Dumb Phones, Feature Phones, and the New Tech Landscape

Dumb Phones, Feature Phones, and the New Tech Landscape featuring Alvaro de Vicente at HeightsCast. If we’ve decided against smart phones for our kids, can dumb phones come to the rescue? New options for families have hit the tech market, offering few or select features, and giving parents new things to consider when it comes to kids and phones in 2025. Headmaster Alvaro de Vicente offers a framework for thinking about smart phones, dumb phones, and feature phones in a culture still weighed down by anxiety and distraction. Listen

When a Smartwatch Disrupts Second Grade by Delaney Ruston, MD and Lisa Tabb at After Babel. While educators have had their attention focused on smartphones, 5-to-10 year olds have been trooping across the doorsteps of elementary schools wearing watches wired to the internet. In fact, according to one estimate from market.us, approximately 60% of children aged 7–12 owned or regularly used a smartwatch. To complicate matters, this cohort of digital natives has become a target market in-and-of-themselves. Analysts project the global kids’ smartwatch market will be worth $2.0 billion this year. Read

The Schools Reviving Shop Class Offer a Hedge Against the AI Future by Te-Ping Chen at The Wall Street Journal. In America’s most surprising cutting-edge classes, students pursue hands-on work with wood, metals and machinery, getting a jump on lucrative old-school careers. School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century. They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college. Read

Inside the School Where Five-Year-Olds Learn to Think Like Socrates by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson at The Sunday Times. Great Hearts is leading the charge in America for a shift to classical education, meaning an academically challenging curriculum rooted in the Greek, Roman and Renaissance traditions, with a focus on classic works of western literature, philosophy and politics… The 48 Great Hearts academies are charter schools, which are publicly funded, tuition-free institutions that must meet certain standards but are independent from the public school districts and have more flexibility in what they teach. Read

Getting Schooled by Mark Judge at Chronicles. A few years ago, I signed up for education classes at my local community college. The economics of journalism were collapsing, so I thought I might make a second career in teaching. It was there that I discovered what is wrong with the American education system—and how we might fix it. With the Department of Education under new and increasing scrutiny, including calls for it to close, it’s a good time to revisit that experience. Read

These Three Schools Are Preparing Teachers For Classical Education by Michael McShane at Forbes. If classical education is going to continue to grow, it will need teachers. Teaching in a classical school is a tall order. Teachers are expected to master subject matter that goes beyond traditional teacher preparation, methods (like Socratic seminars) that are generally not part of teacher training, and to provide a moral and ethical example beyond what teachers are typically asked to. Three universities — Flagler College, The University of Dallas, and Hillsdale College — have stepped up to tackle this challenge. Read

Catholic Schools Surpass Public Schools in Nation’s Report Card by Kate Quiñones at Catholic News Agency. Catholic schools outranked public schools in recently released mathematics and reading test scores for 2024. The Nation’s Report Card by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released national scores for fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics and reading. Catholic school students in both grades surpassed public school students in both categories. Read

McMahon is Officially Setting in Motion the End of the Agency, after it Has Already Cut Many of Its Left-Wing Programs by Breccan F. Thies at The Federalist. Education Secretary Linda McMahon laid out the “final mission” for the Department of Education, initiating President Donald Trump’s goal to “send education back to the states” and shut down the federal agency. In one of her first official acts as Education Secretary, immediately after her successful Monday confirmation vote in the Senate, McMahon sent a speech to department staff titled “Our Department’s Final Mission.” The speech detailed several benchmarks necessary to fulfilling the decades-long goal of conservatives to end the bureaucratic thwarting of the American education system. Read

The Best History of the American Revolution by Andrew J. Zwerneman at Cana Academy. If you could have one book in your library on the American Revolution, here is the one I recommend: Jack Warren, Jr.’s, Freedom: the Enduring Importance of the American Revolution. The author begins his magisterial work with this observation: “America is free because nearly 250 years ago brave people fought a war to establish the independence of the United States and create a system of government to protect the freedom of its citizens.” Read

How Can I Bring the Liturgical Calendar to Life in My Family’s Daily Routine? by Allison Auth at Denver Catholic. The more we can involve other families in our traditions, the more our community grows. Creating rituals of celebration, penance and prayer in our homes gives our children a rhythm of life we can all enter into together: activities in which memories are created, communities are built, and God is worshiped. Read

Throwback Thursday

How Seminar-Style Classes Produce Thoughtful, Adaptive Students featuring Paul O’Reilly at Anchored by the Classical Learning Test on December 14, 2023. On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Paul O’Reilly, president of Thomas Aquinas College (TAC). The two discuss Paul’s background growing up in Ireland during a time of high tensions between Protestants and Catholics. They explore how the campus has changed since Paul attended in the 1980s, including a recent expansion into New England. And finally, they talk about the merits of seminar-style classes to produce thoughtful, adaptive graduates. Listen