3 Steps to Help Educators Get Phones Out of Schools

Aug 13, 2024 |

Smartphones in schools are increasingly wreaking havoc on both the academic and social development of America’s children. They are distracting students from learning, inhibiting healthy socializing, and undermining student discipline in class and on campus. Teachers are frustrated, students are suffering, and parents are fighting against two powerful forces: curated algorithms designed to give their children constant dopamine hits, and age-old teenage peer pressure.

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What is an “Artificial Womb”? A Response to Katy Faust and Samantha Stephenson

Aug 13, 2024 |

Katy Faust’s recent essay on artificial womb technology (AWT) sought to address the social and developmental impacts of AWT on children and families. The AWT that she is describing is referred to in the medical ethics literature as “complete ectogenesis” or full gestation outside of the womb. In her essay, Faust assesses the potential impacts of such AWT through the lens of her experience with emotionally starved infants at an orphanage in China, concluding that the potential harms of AWT could be substantially worse for children than parental abandonment. Her reasoning: abandoned children in the orphanage at least benefited from nine months of gestational development, while AWT would completely deprive children of the maternal-fetal bond. Faust buttresses her analysis with other examples of the commodification of children in the field of reproductive technology, including surrogacy, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and sperm donation.

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Can we create kinder schools?

Aug 13, 2024 |

A mother says, “Children remind me of chickens, seeking out the weak and wounded and pecking them to death. They have discovered that my 9-year-old son, who is autistic, is bothered by loud noises, and they scream and whistle in his ear until he cries.”

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