sat across from a freshman at Vanderbilt University. We were chatting over tacos when I posed the question. I watched the gears spin in his head. Would it be a church from back home? A great book? An older mentor who discipled him? Maybe his parents? 

He leaned back. 

“YouTube.” 

I stared blankly, trying my best not to show my surprise. 

It hit me: What we were doing—eating lunch alongside one another—discipler and disciplee—might be an entirely new experience for him. In the digital age, disembodied social interactions have become the norm.

Read it all.

The High Court rejected school board’s description of the books as merely “exposure to objectionable ideas” or as lessons in “mutual respect.”

The Court said the storybooks “unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage and gender.” The books are designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated, and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected….

“I’m encouraged by the Court’s ruling today to protect the rights of parents to raise their children according to their deeply held convictions, even as they are educated in public schools,” said Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).

“As the primary teachers of their home, parents should have the right to opt their children out of curriculum that actively undermines their religious convictions regarding marriage, family, gender, and sexuality. Religious families should be accommodated so that parents do not have to worry that their children will be indoctrinated in an educational setting.”

Read it all.

“Supreme Court sides with religious parents seeking to opt out of LGBTQ storybooks.”

Yup.

The 6-3 decision could have big implications for schools nationwide.

Good decision. I’m always struck by just HOW oppressive heavy-handed “inclusion” proved to be. https://t.co/dH83SutF2C

— Frederick M. Hess (@rickhess99) June 27, 2025

There is a lot of research and a lot of effort focused on the idea that if we can design AIs in a certain way, if we can teach them certain principles, if we can code into them certain goals, then we will be safe.

But the two main problems with this approach are: First, the very definition of AI is that it can learn and change by itself. So when you design an AI, by definition, this thing is going to do all kinds of things which you cannot anticipate.

The other, even bigger, problem is that we can think about AI like a baby or a child. And you can educate a child to the best of your ability. He or she will still surprise you for better or worse. No matter how much you invest in their education, they are independent agents. They might eventually do something which will surprise you and even horrify you.

The other thing is, everybody who has any knowledge of education knows that in the education of children, it matters far less what you tell them. It matters far more what you do. If you tell your kids, “Don’t lie,” and your kids watch you lying to other people, they will copy your behavior, not your instructions.

Now if we have now this big project to educate the AIs not to lie, but the AIs are given access to the world and they watch how humans behave and they see some of the most powerful humans on the planet, including their parents, lying, the AI will copy the behavior.

Read it all.

Will AIs lie a lot in the future? Yes, if they copy us humans, says this author https://t.co/jtvWbwp6Sw

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) June 29, 2025

Herewith the NBC preview–‘Joan Alexander was awarded a teaching degree by the University of Maine after being denied more than six decades prior. The 88-year-old says she was barred from student teaching, a requirement for her degree, because she was pregnant with her first child. Tom Llamas speaks with the recent graduate and has her story.’

In the classroom, MacIntyre followed the example of Socrates, who demonstrated to those in his company the depths of what they did not know. My first graduate class with him was on twentieth-century ethics. I read all the books for the fall semester the summer before, so I thought I was ready to impress. On the first day of class, he began in stern British schoolmaster style, “I’m Alasdair MacIntyre, but if you don’t already know that, you probably shouldn’t be in this class.” Unlike other professors, he did not address us as “Christopher” or “Rebecca,” but as “Mr. Kaczor” and “Ms. DeYoung.” The only exception was “Master Resnick,” who had gained his MA already. MacIntyre announced that in order to earn an A on a paper, we would have to write an essay of the caliber that he would put his own name on it. An A minus meant he would almost put his name on it. My first paper came back with a grade that I had never before received. Indeed, a grade I had never before seen: B minus minus.

A philosophical version of a Marine boot camp instructor, MacIntyre left us in much better shape than when we began. As Lee Marsh put it, “When I met Alasdair MacIntyre, I realized how much I did not know and why I should know it.” We learned that there was such a thing as a stupid question. One grad student asked, “What are the Thirty-Nine Articles?” MacIntyre replied, “Do you happen to know where the library is? It’s not too late to learn.” We were kept continually off balance, often not knowing where the jokes ended and the serious warnings began. One day, Alasdair announced, “I happen to be one who believes torture is not always wrong—something you may want to remember.” He warned us, “Never call me at home unless you want to no longer be a student in the graduate program.” This admonition was entirely unnecessary as most of us were afraid to speak with him even during class time. Graduate students brave enough to visit his office, dark as a cave and lit by a solitary lamp, found it adorned with a Gallic cross and a photo of the Jewish-born philosopher Edith Stein, who died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. One day, having finally earned paper grades in his classes better than B minus minus, I ventured into his office to ask for his coveted letter of recommendation. It took courage to request one. He told one grad student, “I can certainly write you a letter, but it is the kind of letter that keeps you from getting a job.” Fortunately, his letter of recommendation for me was not that kind of letter. 

Not only did he help us on the job market, MacIntyre’s virtues gave his students an example to emulate. When doing a directed readings class with one undergraduate, MacIntyre remarked that there was a recent article in French very much relevant for their discussion. Unfortunately, the student couldn’t read French. So the next time they met together, MacIntyre provided the student with a translation he had made of the article. Alasdair had a great love for American football, especially Notre Dame football.

Read it all.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)

Requiescat in pace pic.twitter.com/Ta89InMBX3

— Chad Pecknold (@ccpecknold) May 22, 2025

Both Marion and Williams say their churches haven’t abandoned local public schools as they’ve built Christian schools. Williams notes that the church has volunteers serving in a variety of public school roles and participates in the “BackSnack” program, which fills backpacks with food for public school children in the Kansas City area.

Likewise, Marion’s church has a strong commitment to be an effective partner with local public schools.

“You better be intentional,” Marion said. “If a church wants to do this, they have to be intentional about being a champion at the local schools. I’m grateful we’re able to provide a Christian school option for families who want it. But please hear me: I love our public school teachers. I love the work they do. I believe in our public schools. I’m friends with our school superintendent, and I believe in him. And the schools know if they ever need anything, they call on us.”

Churches like Fellowship and FBC Covington are showing school engagement doesn’t need to be an either/or proposition. Instead of abandoning public schools, many churches are starting new schools while deepening their relationships with local public schools—volunteering, serving, and supporting families on both fronts.

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“Instead of abandoning public schools, many churches are starting new schools while deepening their relationships with local public schools—volunteering, serving, and supporting families on both fronts.” — @TobinPerry https://t.co/GaxcHU7AHo

— Lifeway Research (@LifewayResearch) March 31, 2025

Rudenstrand, who is deputy general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, explained that “Örebro is a church-dense city”, and that it is encouraging to see that “many churches have opened for counseling and prayer. This is our task as the Body of Christ: to weep with, mourn with, and comfort those who suffer”.

“My prayer is that both those who were wounded and those who have lost loved ones will find comfort and strength during this difficult time”, he added. “That Jesus will make his presence felt to those who are grieving, especially those who have lost family members”. 

Asked what the attacker’s motives might be, Jacob Rudenstrand remarked that police have found no evidence of an ideological motivation for the attack so far. But “even if an investigation may provide some answers, many questions will not be satisfied”, he said.

In a time in which Sweden has “experienced a sharp increase in bombings in recent years, mainly related to conflicts between warring criminal gangs, this will leave a mark for a long time. Now is a time for mourning”.

Read it all.

Kommenterar attacken på min gamla gymnasieskola i @Evan_Focus:
”My prayer is that both those who were wounded and those who have lost loved ones will find comfort and strength during this difficult time.” https://t.co/f2zXwDOYY8

— Jacob Rudenstrand (@JRudenstrand) February 5, 2025

US fourth- and eighth-grade students are struggling with reading comprehension with last year’s nationwide testing showing the worst results in over two decades.

Average reading scores deteriorated among students who took the Congressionally-mandated assessment in 2024, according to results released Wednesday from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“This is a major concern,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test known as the Nation’s Report Card every two years. “Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading.”

Read it all.

US fourth- and eighth-grade students are struggling with reading comprehension with last year’s nationwide testing showing the worst results in over two decades. https://t.co/mHk2GPQyId

— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) January 29, 2025

Authentic Christian faith does not fear reason “but seeks it out and has trust in it”. Faith presupposes reason and perfects it. Nor does human reason lose anything by opening itself to the content of faith. When reason is illumined by faith, it “is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God”. The Holy Father observes that St Thomas thinks that human reason, as it were, “breathes” by moving within a vast horizon open to transcendence. If, instead, “a person reduces himself to thinking only of material objects or those that can be proven, he closes himself to the great questions about life, himself and God and is impoverished”. Such a person has far too summarily divorced reason from faith, rendering asunder the very dynamic of the intellect.

What does this mean for Catholic universities today? Pope Benedict answers in this way: “The Catholic university is [therefore] a vast laboratory where, in accordance with the different disciplines, ever new areas of research are developed in a stimulating confrontation between faith and reason that aims to recover the harmonious synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas and other great Christian thinkers”. When firmly grounded in St Thomas’ understanding of faith and reason, Catholic institutions of higher learning can confidently face every new challenge on the horizon, since the truths discovered by any genuine science can never contradict the one Truth, who is God himself.

Read it all from 2010.

Today's the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, 13th Century Dominican friar and philosopher. Here he is in glass by Powell & Sons at Mautby, Norfolk, 1936. He's the patron saint of academics. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/JwknTr0LA3

— Simon Knott (@SimoninSuffolk) January 28, 2025

I have a friend who teaches in the upper peninsula in Michigan. He has one of those schools that run from kindergarten all the way up through eighth grade, including special ed. One of his students was intellectually slow, couldn’t do very well in classes. And when Christmas Pageant time came he wanted to have a part in the Pageant. What’s more, he wanted a speaking part. He wouldn’t settle for anything less.

So they made into the innkeeper. They figured he could handle that because all he had to do was say, “No room,” twice: once before Mary spoke, once after she spoke. The night of the Pageant, Mary knocks on the door he opens the door, and he says in a brusque fashion, “No room!” Mary says, “But I’m sick, and I’m cold, and I’m going to have a baby, and if you don’t give me a place to sleep, my baby will be born in the cold, cold night.”

He just stood there. The boy behind him nudged him and said, “No room, No room, say, “No room.’” And finally, he turned and he said, “I know what I’m supposed to say, but she can have my room.”

–Anthony Campolo in William H. Willimon Ed, Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p.294

Ich wünsche euch allen Frohe Weihnachten und ein paar ruhige und besinnliche Festtage ! pic.twitter.com/xAxtjbTUbU

— Thomas Stiegler (@StieglerThomas) December 25, 2024

One often hears liberal-arts professors, as well as college and K-12 administrators, advocating two ideas about academics in America: (a) the importance of a broad, well-rounded, liberal-arts education and (b) the equating of that education solely with the head, not the heart. In 1931, John Dewey chaired a national curriculum conference that declared the liberal arts important for “the organization, transmission, extension and application of knowledge” (emphasis added). That concept has given us the educational system we have today, and it is not what was promised.

Don’t misunderstand my point; there is great value in a broad, liberal-arts education. It is just that, today, we do it in a way that is ineffective; time is wasted, and so is a lot of money. College should not be the venue where liberal-arts education begins. Instead, college is where students should start to specialize in a course of study, having already acquired general knowledge in K-12. The “12” does represent years, you know.

According to Dorothy Sayers, a noted 20th-century advocate of the liberal arts (and especially the classical liberal arts), much of modern education involves an “artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence.” It used to be that a well-educated person was deemed fit for higher education at about the age of 16 and specialization (either in the form of apprenticed work or more advanced learning) by the age of 18. With the advent of the modern era, however, the West moved away from serious education to the point that it has now collapsed.

Suffice it to say, in the West today (and especially in the U.S.), a type of schizophrenic malaise has crept into colleges, due primarily to an ineffective K-12 system, an overreliance on developmental college curricula, and “general course requirements” that essentially reiterate high-school learning.

Read it all.

Universities Are Doing Education Badly — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal https://t.co/QxnZUnk8XN

— Allen Mendenhall (@allenmendenhall) October 9, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Appalling.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books – The Atlantic https://t.co/xK0Aru2Enm

— Carlton Larson (@carltonfwlarson) October 1, 2024

Under the sponsorship of the YMCA, Wilder spent the following academic year touring college campuses. He told the story of the “Mount Hermon One Hundred” and urged students to pledge themselves to become missionaries. Some 2,000 did so. To avoid allowing the bright light of this new movement to flicker out, in 1888 YMCA leaders organized the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (known simply as the SVM). They placed the recent Cornell graduate, John R. Mott, at its head. The SVM formed organizations on college, university and seminary campuses across the nation. Students signed pledge cards stating their intention to become missionaries and joined weekly meetings to study missions. The watchword of the movement illustrates the boldness and optimism of the Christian youth of that era: “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation.”

The SVM became one of the most successful missionary-recruiting organizations of all time. Prior to its formation, American Protestants supported less than a thousand missionaries throughout the world. Between 1886 and 1920, the SVM recruited 8,742 missionaries in the U.S. Around twice that number were actually sent out as missionaries in this period, many of them influenced by the SVM though never members. SVM leaders also formed college groups around the world in countries where missionaries had established mission colleges during the previous century. Their goal was to create a missionary force large enough to evangelize every nation. They thought in military terms. Missionaries were soldiers in God’s army. The SVM sought to recruit, to support, and to place these soldiers strategically around the world. If done shrewdly, they thought they would surely conquer the world.

Read it all.

Earlier this month, a detective knocked on Shavon Harvey’s door, in suburban Ohio, to ask about her son. The son had sent a Snapchat message from her phone to his friends, saying there would be shootings at several schools nearby.

She rushed to the police station, where her son was already in custody, but the police did not release him. He was charged with inducing panic, a second-degree felony, and officials kept him in detention for 10 nights.

He is 10.

Ms. Harvey’s son is far from the only child arrested this month after similar behavior. And he’s not even the youngest.

Read it all.

We need to find a non-law-enforcement solution to students who make threats on social media. This @nytimes piece explains why.

As School Threats Proliferate, More Than 700 Students Are Arrested https://t.co/dnTc2hQ1MG

— Tom Warrick (@TomWarrickAC) September 26, 2024

The economic, social, and public benefits provided by universities are “threatened by the financial crisis” in higher education, the Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Pete Wilcox, has warned.

Contributing to a two-hour debate on the subject in the House of Lords last week, Dr Wilcox said that, in his diocese, the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University “support more than 19,500 jobs and generate more than £1 billion annually for the local economy. What is true in Sheffield is true across the country: universities are generally hugely beneficial to the communities within which they are situated.”

The Church of England believed that higher education should serve the common good, he said. The universities mentioned did this in a variety of ways, including private investment, and volunteer and work placements across health, social care, the law, and other areas.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

The economic, social, and public benefits provided by universities are “threatened by the financial crisis” in higher education, the Bishop of Sheffield @PeteWilcox1564 has warned https://t.co/Jx29BNFPf0

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 17, 2024

The pandemic’s babies, toddlers and preschoolers are now school-age, and the impact on them is becoming increasingly clear: Many are showing signs of being academically and developmentally behind.

Interviews with more than two dozen teachers, pediatricians and early childhood experts depicted a generation less likely to have age-appropriate skills — to be able to hold a pencil, communicate their needs, identify shapes and letters, manage their emotions or solve problems with peers.

A variety of scientific evidence has also found that the pandemic seems to have affected some young children’s early development. Boys were more affected than girls, studies have found.

Read it all.

The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling
Teachers this year saw the effects of the pandemic’s stress and isolation on young students: Some can barely speak, sit still or even hold a pencil, @clairecm and @smervosh report for @nytimes. pic.twitter.com/RWtcuhFhDG

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) July 1, 2024

THE appointment of two new Oxford Regius Professors and Canons of Christ Church was announced from Downing Street on Thursday.

The Starbridge Professor of Theology and Natural Sciences in the University of Cambridge, the Revd Dr Andrew Davison, has been appointed Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity: one of the oldest chairs in the university, established by King Henry VIII….

The Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke University, in the US, Dr Luke Bretherton, is to be the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology. He is also currently Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke.

His predecessor at Christ Church, the Revd Professor Nigel Biggar, retired in 2022.

His Majesty The King has approved the appointment of two new Regius Professorships at Christ Church. We look forward to welcoming Professor Luke Bretherton and The Revd Professor Andrew Davison in the coming months! #MuChChLove
Find out more 👇https://t.co/kzPUZIGZSA pic.twitter.com/s8idYVu3d8

— Christ Church (@ChCh_Oxford) June 13, 2024

The report has been influenced by a series of recent blasphemy cases in Britain that have been inappropriately handled, according to government sources familiar with its findings.

They include the 2021 protests against a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who received death threats and is still in hiding after showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a religious studies lesson.

Another incident understood to have informed the report’s recommendations was the controversy last year in Wakefield, also West Yorkshire, after a copy of the Quran was slightly damaged at a high school. West Yorkshire police recorded it as a “hate incident,” which led to concerns that officers were being pressured into imposing de-facto blasphemy laws by conservative faith groups. It led to Suella Braverman, the home secretary at the time, introducing a new code of conduct for the police to protect freedom of expression.

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Teachers will be given protection from claims of blasphemy by religious groups under proposals set out in a government-commissioned report ⬇️https://t.co/9y7vlpx9gP

— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) May 17, 2024

Degrees in philosophy and religious studies are to be “phased out” at the University of Kent, it was announced last week.

Courses in anthropology, art history, health and social care, journalism, music, and audio technology are also to be dropped, in part because the university believes that it can no longer compete in these specialisms, but more generally because of recent “financial challenges including the fixed tuition fee, rising costs, and changes in student behaviour”.

The changes are part of its Kent 2030 plan, “which brings together a range of improvements based on suggestions from our students”, a press release circulated last week says. Students on the courses to be phased out will be taught and supervised until the end of their degrees.

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Degrees in philosophy and religious studies are to be “phased out” at the University of Kent, it was announced last week https://t.co/pHmnywcy8G

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 28, 2024

Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli American psychologist and best-selling author whose Nobel Prize-winning research upended economics — as well as fields ranging from sports to public health — by demonstrating the extent to which people abandon logic and leap to conclusions, died March 27. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. She did not say where or how he died.

Dr. Kahneman’s research was best known for debunking the notion of “homo economicus,” the “economic man” who since the epoch of Adam Smith was considered a rational being who acts out of self-interest. Instead, Dr. Kahneman found, people rely on intellectual shortcuts that often lead to wrongheaded decisions that go against their own best interest.

These misguided decisions occur because humans “are much too influenced by recent events,” Dr. Kahneman once said. “They are much too quick to jump to conclusions under some conditions and, under other conditions, they are much too slow to change.”

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Daniel Kahneman, who changed psychology and economics forever, dies at 90.

Thanks for everything.

We remember him in 10 great quotes: pic.twitter.com/kiyhC2kCo3

— Wisdom Theory (@wisdom_theory) March 27, 2024

The tendency to downplay the value of toddler groups has been challenged in a new booklet that highlights the vital part that they play in preparing children for school.

The booklet, It’s not ‘just’ a parent and toddler group, has been compiled by a number of organisations brought together by Dave King, the strategic director for Gather Movement, an organisation that works with churches seeking to transform communities. The group including Kids Matter, Daniel’s Den, Care for the Family, 1277, 5 Minus, and Love and Joy Ministries.

It encourages those running groups to stop prefacing references to their work with “just” (“I’m just putting out some toys”), and sets out 12 aspects of school-readiness to which the groups can contribute.

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Really enjoyed looking at a new booklet, "It’s not ‘just’ a parent and toddler group", about how they can contribute to school-readiness, & a chat with Jo Gordon of @DanielsDenUK. "The primary thing of a toddler group is that unconditional welcome to all" https://t.co/Gq1Wvx9xnE

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) March 19, 2024

Betsy Sumner always knew she wanted to be a teacher. She came from a family of educators and took a class in high school for aspiring teachers. She began teaching straight out of college in 2009 and loved it.

But last summer she left her job teaching family and consumer sciences, the subject previously known as home economics, at a high school in northern Virginia. With four children of her own, juggling the demanding workload was no longer worth it for the pay.

“It’s almost like preparing for a circus or a theater performance—every day you have to show up and do a show,” she said of preparing for class each day. “It’s just not really sustainable.”

Public-school teachers like Sumner are still leaving the profession in higher numbers than before the pandemic, a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 10 states show, though departures have fallen since their peak in 2022. The elevated rate is likely due to a combination of factors and adds one more challenge to schools battling learning loss and frequent student absences.

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Teachers are still quitting the profession in high numbers, as schools continue to be shaken by political discord, learning loss and chronic absenteeism https://t.co/ckIsXq00Ij https://t.co/ckIsXq00Ij

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 4, 2024