On 16th October 1945, as the ruins of war still marked London’s skyline, representatives of forty-four nations signed a new constitution. Their task was not to rebuild bridges or ports or industrial plants. That work would come later. Instead, they were asked to rebuild something far less tangible, and far more ambitious: the conditions of peace in the minds of people.

Every culture finds its own way to remember. Some carve their stories in stone, some store them in libraries; however others carry them in song, and performance. Across the world, performers have acted as living archives; keeping history not through writing but through re-enactment.

In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to describe cultural units of transmission; songs, jokes, fashions; that replicate like genes. Social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram supercharge this process. In 2025, memes do not trickle from person to person in small niche corners of the internet; they flood across continents as a part of mainstream culture.

When I sat down with Scott Thornbury, I might have expected to meet an educationalist obsessed with finding the latest method. With a reputation as one of the most respected voices in language teaching, he has shaped ESL classrooms around the world. Yet in conversation, I encountered an educator who returns again and again to the more understated human aspects of education.

When I began my first year as a newly qualified teacher, I was asked to teach a Year 7 computer science class. At first, I felt confident as after all I’d studied the subject myself not so long ago. But what I encountered in the curriculum quickly knocked that confidence.

The modern classroom is no longer a battleground for attention — it’s a battleground between the demands of cognitive development and the allure of pocket-sized digital worlds. But what is this really doing to learning? And what, exactly, is it doing to the brain?

One hundred years ago, a 24-year-old biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, walked into a courtroom; and at the same time, into the history books. As we revisit this story, we get a glimpse of a drama that in many ways has never quite left the classroom.

On this day in 1853, Georges-Eugène Haussmann was appointed Prefect of the Seine. This was the beginning of a project to use the environment to teach citizens implicitly how to engage socially.

Before our classrooms became populated by screens, endless streams of worksheets, or the humble textbook, there was another tool for learning: the object.

Across the ‘green desert’ of the Mongolian steppe, nearly 30% of the population live a nomadic or semi-nomadic life. In a world of standardised education, Mongolia provides a novel approach to rooting education in culture.

Recently, I came across an interesting term: ‘Geneva babies’. It’s not an official label, but a shorthand used among some UN staff. What can it tell us about the surprising ways inequality persists?

Two weeks ago, whilst at breakfast, on my daily morning doom-scroll through social media, I came across a video which struck me as unusual as it did oddly terrifying.

I used to say teaching felt like putting on a performance. The analogy made sense at the time. But looking back now, I wonder: ‘should I have been the one who was performing at all?’

In a world where teachers are scarce and class sizes are ballooning, an old abandoned educational method may offer surprisingly modern solutions.