Nothing is more political than education. The Texas State Board of Education reminded us of the phenomenon this month, rewriting textbook guidelines to match their conservative, theological worldviews. Not since the Kansas Board of Education voted to restrict the teaching of evolution has an entire state backlashed so strongly against science and reason. In an [...]

In this video from The UpTake forwarded to Education Futures from Bring Me the News, President Obama speaks on the relationship between education and national competitiveness (you can skip the introductions and jump to his talk which begins around 6:20 into the video): President Obama: “So make no mistake: Our future is on the line. [...]

Dan Sutch at Futurelab (UK) alerted me to their new project, Beyond Current Horizons: Beyond Current Horizons looks at the future of education, beyond 2025. The aim is to help our education system prepare for and respond to the challenges it faces as society and technology rapidly evolve. What skills will children need for work? [...]

Cedefop, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, supplied a comprehensive assessment of Europe’s skills requirements up to 2020 to the European Council.  In the study, they identified six employment trends leading to the year 2020 horizon: Services sector still expanding: Europe continues to shift away from manufacturing and agricultural industries Around 20 [...]

A few days ago, Minnesota Public Radio‘s Gary Eichten shared a clip of Duke’s Vivek Wadhwa, speaking about his research on the effects of globalization in the United States: After researching the impact of globalization on U.S. competitiveness in the tech industry, Vivek Wadhwa was surprised to see his findings contradict commonly-held ideas. He recently [...]

Phil Plait says it better: The Oklahoma House of Representatives has passed a bill that says that a student can receive a passing grade in an Earth Science class if they say that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the Earth an hour ago, and then planted false memories into every single living creature on Earth [...]

A collaborative work by Kevin Boyack, Dick Klavans and W. Bradford Paley maps the relationships among scientific paradigms through an analysis of published works in 2003. Seed Magazine has a link to a much larger JPEG (5.3MB) as well as a description of how the image was constructed. Prints of the image are also being [...]