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21st Century Education

At GEII we look at education for the 21 st century in the following ways:

See 21st Century Education in Action

Competencies in the Intrapersonal Domain

1) Intellectual Openness, including:

Flexibility, adaptability, artistic and cultural appreciation, personal and social responsibility, cultural awareness and competence, appreciation for diversity, adaptability, continuous learning, intellectual interest and curiosity

2) Work Ethic & Conscientiousness, including:

a. Initiative, self-direction, responsibility, perseverance, grit; productivity, type 1 self-regulation (metacognitive skills, including forethought, performance, and self-reflection), professionalism/ ethics; integrity; citizenship, career orientation

b. Positive Core Self-Evaluation, including: i. Type 2 self-regulation (self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement), physical and psychological health

For more about this domain, please see National Research Council. Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2012. doi:10.17226/13398 .

Competencies in the Interpersonal Domain

1) Teamwork & Collaboration, including:

Communication, collaboration, teamwork, cooperation, coordination, interpersonal skills, empathy/perspective taking, trust, service orientation, conflict resolution, negotiation

2) Leadership, including:

Leadership, responsibility, assertive communication, self-presentation, social influence with others

Competencies in the Cognitive Domain

1) Cognitive Processes & Strategies, including:

Critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, reasoning and argumentation, interpretation, decision making, adaptive learning, and executive function

2) Knowledge, including:

Information literacy, including research using evidence and recognizing bias in sources; information and communication technology literacy, oral and written communication, active listening

3) Creativity, including:

Creativity and innovation

Values and Attitudes

The values and attitudes cultivated in participants by each program will vary by country, region, philosophies, and other social and cultural factors. However, as values and attitudes are central to developing a person’s character and shaping the beliefs, attitudes, decisions and actions of a person, we felt it was important to ask each organization included on our website to explicitly name the particular values and attitudes they seek to nurture in their program participants.

There are many sources about what kind of values, and we note that they vary according to different contexts. One document might be a helpful resource among many is the following by Margaret Sinclair titled, “ Learning to Live Together: Building Skills, Values, and Attitudes for the 21st Century ” published in 2005 by the International Bureau of Education: 

Active, Engaging, and Empowering Pedagogy

21st Century pedagogy includes a focus on active, engaging, and empowering learning. Personalization, participation, and learning through authentic real-world contexts, solving problems creatively, developing projects from the beginning to the end, working collaboratively with peers and mentors, with a focus on developing metacognitive abilities, adapting and applying new knowledge while integrating it into existing conceptual frameworks are all examples of powerful pedagogy.

For more on this topic, please see this working paper from UNESCO (December, 2015) by Cynthia Luna Scott, titled, “ What Kind of Pedagogies for the 21st Century? ” among many others: 

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The turning point: Why we must transform education now

Global warming. Accelerated digital revolution. Growing inequalities. Democratic backsliding. Loss of biodiversity. Devastating pandemics. And the list goes on. These are just some of the most pressing challenges that we are facing today in our interconnected world.

The diagnosis is clear: Our current global education system is failing to address these alarming challenges and provide quality learning for everyone throughout life. We know that education today is not fulfilling its promise to help us shape peaceful, just, and sustainable societies. These findings were detailed in UNESCO’s Futures of Education Report in November 2021 which called for a new social contract for education.

That is why it has never been more crucial to reimagine the way we learn, what we learn and how we learn. The turning point is now. It’s time to transform education. How do we make that happen?

Here’s what you need to know. 

Why do we need to transform education?

The current state of the world calls for a major transformation in education to repair past injustices and enhance our capacity to act together for a more sustainable and just future. We must ensure the right to lifelong learning by providing all learners - of all ages in all contexts - the knowledge and skills they need to realize their full potential and live with dignity. Education can no longer be limited to a single period of one’s lifetime. Everyone, starting with the most marginalized and disadvantaged in our societies, must be entitled to learning opportunities throughout life both for employment and personal agency. A new social contract for education must unite us around collective endeavours and provide the knowledge and innovation needed to shape a better world anchored in social, economic, and environmental justice.  

What are the key areas that need to be transformed?

• Inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools

Education is in crisis. High rates of poverty, exclusion and gender inequality continue to hold millions back from learning. Moreover, COVID-19 further exposed the inequities in education access and quality, and violence, armed conflict, disasters and reversal of women’s rights have increased insecurity. Inclusive, transformative education must ensure that all learners have unhindered access to and participation in education, that they are safe and healthy, free from violence and discrimination, and are supported with comprehensive care services within school settings. Transforming education requires a significant increase in investment in quality education, a strong foundation in comprehensive early childhood development and education, and must be underpinned by strong political commitment, sound planning, and a robust evidence base.

• Learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development

There is a crisis in foundational learning, of literacy and numeracy skills among young learners. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries, with an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand a simple written text. Children with disabilities are 42% less likely to have foundational reading and numeracy skills compared to their peers. More than 771 million people still lack basic literacy skills, two-thirds of whom are women. Transforming education means empowering learners with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to be resilient, adaptable and prepared for the uncertain future while contributing to human and planetary well-being and sustainable development. To do so, there must be emphasis on foundational learning for basic literacy and numeracy; education for sustainable development, which encompasses environmental and climate change education; and skills for employment and entrepreneurship.

• Teachers, teaching and the teaching profession

Teachers are essential for achieving learning outcomes, and for achieving SDG 4 and the transformation of education. But teachers and education personnel are confronted by four major challenges: Teacher shortages; lack of professional development opportunities; low status and working conditions; and lack of capacity to develop teacher leadership, autonomy and innovation. Accelerating progress toward SDG 4 and transforming education require that there is an adequate number of teachers to meet learners’ needs, and all education personnel are trained, motivated, and supported. This can only be possible when education is adequately funded, and policies recognize and support the teaching profession, to improve their status and working conditions.

• Digital learning and transformation

The COVID-19 crisis drove unprecedented innovations in remote learning through harnessing digital technologies. At the same time, the digital divide excluded many from learning, with nearly one-third of school-age children (463 million) without access to distance learning. These inequities in access meant some groups, such as young women and girls, were left out of learning opportunities. Digital transformation requires harnessing technology as part of larger systemic efforts to transform education, making it more inclusive, equitable, effective, relevant, and sustainable. Investments and action in digital learning should be guided by the three core principles: Center the most marginalized; Free, high-quality digital education content; and Pedagogical innovation and change.

• Financing of education

While global education spending has grown overall, it has been thwarted by high population growth, the surmounting costs of managing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the diversion of aid to other emergencies, leaving a massive global education financial gap amounting to US$ 148 billion annually. In this context, the first step toward transformation is to urge funders to redirect resources back to education to close the funding gap. Following that, countries must have significantly increased and sustainable financing for achieving SDG 4 and that these resources must be equitably and effectively allocated and monitored. Addressing the gaps in education financing requires policy actions in three key areas: Mobilizing more resources, especially domestic; increasing efficiency and equity of allocations and expenditures; and improving education financing data. Finally, determining which areas needs to be financed, and how, will be informed by recommendations from each of the other four action tracks .

What is the Transforming Education Summit?

UNESCO is hosting the Transforming Education Pre-Summit on 28-30 June 2022, a meeting of  over 140 Ministers of Education, as well as  policy and business leaders and youth activists, who are coming together to build a roadmap to transform education globally. This meeting is a precursor to the Transforming Education Summit to be held on 19 September 2022 at the UN General Assembly in New York. This high-level summit is convened by the UN Secretary General to radically change our approach to education systems. Focusing on 5 key areas of transformation, the meeting seeks to mobilize political ambition, action, solutions and solidarity to transform education: to take stock of efforts to recover pandemic-related learning losses; to reimagine education systems for the world of today and tomorrow; and to revitalize national and global efforts to achieve SDG-4.

• More on the Transforming Education Summit
• More on the Pre-Summit

Related items

• Future of education
• SDG: SDG 4 - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

This article is related to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals .

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How technology is reinventing education

Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

The next decade of education transformation: 5 reports to spur debate and discussion

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop.

September 15, 2022

This year, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings is 20 years old. In 2002, Gene Sperling founded the center to help advance the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals and was deeply involved with the establishment and early governance of the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, the predecessor of the Global Partnership for Education. We have traveled far over the last two decades. Much of the center’s work over the first decade was dedicated to this type of strengthening education ecosystems work at the global level. We have been proud to collaborate with many partners—often going from research to recommendations to action (e.g., the Global Business Coalition for Education , the U.N. Special Envoy’s Office for Global Education , the Learning Metrics Task Force , and the Education Commission )—to help elevate education on the global agenda.

Today, as CUE looks toward our third decade of work, we plan to build on our existing efforts to work with partners in education jurisdictions around the world to advance the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since 2016, we have been partnering with approximately 100 partners in 40 countries around the world from governments to civil society organizations to the private sector to work collaboratively on identifying and scaling evidence-based, contextually relevant and impactful change. Working with our partners, we have worked across an array of important topics from understanding the range of competencies young people need to thrive in a fast changing world to identifying innovations that help leapfrog education to change management processes that help sustainably embed new approaches inside education systems to processes that center women and girls’ voices to advance gender-transformative educational approaches.

Faced with the deep impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic alongside the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, increasing economic inequality, and a wave of fake news the U.N. Secretary General calls an “infodemic,” it is clear that education systems must not only recover from lost instructional time but deeply pivot to live up to their potential to be a transformative social service in communities around the world.

Moving forward, we will bring all our work together under the shared goal of transformation. We will focus our efforts, working even more deeply with our partners, to help advance education system transformation that can get jurisdiction leaders and their partners closer to the vision embedded in the SDGs: equitable and relevant education that helps everyone become a lifelong learner. Faced with the deep impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic alongside the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, increasing economic inequality, and a wave of fake news the U.N. Secretary General calls an “infodemic,” it is clear that education systems must not only recover from lost instructional time but deeply pivot in order to live up to their potential to be a transformative social service in communities around the world.

To kick off our new vision for advancing education system transformation over the next decade, we are sharing five publications focused on transformation. We hope these inspire conversation and debate. They are intended to explore education transformation’s urgency, the hurdles faced, and the various pathways needed for advancement. These pieces can be explored in any order, and we invite you to read them, critique them, and share your thoughts with us.

1. ‘Transforming education systems: What, why, and how’

In this piece , coauthors David Sengeh and I provide a big-picture look at what transformation is, why it is important, and some steps to engage in a transformation journey. We argue that education system transformation should entail “a fresh review of the goals of your education system—are they meeting the moment we are in, tackling inequality and building resilience for a changing world, fully context aware, and owned broadly across society—and then fundamentally positioning all components of your education system to contribute toward this shared purpose.” We go on to propose three main steps that system leaders in particular can take to advance transformation in their community or country (Figure 1): This “participatory approach” to transformation draws on evidence from multiple countries on what are major barriers to and accelerators of education system change.

Figure 1. The participatory approach to transformation

2. ‘Transforming education for holistic student development: Learning from education system (re)building around the world’

This piece was developed through close collaboration with scholars in almost 10 universities around the world. The lead authors, Amanda Datnow, Vicki Park, Donald Peurach, and James Spillane, examine the twin questions: “What would it mean—and what would it take—to build education systems that develop every child as would that child’s own parents? Is there evidence that it is possible to (re)build academically focused education systems to support holistic student development?” They argue that this shift—from academic only to holistic development—is essential if systems are to transform to help young people thrive. To answer this question, they worked with 10 scholars—Juan Bravo, Whitney Hegseth, Jeanne Ho, Devi Khanna, Dennis Kwek, Angela Lyle, Amelia Peterson, Thomas K. Walsh, Jose Weinstein, and Hwei Ming Wong—to examine reform journeys across seven jurisdictions. With a focus on high and middle-income countries, they examined the barriers and strategies seven systems used to expand toward holistic learning, including in districts, states, or national ministries in Chile, Canada, India, Ireland, Singapore, the United States, and in the cross-national International Baccalaureate system.

Ultimately, they identified 10 major lessons coming out of the transformation journeys across the seven systems: 1) Engage diverse stakeholders, 2) Construct coherence, 3) Manage the equity and rigor tension, 4) Build social infrastructure, 5) Develop instructional designs, 6) Design educational infrastructure, 7) Balance common conventions with local discretion, 8) Distribute leadership, 9) Support infrastructure use, and 10) Monitor practice and performance.

3. ‘Systems thinking to transform schools: Identifying levers that lift educational quality’

This piece , coauthored by Bruce Fuller and Hoyun Kim, provides a deep dive into the historical roots of systems thinking and how it has informed approaches to education reform. It primarily draws upon the intellectual traditions and literature in high-income countries but also illustrates how these ideas have traveled to middle- and low-income countries. After reviewing the organizational levers inside education systems that touch classrooms, it outlines the diverse approaches to education reform informed by systems thinking. The authors argue that there are at least four distinct education change approaches inspired by systems thinking: 1) standards-based accountability, 2) instructional sub-system, 3) teaching guild, and 4) ecological approach.

Each pathway reflects a distinct analysis of the core problems holding back system improvement and where the power lies to address the problems. Ultimately, the authors argue that although it is not “either, or” in terms of selecting one pathway over another, there is a need in many parts of the world to thaw out “highly institutionalized habits and routines” in favor of harnessing the capacity to innovate and be responsive to particular community needs by local schools and education ecosystems. They conclude with a set of key questions leaders should ask themselves when reflecting on how to harness systems thinking for improving education.

4. ‘Shared priorities to transform education systems: Mapping recovery and transformation agendas’

In this piece , I argue that the United Nation’s Transforming Education Summit (TES) is a unique opportunity for education to be at the top of the global agenda, and to make the most of this moment, actors in the global education ecosystem will need to coalesce around a shared narrative, finding ways to work synergistically—not competitively—in education jurisdictions around the world. I start by reviewing the past success of the global education community in coming together behind the shared “access plus learning” narrative in the lead-up to the development of the SDGs. I then map the range of agendas generating attention and debate in the TES process, especially at the presummit meeting in Paris this past June. I argue that there is a broad distinction between those actors focusing on pandemic recovery versus those focused on longer-term transformation. But while both approaches are needed—and indeed complementary—there is a need to forge closer linkages across agendas.

The piece highlights six of the main agendas prominently discussed in the TES process to date and analyzes them in relation to the level of support they receive by global actors versus actors representing “voices inside the system”—namely students, parents, teachers, local civil society, and governments. While this analysis only highlights some of the agendas and debates underway, it offers three recommendations in order to catalyze dialogue around where there are clear areas of synergy and where deeper discussion is needed: 1) Work collaboratively on addressing equity and inclusion, which is a broadly shared priority, 2) find ways of working more closely together across complementary agendas focused on building young people’s competence and capability—namely foundational learning, student well-being, and 21st century skills for work and citizenship, and 3) engage in deep discussions on who has the power—global versus voices inside the system actors—to define the purpose of education and guide transformation efforts.

5. Big Education Conversation

Together with a coalition of partners, including Big Change in the United Kingdom alongside multiple government and civil society actors, CUE is launching at TES the global Big Education Conversation . This initiative draws on CUE’s research on mapping the purpose of education across family members, teachers, students, and school leaders as an approach to kickstart conversations about education transformation in communities. One year ago, CUE launched “ Collaborating to transform and improve systems: A playbook for family-school engagement ” and has since been piloting the playbook’s Conversation Starter Tools (surveys and conversation guidance) in over 10 countries across the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Last year Big Change adapted CUE’s survey questions as part of a national Big Education Conversation in the U.K. about the purpose of education. As described above in the first “P” (Purpose) of the participatory approach to education, there is strong evidence to suggest that developing a shared understanding across society of the goals of the education system can accelerate transformation and failing to do so can block it. Hence, the Big Education Conversation initiative is a scalable tool to catalyzing discussions around the purpose of education and can be used by decisionmakers to advance participatory policymaking and by youth, parent, teacher, or community networks to catalyze demand for opening dialogue around the purpose of education. CUE team members Akilah Allen, Emily Morris, Laura Nora, Sophie Partington, Claire Sukumar, and I are leading this work and invite anyone to take up and use the Big Education Conversation approach in their communities and countries.

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21st Century Teaching and Learning

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As a 20th century kid, I was awed by the mere mention of the twenty- first century. The optimist in me envisioned a 21st century that was sleek, modern, and bursting with gadgets that stretched the imagination. Although my dreams of flying cars and room-cleaning robots have not been realized just yet, the gadgets have not disappointed. The impact of abundant and ever-changing technology—particularly information and communication technology—frequently dominates conversations in and about modern society. The same holds true in the field of education, where technology integration and emphasis of the disciplines most closely associated with modern technologies (i.e., science, math, and engineering) are seen as vital. These are important considerations, but 21st century teaching and learning goes beyond technology integration and STEM content; it is also about fostering ways of thinking and promoting dispositions that support success in an age driven by rapidly changing and expanding technologies. Responsive 21st century teaching and caregiving requires educators to create environments and provide experiences that encourage exploration and inquiry, and nurture creativity and curiosity.

The July 2016 issue of Young Children celebrates and explores this 21st century approach to teaching and learning. The cluster articles provide a snapshot of the developmentally appropriate ways the needs of young children growing up today are being addressed.

Some of the most prominent components of 21st century education—problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, authentic learning, appropriate use of technologies, and cross-disciplinary teaching—are the focus in “Integrating the Curriculum to Engage and Challenge Children.” Geared toward practice in kindergarten through third grade, the article by Barbara A. Bradley discusses the ways in which educators of primary school children can incorporate these components in their teaching.

Information and communication technology is changing the way we get information and interact with each other. This is particularly true about social media. In “Are You (P)Interested in 21st Century Teaching and Learning?,” Rachael Huber and C.C. Bates provide an introduction to this popular social media platform and explore one of the new ways teachers are locating and sharing information.

Tracey Hunter-Doniger demonstrates the power of creativity and arts infusion in “ Snapdragons and Math: Using Creativity to Inspire, Motivate, and Engage .” Tracey describes the successful efforts of a kindergarten teacher and art educator who designed a cross-curricular collaboration aimed at promoting children’s engagement and enhancing learning.

One of the benefits of the ever-increasing availability of new technology is a shrinking world. In light of our global society, it is essential that crosscultural understanding be fostered in 21st century early childhood education settings. In “Classroom Contexts That Support Young Children’s Intercultural Understanding,” María V. Acevedo explores the efforts used to bridge gaps between a group of preschool teachers’ existing practices and the needs of the children in their classrooms.

In “ Beyond Bouncing the Ball: Toddlers and Teachers Investigate Physics ,” Eric Bucher and Marcos Hernández show us how topics that were once considered beyond the bounds of early childhood classrooms are now being introduced in developmentally appropriate ways. Bucher and Hernández position teachers as reflective co-investigators, a departure from the more traditional view of teachers as disseminators of information. The authors describe the educators in their article as teacher researchers and present a process that was implemented to promote reflective practice.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children has long embraced teacher research—teachers’ systematic inquiry of their practice—and its potential for advancing the profession and promoting high-quality early childhood education. Since 2004, NAEYC has published Voices of Practitioners , the only teacher research journal dedicated to early childhood education. To bring teacher research to a wider audience, a new Voices of Practitioners article will be published regularly in Young Children, beginning with this issue. We are excited to continue promoting teacher research and to make this valuable resource available in print.

Finally, we are pleased that this particular cluster coincides with the debut of Growing in STEM, a new column focusing on developmentally appropriate practice related to early childhood science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Reflecting a 21st century-minded pedagogy premised on inquiry and integration, the column promises to support early childhood educators at all levels as they seek to enhance STEM teaching and learning in their classrooms.

We hope you find something in this exciting issue that inspires the 21st century educator in you! – M. Deanna Ramey, Editor in Chief

Photograph: © iStock

M. Deanna Ramey was formerly editor-in-chief of Young Children .

Vol. 71, No. 3

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Learning in the 21st Century: Concepts and Tools

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Nader Rifai, Todd Rose, Graham T McMahon, Bror Saxberg, Ulrik Juul Christensen, Learning in the 21st Century: Concepts and Tools, Clinical Chemistry , Volume 64, Issue 10, 1 October 2018, Pages 1423–1429, https://doi.org/10.1373/clinchem.2018.292383

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“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” —Benjamin Franklin

The value of learning through education has been recognized for millennia. However, in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, for example, only the offspring of the royalty and the wealthy were afforded such an opportunity. Aristotle's Peripatetic Lyceum and Plato's Platonic Academy were the first type of formal schools in the Western world. During the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, the tier-based schools, like those in modern time, were created and made somewhat accessible to commoners.

Surprisingly, the delivery of information by educators has remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, despite the great changes from the industrial revolution and the advancement in technology. Teaching in schools and universities remains to this day a passive delivery of materials that assumes all students receive, handle, absorb, and process information similarly. Even in the medical discipline for which continuing education is expected, such a requirement can be fulfilled by attending lectures and conferences. No evidence of learning, in this case, must be provided. Therefore, competency assessment and meeting regulatory continuing education requirements have often been reduced to achieving compliance rather than actual learning. Furthermore, with information now abundantly accessible, simple and passive transmission of information is no longer considered adequate. Various approaches in delivering knowledge and assessing competency and learning are now being explored and used. For example, AACC (the publisher of Clinical Chemistry ), in collaboration with the New England Journal of Medicine Group (the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine ), and Area9 Lyceum (a global leader in education technology) launched a cloud-based educational program for laboratory medicine professionals that is based on the concept of adaptive learning, the method closest to personalized education. Adaptive learning uses a sophisticated computer algorithm to customize the interaction between the learner and the educational materials; it identifies the areas in which the learner is deficient and provides the needed targeted information to remedy the situation. In this article, we explore some of the new educational concepts and tools and address some of the larger societal and professional issues related to learning with four educators and education experts.

How can new concepts and tools be used in the democratization of the education needed in the 21st century?

Ulrik Juul Christensen: In healthcare, 21st century skills are nothing new—just a new name for something we have known for decades. The challenge is that it has been hard to create learning environments that provide fertile grounds for the development of such skills. For example, when the current wave of simulation-based learning started, we were all critically aware that the cost of developing and using simulation would inhibit its democratization. Still today—almost three decades later—access to simulation is limited, although orders of magnitude larger than before. The primary impact of the modern tools in education, such as personalized adaptive learning, will be to increase the value of the time that learners have in the impactful situations (i.e., use of simulators or human coaching in the clinical setting). Through democratizing access to advanced technologies, learners get basic learning “out of the way” much more efficiently, which then enables them to concentrate on advanced learning in the more impactful environments—which are often diluted by technical or knowledge-based discussions.

Todd Rose: There are at least two related issues that must be addressed: access and credentialing. Access is the most obvious of the two because without it nothing else matters. Getting access right requires addressing a wide range of obstacles that are already recognized, including ensuring high-speed Internet for every individual and prioritizing adoption of platform-agnostic environments over “walled gardens” (to name just two). At the same time, for access to matter, the learning that takes place must count for something. Thus, credentialing matters. In education, a shockingly small number of gatekeepers determine what counts, and allowing these bottlenecks to remain will hold back the full promise of advances in access. Therefore, expanding and diversifying sources and mechanisms for credentialing will also be an important part of efforts to democratize education.

Graham T. McMahon: In an information age, the currency of education is not information. Because we can look up guidelines more quickly than someone can tell them to us, the currency of education for clinicians now includes problem-solving, skill development, wisdom, and insight. Creating these types of activities is more work for the educator and more work for the learner. Only effortful activities are effective at helping clinicians unlearn and replace established practices with new approaches. One-and-done types of educational approaches that have historically been information exchanges must be replaced by programs and activities that stimulate curiosity, create engagement, drive meaningful learning, and then—critically—support the behavior and practice change using repetition and reinforcement over time, effectively incorporating deliberate practice with feedback.

Bror Saxberg: A key is to recognize that minds vary widely in what they take away from any context. This comes from the work in cognitive psychology and motivation research. One student seeing “ax 2 + bx + c” written on a whiteboard reacts by thinking, “Oh, no, a quadratic equation—I hate those things—I know she's going to make me factor it!” Another student reacts by thinking, “Why are there numbers and letters in the same sentence?” Completely different cognitive, motivational, and even emotional experiences from the same sensory experience.

This means if we really wish to make increasing mastery accessible to more students at all ages, we are going to have to consider what their minds already have on board, including domain-specific masteries, motivation, issues of identity, social and emotional mastery, cognitive functioning, and more. These are matters of brain functioning, not choice—to ignore these and wish learning were simpler is to move back toward failing large numbers of learners.

Is testing the best way to assess learning?

Ulrik Juul Christensen: It depends on which kind of testing. The construct behind summative testing when you sample parts of the knowledge that learners should have learned is that by not telling the learner what is being tested, one hopes that the learner will do her best to learn all. However, there are significant weaknesses with this approach. The first is that all imperfections in the questions get amplified, as each answer is used to infer what people know about other things; we now know that it does not work that way. It is difficult to ask 20 questions and get a reasonably precise picture of what people know about, e.g., the 1000 underlying learning objectives in a course. This gets even worse when testing is used to separate top from average performers on the “fringe” performance when an “average” performer is scoring 15 questions correctly while the top performer knows 19 or 20. It is our experience that often you will find at least 5 weak assessment items out of 20, which severely jeopardizes the applicability of this approach to assess what learning has really happened and to compare performance. Pass/fail testing addresses some of these shortcomings and can be used as a cheap alternative for accreditation. An even worse situation occurs when summative testing is used to guide learning or to assess professional competency. In that case, another kind of testing is much more applicable: formative, short cycle testing when learning and competence are continuously assessed and in a very granular way. This can then be used to guide personalized learning, instruction, and coaching.

Todd Rose: All effective learning environments depend on having accurate ways to measure individual performance and progress. Although tests are not necessarily the best way to accomplish this, under the right circumstances if we use the right test , they can be effective. For example, if we need to assess learning to provide an individual with feedback to support his progress, then quality formative tests can be useful. Similarly, if we need to assess the outcome of learning to determine if that individual has mastered relevant material, then quality performance-based tests can also be useful. In stark contrast, norm-referenced tests—the tests that dominate our education landscape—are almost never useful at informing us about individual learning: They are too restrictive in how and what they measure, and they are based on assumptions that are too pessimistic (and inaccurate) about the nature and distribution of human performance to be useful.

Graham T. McMahon: Assessment is necessary for clinicians because—like all humans—we suffer from overconfidence, particularly in areas where we are least capable. This Dunning–Kruger effect has been demonstrated repeatedly among our community. Misplaced confidence consistently leads to errors that the learner may not be aware of; further, if those errors result in suboptimal outcomes for patients, those same learners are apt to blame system issues and patient variability/complexity before they recognize their contribution to the outcome. Fundamentally, clinicians are prone to the same cognitive errors as all other professionals, but we often lack the humility and self-awareness to identify our gaps.

Bror Saxberg: This is a bit of a trick question. It turns out there is substantial evidence that “testing” (asking a mind to produce an outcome grounded in what they are trying to learn) enhances learning (the so-called “testing effect”), so it's actually a good thing to do. However, it doesn't have to look like “a test,” for example, those timed bubble sheets completed with number 2 pencils under hushed quiet solo experiences—it needs to push a mind to produce and decide, no question, but there are many ways to do this.

The question here, though, is about how to “assess learning.” Here, psychometricians have moved to talk about “evidence-centered design.” The idea is that there are many sources of evidence of whether a mind has changed in the way intended. Definitely, some production tasks (even bubble sheets!) can provide some evidence, but so can success on later tasks that require mastery of the earlier task, or observing the kind of process a learner goes through in executing tasks—how “expert-like” is their process? A good one-on-one human tutor can glean a lot of information about how a student is doing simply by watching her try to solve a problem: How much time does he spend looking off in space, following dead ends, looking for hints, etc. all play into an evaluation of mastery, not merely “s/he picked answer D, the correct choice.”

We need, especially with technology-enhanced learning environments, a much richer approach to gathering and interpreting evidence of mastery, including affective reactions, identity views, confidence, the solution process, and more. This can create the important triangulation of evidence to either support or deny a claim that a mind has, indeed, changed in the way intended.

What are the biggest obstacles in moving from teacher-led education to personalized learning?

Graham T. McMahon: The biggest obstacle currently is engagement. Clinicians are burdened by administrative requirements, productivity expectations, patient or research complexity, patient expectations, and trying to balance home and professional lives.

Many are burned out and increasingly cynical—particularly because compliance education has unsurprisingly eroded clinicians' trust in “education,” continuing medical education and maintenance of certification in many cases. High work burden, time pressures, cynicism, and poor self-awareness are not ingredients for engagement in professional development programs, no matter how well designed they are.

Ulrik Juul Christensen: Lack of access to advanced learning environments that can be widely distributed. The current model is the equilibrium that has been reached based on what is possible with classrooms and books (including e-books)—as well as the lack of appreciation for postgraduate education. The time allocated for continuous professional education in many countries is minimal, and often not paid for in many professions.

Todd Rose: An accurate and actionable understanding of individuality. The structure and function of standardized education systems are primarily informed by average-based insights about learning derived from the study of groups, not individuals. From this approach, we arrive at common practices such as fixed-pace instruction, age-based cohorts, norm-referenced assessments, and lockstep learning progressions. Whatever the merits of this approach, it is now understood (see ergodic theorem) that average-based insights often fail to describe and predict individual patterns of performance, learning, and development. As the promise of personalization rests on the ability to be responsive to individuality, the biggest obstacle is getting beyond average-based insights to understand, explain, and support individuality. There is a growing body of knowledge being generated from scientists who have moved beyond average to study patterns of individuality, and although this “science of individuality” has led to breakthroughs in many fields (including medicine), such methods and insights remain the exception in education, where averages still dominate research and practice.

Bror Saxberg: I'm not sure this is quite the right way to put it. A highly trained one-on-one human tutor is a terrific learning environment, and the experience is highly “teacher-led,” so it's not right to characterize “teacher-led” as something to be unvaryingly “moved from.”

What we'd like to do is move from any kind of learner-invariant learning environment (with teachers engaged or without) to personalized learning environments (most likely with teachers involved with the right interactions). “Personalized learning” here does not necessarily refer to technology-enhanced learning (that one-on-one human tutoring example again) but rather refers to a learning environment that changes based on the learner's own state: her motivation, his preexisting masteries, her identity, his social and emotional skills, her cognitive capacities, etc. (Even physical and mental health matter—a very hungry student is unlikely to start, persist, or put in mental effort no matter how gloriously designed a learning experience he's put in. Getting students access to a healthy breakfast is potentially a great personalization of the learning environment!)

Will access to the new educational tools contribute to increasing the gap between those who have and those who have not?

Graham T. McMahon: Digital learning readily allows for the dissemination of programs and activities. However, it's clear that knowing something, building cognitive skill in that area, and then sustaining necessary change is a complex process that needs local support—either from the clinician-learner or from mentors or continuing medical education providers. Those who “have not” may lack access to the technology and people they need to support longitudinal change.

Bror Saxberg: This entirely depends on how communities and societies allocate evidence-based approaches to learning. It is also one of the reasons well-designed technology-enhanced experiences linked with teachers can be so helpful—they may well be able to increase the reliability, affordability, and accessibility of well-designed personalized environments for students, if communities/societies choose to invest in widely distributing these among the most challenged communities, and if they are designed to work with the affordances and interests of those communities.

There are many issues to address beyond what happens in a classroom, or an individual learning environment, to help: Learners who are subject to ongoing “toxic stress” in their lives experience biological chemical changes to their learning systems that reduce their capacity to learn. (Literally, genetic and cellular level responses to extended exposure to the stress hormone cortisol—not a moral issue, or a social issue, but a biological impediment.) If we truly want to help those in challenged communities become their best, we need to think broadly about what affects their learning. And, at least, their learning environments need to consider a full range of characteristics and capacities—academic, of course, but also identity issues, social and emotional capacities, cognitive capacities, and mental and physical issues that can impede or enhance learning and motivation.

Ulrik Juul Christensen: No—access will narrow the gap. Medical students who go to Harvard Medical School, for example, have access to world-class teachers and mentors who can personalize what the individual student is challenged with. New platforms can massively democratize those high value learning opportunities through intelligently helping and coaching learners to focus their efforts.

Todd Rose: It depends on our approach to adoption and diffusion. On the one hand, it will assuredly exacerbate inequality if we rely on the “early adopter” model that works so well in most consumer-facing sectors: Wealthy individuals gain access to the innovation earlier, albeit at a higher price point, and the masses gain access to it later through economies of scale. This model is problematic because personalized learning environments, at their best, hold the potential to amplify individual potential and, therefore, create massive asymmetries in ability and achievement that could have generational consequences. On the other hand, given the incredible (and incredibly expensive) R&D effort that will be needed to develop and scale personalized learning, it is unrealistic to assume that it will happen without a strong market contribution. Therefore, what is needed is a hybrid model of adoption that makes a distinction between public utility aspects of the system (e.g., universal access to underlying infrastructure, data, and other relevant systems) and aspects of the system where we want and expect market-based innovations to flourish. Without a new adoption model, we risk either profound and lasting inequality or the inability to get the innovation off the ground in the first place.

What is the ideal continuing education program?

Ulrik Juul Christensen: Continuous. Smaller amounts of learning happening every week. And no failures. There should only be “thumbs up” and “noncomplete – yet.” Make nonpunitive environments where learners can evolve, and as long as they do not give up, it is totally fine not to be perfect yet.

Todd Rose: It would be platform agnostic and accessible anytime and anywhere; it would be designed for learning in small doses and on a regular basis, rather than large, infrequent doses; it would be adaptive to individuality in terms of content, pace, and sequence of learning; it would have a mastery-learning focus, with an emphasis on timely, relevant, and actionable feedback; it would measure performance against an industry-aligned standard, not relative to other people; it would measure content accuracy and individual awareness of competence; and it would have a context-relevant performance orientation that prioritized demonstrating knowledge and skills in ways that are similar to what is required on the job rather than through proxy metrics that abstract away from real life.

Graham T. McMahon: One that is based on individual gaps and needs, builds on prior knowledge, is relevant to the clinician, is appropriately designed to create curiosity, engagement, learning, and change, and that is connected longitudinally to the learner to support and reinforce both learning and change over time, optimally as part of an educational home.

Bror Saxberg: One that works for a wide array of targeted learners over an extended period to change their real-world behavior in the way intended.

To get this, it requires a declaration of those outcomes and the expected characteristics of the learners coming in: exactly what do we assume of the array of learners intended to be changed (e.g., preexisting skills, identity, social and emotional capacities, cognitive capacities)? And what, exactly, are the decisions and tasks we want these learners to be able to do by the end of that experience? (Ideally, ensuring those decisions and tasks match what top performers decide and do vs mythologies within the profession about “what we experienced that made us what we are,” which often messes up getting ready for modern work.)

Once you have such a definition, then an ideal continuing education program should be grounded in learning science about how those kinds of outcomes can be achieved from those kinds of starting points: what kinds of practice and feedback have evidence they work for the types of outcomes and suboutcomes needed for the types of learners we plan to have. Such an environment would have good evidence-gathering methods (not merely “quizzes” but rather evidence gathered and interpreted at the point of learning and later, when mastery is supposed be used in other circumstances). There should be ample opportunities to practice the actual decision or task to be mastered, with feedback on both the process and the outcome that must be incorporated in another round of practice. Ideally, too, developers should have continuing flows of evidence about which parts of the learning environment are working as designed (usability, learner process development, and outcomes) and which are not.

Have we gone too far in our reliance on standardized tests?

Ulrik Juul Christensen: One hundred percent, yes! Google's clear message that they no longer look at diplomas and degrees during the hiring process confirms our company's strategy for years: We base employment entirely on the candidate's ability to integrate technical skills with 21st century skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and advanced character skills like resilience and leadership.

Todd Rose: Yes, in the sense that we are expecting them to do things that they are not designed to do. Standardized tests may or may not be good metrics for school-level accountability models, but they simply fail when asked to serve as proxies for individual learning and progress because they lack the specificity needed to inform an understanding of any particular individual, they offer next to nothing in terms of feedback for improving over time, and to the extent they say anything at all about individuals is usually comparative in nature, taking the form of a relative rank against other people, on average.

Graham T. McMahon: Tests can have terrific value when they help clinicians identify gaps and compare themselves to a peer community. Test results can be a powerful remedy to overconfidence and poor self-awareness. Tests can also be instructional if/when formative feedback is provided. However, tests can be discouraging to some and can induce the type of binge-and-purge cramming behavior that is antithetical to the types of effective learning programs that facilitate unlearning and support new practice patterns and change.

Bror Saxberg: As mentioned previously, the concepts of evidence-centered design from modern psychometric theory are helpful here: Use multiple lines of evidence to test a hypothesis that a mind has been changed in the way you intend. Standardized tests certainly provide a form of bulk evidence for something related to mastery. However, the activities in a standardized test are far from most real-world working environments (how many bubble tests have YOU completed in the past year at work?), so there is a real risk that too deep a focus on preparing for standardized tests misses the full preparation required for applying decisions and masteries in the real world.

What's needed is to develop more efficient ways to give both formative and summative feedback that is as close to real-world performance as possible. Simulations and performance recording (potentially with automated feedback and scoring) seem like highly promising directions here.

In principle, with rich technology-enhanced clickstream data collection, a fully functioning simulation-based practice-and-feedback environment just by itself might provide enough evidence of mastery that there is no need for some stand-alone, artificial “testing” activity that is far from embedded work practice: The evidence about the process of decision-making, the timing, the write-up and description of reasoning, and how that evolves through practice is likely to be enough to conclude, “this learner is expert enough now.”

What is the most interesting concept in education that is being used currently?

Graham T. McMahon: Reestablishment of human mentorship in professional practice is most interesting to me. Helping capable clinicians support their peers in informal and workplace environments appears to be surprisingly important for the development of high-quality professional practice.

Ulrik Juul Christensen: The emergence of the concept of precision education. It manifests itself in multiple ways, but continuous maintenance of certification based on personalized and adaptive learning has massive potential to change professional education—among many others.

Todd Rose: Mastery learning, which implies that a learner must achieve a certain level of mastery of determined information before proceeding to learn subsequent information. Although the concept is decades old, our ability to embed it in learning environments at scale is relatively new. Mastery learning is interesting to me because of the implications it has for advancing new practices and mindsets needed to allow personalized learning to flourish at scale. For instance, although mastery is agnostic about individual vs group instruction, it has a clear focus on individualized feedback and correctives to advance learning—something that is not common in standardized education. In addition, because the focus is on measuring mastery against a standard, it calls into question the value of norm-referenced tests that cannot measure individual learning and progress. It may be that the shift to mastery in practice will do more to unseat the outsized influence of standardized tests in education than anything else. Finally, mastery rests on an optimistic view of human potential: In our current system, we assume a fixed number of students can do well (this is true with grades in general, and in the historical practice of curving grades in particular). In contrast, mastery learning does not impose an arbitrary, predetermined cap on excellence—in principle, all students can attain the highest levels of achievement. This view of potential, put into practice, may be harder for selection, but it is most certainly better for individuals.

Bror Saxberg: It is not being used enough yet, but the incorporation of actual science around how human learning and motivation work has intriguing potential. There is a rich trove of research about working memory, long-term memory, executive function, and motivation that is only rarely being deployed in specific learning environments. A notion of “learning engineering”—applying learning science at scale to solve real-world constrained problems and iterate with good measures to continuously improve learning—could be a promising direction to pursue in many training areas.

What are ways that the science of learning and development could be incorporated into learning throughout life compared with what is happening now?

Bror Saxberg: Thinking multidimensionally about human development, grounded in the growing evidence about the science of learning and development, has enormous potential across people's life spans to change our definitions of “success” and “expertise.”

Even the definition of expertise must be expanded to consider results from cognitive science research. Seventy percent or more of what top expert minds decide and do has become nonconscious, or tacit, through repeated practice and feedback—it's “obvious” what to do, what the situation is, yet not to a novice. This means, if we follow the learning science, we must do some serious work to unpack exactly what top experts are deciding and doing to accomplish their goals in ways that are measurably dramatically more valuable than median performers—and, with information-rich appliances continually changing the nature of work, this must be updated repeatedly.

Even with a solid evidence-grounded definition of expertise, humans are more than cognitive processors: We cannot separate their skills and domain-specific decisions from notions of identity, social and emotional capacities, cognitive capacities, and even physical and mental health affordances.

All of us have accepted that being an “expert” is no longer a static state—it includes “expertise in continuous learning” as well. We need continuous practice and feedback environments built around the latest evaluation of what top performers are deciding and doing, and, perhaps, credentials that regularly sunset unless they are refreshed with these kinds of learnings accompanied by valid and reliable demonstrations.

All of this alters what learners need to experience to expand their expertise to pursue their dreams and capacities—and continue to be, in the words of Dana Gioia, a former head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, “productive citizens for a free society.”

Todd Rose: Perhaps the most straightforward way, because of the changing nature of work, would be to introduce the insights into workplace training and continuing education environments. As individuals are faced with the ongoing need to refine and develop skills to stay relevant in their jobs, and companies are faced with the reality that they are in the business of talent development , having workplace learning environments reflect the state-of-the-art insights from the science of learning and development would not only make those specific efforts more effective, but also it would likely help generate a broader understanding and demand for similar changes throughout public education.

Ulrik Juul Christensen: It requires that we depart from the current approach to summative assessments in which learners are sufficiently afraid of the consequences of not learning to an approach that demonstrates the benefit of continuous learning. With modern precision approaches to personalized learning based on high resolution, formative assessment methods (adaptive learning), it will be possible to transform how we develop and refine learning.

Author Contributions: All authors confirmed they have contributed to the intellectual content of this paper and have met the following 4 requirements: (a) significant contributions to the conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (b) drafting or revising the article for intellectual content; (c) final approval of the published article; and (d) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the article thus ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the article are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Authors' Disclosures or Potential Conflicts of Interest: Upon manuscript submission, all authors completed the author disclosure form. Disclosures and/or potential conflicts of interest:

Employment or Leadership: N. Rifai, Clinical Chemistry , AACC; G.T. McMahon, ACCME; U.J. Christensen, Area9 Lyceum.

Consultant or Advisory Role: U.J. Christensen, Area9 Learning Lab Advisor.

Stock Ownership: U.J. Christensen, Area9 Lyceum.

Honoraria: U.J. Christensen, Area9.

Research Funding: None declared.

Expert Testimony: None declared.

Patents: None declared.

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21st Century IAS Honours Civil Service Rankers at Grand Ceremony Graced by Former Vice President Shri Venkaiah Naidu

Recognizing the remarkable achievements of those who have excelled in this journey, krishna pradeeps 21st century ias academy is set to felicitate 50 rankers in a grand ceremony..

Hyderabad, 3rd May 2024 - Embarking on the arduous journey towards civil services is a testament to dedication, perseverance, and unwavering determination. Recognizing the remarkable achievements of those who have excelled in this journey, Krishna Pradeep's 21st Century IAS Academy is set to felicitate 50 rankers in a grand ceremony. Former Vice President Honorable Sri Venkaiah Naidu will grace the occasion as the esteemed chief guest, honoring the exemplary accomplishments of the rankers. The felicitation ceremony is scheduled to take place at the prestigious Daspalla Hotel, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad on Saturday. Joining the celebration as a guest of honor will be Doordarshan's former additional Director General, Dr. R.A. Padmanabharao.

21st Century IAS Academy Chairman P. Krishna Pradeep expressed his enthusiasm for the event, stating, ''Cracking the civil services examinations is an extraordinary feat that demands unwavering commitment and perseverance. We are proud to celebrate the achievements of these exceptional individuals who have demonstrated outstanding merit and dedication.'' With a legacy spanning 21 years, Krishna Pradeep's IAS Academy has been instrumental in shaping the aspirations of aspiring civil servants. Chief Mentor Dr. Bhavani Shankar emphasized the academy's commitment to nurturing talent and fostering confidence among its students. The academy's journey, from its humble beginnings in 2003 to training nearly 2 lakh students today, reflects its unwavering dedication to excellence in civil services preparation. Offering specialized programs such as the Interview Guidance Program (IGP), One to One personal sessions, mock interviews with former UPSC board members, and residential training facilities, the academy caters to the diverse needs of aspirants.

Highlighting the inclusivity of the academy, Dr. Bhavani Shankar noted, ''Eligibility is not a criterion for appearing in civil services examinations. We believe in empowering individuals from all walks of life to pursue their dreams of serving the nation.'' With branches in Hyderabad, Rajahmundry, and Delhi, along with specialized programs tailored to meet specific needs, Krishna Pradeep's 21st Century IAS Academy continues to be a beacon of excellence in civil services exam preparation.

This felicitation ceremony serves as a testament to the academy's unwavering commitment to excellence and its belief that the best of coaching expertise resides right here in Hyderabad. For more information, please visit - https://www.kpias.net/ (Disclaimer : The above Press Release is provided by HT Syndication and PTI will not take any editorial responsibility of this content.).

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The 11 best TV pilots of the 21st century

• Before streaming, a TV show's first episode was an important way to gauge viewer interest.
• A great pilot ensured a show would be picked up for the rest of the season.
• "Glee," "Game of Thrones," and "The OC" all had iconic pilots.

In today's age of streaming , ratings are largely secret, and all it takes to watch the next episode of a show is the press of a button.

But before this, we had week-to-week television.

The best way to ensure a show would be picked up for the rest of a season was to have an excellent pilot episode that attracted many eyeballs and, in turn, ad revenue.

These 11 pilots that aired in the last 24 years established series-long arcs, beloved characters, and filmmaking worthy of the big screen.

"A Hard Day's Night" — "Grey's Anatomy"

The first episode of "Grey's Anatomy" aired on March 27, 2005, and introduced 16.25 million viewers to a cast of characters so compelling that the show is still on 19 years and 20 seasons later.

"A Hard Day's Night" starts with surgical intern Meredith Grey, a young, slightly chaotic woman who is juggling moving back to Seattle, starting a new job, finding out her dreamy one-night stand, Derek, is now her boss, and her mother's secret Alzheimer's diagnosis.

We're also introduced to the four other original interns (Cristina Yang, Izzie Stevens, Alex Karev, and George O'Malley), their intense boss, Dr. Bailey, and the intimidating chiefs Dr. Weber and Dr. Burke.

It's a wonder that this fit into 45 minutes of TV, but the episode was so tightly written with immediately compelling characters that audiences have been tuning in ever since, even though almost all of the original cast is gone .

"Pilot" — "Breaking Bad"

The image of Walter White standing in a green dress shirt and tighty-whities while brandishing a gun beside a beat-up RV in the middle of the New Mexico desert is one that any viewer of "Pilot" will never forget, not even 16 years after its premiere on January 20, 2008.

"Breaking Bad" is widely considered one of the best TV shows ever , but it wouldn't have gotten anywhere without establishing the show's darkly comedic tone and introducing inimitable characters like White, a chemistry teacher who decides to start cooking meth to pay for his chemo, his delinquent former student Jesse whom he enlists to help him, his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank, and White's slightly clueless (for now) wife, Skyler.

"Breaking Bad" went on to air for five more seasons (62 episodes in all), and by the end had become a huge success for AMC in both awards and ratings. And it all started with Walt's slacks flying in the wind.

"Winter Is Coming" — "Game of Thrones"

Try to think back before the finale of " Game of Thrones " had soured your opinion of the entire show — go all the way back to April 17, 2011, when you turned on HBO to check out its new fantasy series.

If you were like most people, you were immediately hooked by the immersive world of Westeros and its compelling characters like Ned Stark, Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen.

"Winter Is Coming" also established a sense of dread that hung over the rest of the show — while these highborn lords and ladies fought over a throne, the real threat resided in the north with mysterious creatures who could reanimate the dead.

"Game of Thrones" finished in 2019 after eight seasons and 73 episodes, with many fans left unhappy by its ending. But if you ever need to remember the magic of Westeros , revisit the pilot.

"Pilot" — "Arrested Development"

Dramatic pilots can have up to an hour to set up the premise of the show, but sitcoms have a tougher challenge — these shows usually have at most 28 minutes to hook enough people into tuning in next week.

The "Arrested Development" pilot aired on November 2, 2003, and had enough jokes to fill an entire season of a lesser sitcom.

Over the course of the episode, we meet the dysfunctional Bluth family: patriarch George Sr. and his wife, Lucille ; their kids Michael, Gob, Buster, and Lindsay; Michael's son, George Michael; and Lindsay's husband Tobias and daughter Maeby.

The pilot sets up George Sr.'s criminal activity, the love of wordplay and puns from the writers, and the general absurdity of the world of the Bluths.

"Arrested Development" was never a huge ratings success, but it became such a cult classic that it was brought back in 2013 (seven years after it ended) and then again in 2018.

"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" — "Mad Men"

"Mad Men" premiered on July 19, 2007, and took viewers back to 1960 and the peak of the New York City advertising scene.

But while we thought the show was just about a typical ad man — the cigarette-smoking, bourbon-drinking, womanizing Don Draper, and his fascinating coworkers — the last scene of the episode told us we didn't know this man at all.

After watching Don spend the episode trying to woo a new client (both romantically and professionally), we learn he actually has a wife and two kids. This is a man who knows how to compartmentalize — something we'd learn over and over again across "Mad Men's" 92 episodes.

"Pilot" — "Glee"

Fox knew they had something special when the " Glee " pilot was finished, which is why it aired on May 19, 2009, a full four months before the rest of the show aired that September.

The network wanted to create some buzz for the show, and it worked. "Glee's" pilot is wonderful: The musical performances were touching, the comedy was biting and hilarious, and the characters were immediately lovable.

In typical creator Ryan Murphy fashion , "Glee" went off the rails almost immediately. But the power of the final scene of the pilot, with the glee club performing "Don't Stop Believin'" together, cannot be denied.

"Premiere" — "The OC"

When "Premiere" aired on Fox on August 5, 2003, it was almost unbelievable how much happened in just one episode.

Viewers were introduced to the glamorous lives of Orange County's elite through the eyes of an outsider: Ryan Atwood, a juvenile delinquent with a heart of gold. After his public defender, Sandy Cohen, takes him in, Ryan decides to leave his criminal past behind and join the preppy residents of Newport Beach.

Ryan is introduced to his surrogate brother, Seth Cohen ( an all-time TV character ), Seth's longtime crush, Summer, and his mysterious neighbor, Marissa.

Oh, and he gets punched in the face by Marissa's boyfriend, Luke, while being welcomed to the OC.

Unlike in other teen soaps, the adults on this show had drama, too. Sandy, his wife Kirsten, and Marissa's parents all had compelling arcs of their own.

The show crammed so much plot into each episode that it wasn't surprising when " The OC " ended after just four seasons.

"Pilot" — "This Is Us"

Viewers were shocked at the end of the "This Is Us'" pilot episode on September 20, 2016, when it was revealed the seemingly disjointed storylines of four people with the same birthday were actually all related — and that the plot line centering on Jack, a kindhearted dad-to-be, was actually taking place 36 years in the past.

The other three adults — Kate, Kevin, and Randall — were his kids (a set of twins and their adopted brother), who also shared Jack's birthday.

From the start, viewers were invested. Even to this day, the hospital speech that Dr. K shares with Jack is tear-inducing.

"This Is Us" ended in 2022 after 105 more episodes and gallons of tears.

"Truth Be Told" – "Alias"

On September 30, 2001, a shocking 15 million people tuned in to see a new spy show starring Jennifer Garner, an unknown at the time .

"Alias" introduced us to Sydney Bristow (Garner), a college student turned spy who learns that the secret organization she had been recruited into was actually villainous.

Then she learned her dad, Jack, was working for the bad guys — but wait! Actually, he was a double agent working for the CIA and expected Sydney to do the same.

"Alias" might have lost the plot as the show continued, but the pilot (and, really, the first two seasons) remains excellent television.

"Pilot" — "Friday Night Lights"

The pilot of " Friday Night Lights " is a cinematic achievement — which makes sense, since it had already been a movie in 2004.

When the pilot aired two years later, on October 3, 2006, it was like nothing on TV, with its documentary-style shaky cam, the realistic dialogue, and the decidedly un-glamorous lifestyles of the residents of Dillon, Texas.

But it became clear this show was about more than football when star quarterback Jason Street got carried off the field, never to return (on his feet) again. This show was about trauma, the pressure that these football players faced, the racial tension between Dillon residents, and much more.

"FNL" was never a ratings hit, but the fan base was loyal enough that the show lasted another 75 episodes.

"Pilot Parts 1 and 2" — "Lost"

When the two-part pilot of "Lost" aired on September 22 and 29, 2004, it already had a significant achievement to its name: It was the most expensive pilot of all time (up to that point).

It cost somewhere between a whopping $10 to $14 million to shoot the harrowing plane crash of Oceanic 815. Why? Because ABC actually purchased a decommissioned jet, shipped it to Hawaii, and then artfully beat it up.

But the "Lost" pilot is iconic beyond its numbers. We met a truly staggering cast of characters from across the world, who spoke different languages, which was somewhat unheard of on broadcast TV at the time. We were invested in them almost immediately.

If you weren't hooked by the multiple mysteries (Why was Kate arrested? What is the roaring coming from the jungle?), you were by the end of the two-part pilot, when Charlie asks, "Guys … where are we?"

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‘We’re in a new era’: the 21st-century space race takes off

As humans enter what has been termed the ‘third space age’, it’s private companies – not governments – leading the charge

I f the 20th-century space race was about political power, this century’s will be about money. But for those who dream of sending humans back to the moon and possibly Mars, it’s an exciting time to be alive whether it’s presidents or billionaires paying the fare.

Space flight is having a renaissance moment, bringing a fresh energy not seen since the days of the Apollo programme and, for the first time, with private companies rather than governments leading the charge.

A series of recent milestone missions, not least the increasingly successful test flights of the largest rocket ever made and the first privately built probe to land on the lunar surface , have embedded a growing idea that humans are entering what has been termed the “third space age”.

“To say we’re in a new era, that’s absolutely fair,” said Greg Sadlier, a space economist and the co-founder of the know.space consultancy. “We’re in the era of competition, or the commercial era. The barriers to entry are lower, the costs have fallen, which has opened the doors to a much larger pool of nations,” he said. “It’s the democratisation of space, if you like.”

Today, more than 70 countries have space programmes, but for a long time, the US and the Soviet Union were the only big players.

Humanity’s first space explorer, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, orbited around the globe in April 1961. A year later, US President John F Kennedy gave his famous “we choose to go to the moon” speech, promising to get an American man on the lunar surface by the end of the decade ahead of a “hostile flag of conquest”.

“To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money,” Kennedy acknowledged, but the cold war motivated him to spend the modern-day equivalent of hundreds of billions in US taxpayers’ money to win the space race.

The end of the cold war in 1989 brought a brief moment of global optimism, leading to the second, more collaborative space age. The International Space Station was assembled over 13 years and, since 2000, people of multiple nationalities have been living in space constantly, working together on experiments in the orbiting laboratory.

However, this second era also saw a dip in efforts to get humans farther out into space, symbolised by Nasa’s space shuttle programme that never sent people beyond Earth’s orbit and was eventually disbanded in 2011, in large part because the US government did not want to keep bankrolling its high costs. Afterwards, Washington had to rely on Moscow’s Soyuz rockets to get its astronauts into space.

Yet those high costs have now been driven down by private businesses entering the scene, often as government contractors. In the past few years, some of these businesses have started to make money, although not from headline-grabbing reasons such as space tourism but mostly for sending up communication satellites, especially broadband internet. Many estimates suggest the global space industry could generate revenues of more than $1tn within the next two decades.

In an article published last year by the influential strategy and management consultancy McKinsey & Company, global managing partner Bob Sternfels and his colleagues wrote to CEOs: “If space isn’t part of your strategy, it needs to be.”

They added: “Only recently have we seen significant acceleration down the cost curve: launch costs have fallen 95% (with another massive reduction expected in the coming years) thanks to reuse, improved engineering, and increased volumes.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been at the forefront of this movement, launching 96 times last year with its reusable rockets. The company’s largest system, called Starship and still in development, has been marketed as an interplanetary explorer. Musk says he built the 120-metre rocket so that humans can colonise Mars. Before then, Nasa has contracted SpaceX to land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moon this decade.

As a business venture, it could make money well before then by serving as the equivalent of a flying cargo ship. Starship has a payload of up to 150 metric tonnes, five times the load the space shuttle could carry.

Global politics continues to play a role in space but with more players. China has overtaken Russia as the main national contender to the US, with its own space station in operation, probes on the moon and a rover on Mars. On Friday, Beijing is due to launch a robotic spacecraft to the moon’s far side.

The moon’s south pole, in particular, is seen as a “golden belt” for lunar exploration as it contains water ice, which could be used as drinking water and even broken down to make rocket fuel.

Scientists are nervous about both the politicisation and the commercialisation of space, especially with talk of future “mining” operations on the pristine, untouched moon. Advocates of space exploration, however, point to advancements made so far. The CT scan, a critical medical device that can identify tumours, traces its origins to pre-Apollo mission research; astronauts on the space station have been using the unique microgravity environment to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer’s .

For economists like Sadlier, the third space age creates an unprecedented situation – one that could upend the very foundations of the market system. “In economics, we assume that resources are limited; land is limited; natural resources are limited,” he said. “With space, it allows us to change that.”

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The Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far)

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky .

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Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The Brag is Coming From Inside the House

Book Riot’s Kelly Jensen has spent the last few years becoming a leading name in book banning coverage, and we couldn’t be prouder to see her named as one of  Library Journal’s 2024 Movers & Shakers.  Subscribe to Kelly’s (free) Literary Activism newsletter to stay up-to-date on book banning efforts and learn about the most effective ways to get involved in your community. Kelly’s work has changed the way I think about the book banning movement and what it’s really about, and I know I speak for all of us here at BR when I say we are deeply grateful for her dedication, intelligence, and ability to get to the heart of an issue. May her efforts continue to succeed.

The Best Books of the Century (So Far)

The New York Times  has taken  a page from NPR’s book  and  aggregated their best books of the last 23 years into a cool interactive tool . Filter by year and/or genre and make your way to a read that’s almost guaranteed to be great. The  NYT ’s end-of-year lists of 10 best books and 100 notable books are consistently varied and interesting, and they’ve informed more than a few of my reading choices over the years. Nice to see them finding creative ways to repurpose content that continues to be relevant and helpful.

What’s the Point?

Why seek a traditional publishing deal when you have the internet and direct access to audience? Does anyone even read anymore? What makes books so special? Author Emma Gannon reflects on these questions and more.

New Legislation Aims to Ban Librarians from Joining the ALA

Yep, you’re reading that right. Louisiana’s House Bill 777 would criminalize libraries and library workers who use taxpayer funds to join the American Library Association. Why?  I’ll let Kelly tell.

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The Secret Push That Could Ban TikTok

U.s. lawmakers have long worried that the chinese government could use the app to spread propaganda..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.”

[THEME MUSIC]

American lawmakers have tried for years to ban the video app TikTok over concerns that its ties to China pose a national security risk. Last week, they passed a law that might finally do it. Today, my colleague, Sapna Maheshwari, on the secret effort behind the law and what a ban would mean for the company’s 170 million American users.

It’s Tuesday, April 30.

So Sapna, tell me about this law that just passed that potentially bans the social media app TikTok. We’ve seen efforts in the past to rein in TikTok, but this one really seems like the most substantial yet.

It’s a huge deal. What this law really does is it puts the future of this hugely popular app with 170 million American users into question. TikTok has reshaped the way many people listen to music. It’s changed the way we cook. It’s made a whole different kind of celebrity.

But it’s never been able to shake these concerns around the fact that it has really close ties to China. It’s owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance. And lawmakers, for years, have been worried that the Chinese government could somehow use ByteDance and TikTok to get information on Americans or possibly spread propaganda.

President Trump tried to ban it in 2020. The State of Montana tried to ban this app last year. TikTok has largely survived those challenges, but this time it could actually be banned in the United States.

So let’s talk about this. Why did this effort succeed where the other ones failed?

So it’s an interesting story.

Here we go.

The committee will come to order.

And it really dates back to this hearing about a year ago that Congress had with Shou Chew, the CEO of TikTok.

Mr. Chew, you are here because the American people need the truth about the threat TikTok poses to our national and personal security.

Members of the committee, thank you for your time.

— TikTok has repeatedly said that it has addressed these national security concerns and that there’s no issue here. And you can hear that when Shou Chew testified.

Let me start by addressing a few misconceptions about ByteDance of which we are a subsidiary. ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government.

He’s saying American investors are behind ByteDance.

Now, TikTok itself is not available in mainland China. We’re headquartered in Los Angeles and in Singapore.

And I myself am Singaporean. I live in Singapore.

The bottom line is this — American data, stored on American soil, by an American company, overseen by American personnel.

And we are actually going above and beyond what American technology companies do to keep things safe.

And I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much.

And is Congress convinced by that?

Congress is not convinced by that.

ByteDance is a Chinese company?

Well, ByteDance owns many businesses that operates in China.

Is it or is it not a Chinese company?

Congressman, the way we look at it, it was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs.

No, no, no, no. I’m not asking how you look at it. Fact, is it a Chinese company or not? For example, Dell is a company —

It was this really fiery, five-hour hearing, where Republicans and Democrats asked really contentious questions.

We do not promote or remove content at the request of the Chinese government. Will you repeat —

The question is, are you percent certain that they cannot use your company to promote such messages?

It is our commitment to this committee and all our users that we will keep this free from any manipulation by any government.

OK. If you can’t say it 100 percent certain I take that as a no.

There’s this underlying sense of distrust around the company and its ties to China.

I will remind you that making false or misleading statements to Congress is a federal crime.

I understand. Again, you can go on our platform. You will find that content.

And it becomes clear through the hearing that, across the board, Republicans and Democrats largely feel the same way.

Mr. Chew, I got to hand it to you. You’ve actually done something that in the last three to four years has not happened except for the exception of maybe Vladimir Putin. You have unified Republicans and Democrats.

So within weeks of this hearing, this small group of lawmakers gets together. And they say, let’s come up with a law that works where all the other ones have failed and actually make TikTok answer to its Chinese connections once and for all.

So tell me about this small group of lawmakers. Who are they?

So it starts with Republicans. Among them is Steve Scalise, one of the most powerful Republicans in the House. And a small group sort of works together for a few months, but they realize that in order to really make this law work, they’re going to need Democrats. So they end up working through this House Committee that’s focused on China and competition. And this is where the bulk of the work on this bill takes place.

And just to note, this is a really small group. There’s less than 20 key players who are working on this. And all throughout, they are keeping this very, very secret.

And why exactly are they keeping it secret? What’s the point of that?

So this group really wanted to keep this out of the eyes of TikTok, which has a huge lobbying presence in DC, and has successfully worked to kill bills that targeted TikTok in the past. And what they’re really doing is looking at all of the past efforts to either force a sale or a ban of TikTok, and trying to work their way through why those plans didn’t succeed and what they can do differently.

But while the lawmakers are working on this bill, something big happens that kind of changes the politics around it. And that’s October 7.

Your social media feeds are unique to you, but could they be shaping how you view the Israel-Gaza War? The BBC’s —

As the war breaks out and people start getting information about it, a lot of people are getting information about the Israel-Hamas War on TikTok, especially young people.

Social media algorithms seem to be driving some users towards increasingly divisive posts —

And there’s this big messy argument spilling out into living rooms and all over the internet, and, of course on TikTok. And it’s getting very heated. For instance, there’s this moment in the fall where a bunch of TikTok users start sharing this old manifesto.

I read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”

It’s wild, and everyone should read it.

Go read “A Letter to America.” Seriously, go read it.

That was actually written by Osama bin Laden, defending the 9/11 attacks and criticizing the United States’ support of Israel. TikTok users start trying to tie it to the modern day conflict.

Reading this letter, it becomes apparent to me that the actions of 9/11 were all just the buildup of our government failing other nations.

The way this letter is going viral right now is giving me the greatest sense of relief. Now it’s all coming to light because of Palestine.

And there’s these accusations that TikTok may be promoting one side of the conflict over the other. And a couple of researchers look at hashtags around Palestine, and they say that the data they pulled shows that TikTok is showing way more pro-Palestine videos and not so much for Israel. And this sets off huge alarm bells for this small group of lawmakers.

But isn’t that just a function of the fact that TikTok, at this point, is the public square in the United States for young people? I mean, this is what young people were talking about, and this is where they’re doing the talking.

TikTok has pushed back really forcefully against these accusations. They said that Gallup polls show that young people view Israel differently than older generations. They say that they’re not the ones influencing what people post, that the hashtags and the videos are a reflection of the user base and nothing that they’re doing to influence.

But for lawmakers, this doesn’t really make their concerns go away. Instead, this conflict shows them how TikTok could be used to spread propaganda. It made lawmakers feel that TikTok could be really dangerous when it comes to shaping the views of Americans on foreign policy, on US elections. And what it also does is, it provides this driving force to this group that’s drafting this bill. And they suddenly see that this might be a way to bring more people into their effort.

And so heading into November against this backdrop, they even bring in the White House and the Justice Department to help work on this bill. And with the White House, they want to make sure that this is a bill that the president will support. And they work with the Justice Department to shore up the language in the bill to help defend against court challenges.

Because the Justice Department, of course, would be the one that would have to defend the bill, right?

That’s exactly right. And so they’re trying to make it as rock solid as possible so that they can win in court when TikTok challenges this law. And so March rolls around, and they decide that it’s time to unveil this bill that they’ve been working on for close to a year.

The battle over TikTok on Capitol Hill is intensifying.

This morning, House lawmakers have agreed unanimously to move a bill to a full floor vote.

And TikTok is caught completely flat footed. They didn’t see this coming. And this is just what the group wanted. So TikTok has this army of lobbyists that’s suddenly scrambling. And they go into damage control mode. They start reaching out to members of Congress.

This app is so much more than just an app for dumb TikTok dances.

They fly a group of TikTok stars and small businesses to come to DC —

This is a life-changing apps.

— and lobby on the steps of the Capitol and meet with lawmakers.

Standing up here with all these amazing TikTokers behind me is a complete honor, and every single one of them would voice their opinion just like this. This is how we feel. This has to stop.

They set up interviews between these TikTok creators, as they’re known, and big TV shows and news programs. And they’re doing everything they can to fight against this bill before it goes any further. And then they decide to do something unusual, which is use TikTok itself to try and derail this bill.

How exactly do they do that?

So days after this bill is announced, a ton of TikTok users get a message when they open the TikTok app that basically says, call Congress and tell them not to ban TikTok.

Hmm. OK. So like, literally this window comes up and says, call Congress. Here you go.

Exactly. You can enter your zip code, and there’s a button that appears. And you can press it, and the call goes straight to your representative.

So offices are quickly overwhelmed by calls. And TikTok sent out this message to users on the same day that a House committee is going into vote on this bill and whether to move it forward. And so the stunt happens. They go into vote, and they come out, and it’s 50 to 0 in support of the bill.

One of the representatives who worked on the bill said that this stunt by TikTok turned a lot of no’s into yeses and yeses into, quote, “hell yeses.”

[LAUGHS]: so the whole episode sounds like it actually backfired, right? Like, TikTok’s stunt essentially just confirmed what was the deepest fears of lawmakers about this company, that the app could be used to influence American politics.

That’s definitely how a lot of lawmakers viewed it. And when this bill is brought to the full House a week later, it passes by an overwhelming majority. And weeks later, it passes in the Senate as part of a broader aid package. And on Wednesday, it’s signed into law by President Biden.

But now the question is, what does it mean? Like, how will this actually work? And how will it affect the tens of millions of Americans who use TikTok every day?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

So Sapna, now that Biden has signed this bill, what does it actually mean in practice for TikTok? What does the law do?

So the law is really trying to push ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, to sell to a non-Chinese owner. And the company basically has nine months for this sale to happen. There’s an option for President Biden to add another three months to that clock. And if the company doesn’t find a buyer or refuses to be sold, it will be banned.

And what would a ban actually mean, Sapna? I mean, people would still have the app on their phones, right? So it wouldn’t disappear overnight.

Yeah, no one’s coming to pick up your phone and to forcibly delete this thing. What the law says is that app stores and web hosting services wouldn’t be allowed to carry TikTok anymore. So basically, it would kind of die a slow death over time, where it wouldn’t be updated and just kind of peter out.

So the bottom line here is that the clock has started on this potential sale, right? They have 12 months to find a buyer. So what are the obstacles here? I mean, it sounds pretty ferociously complicated.

There’s a ton of challenges here. And it’s a very messy choose-your-own adventure. So one of the first big questions is who could buy this?

ByteDance and TikTok are private. We don’t know their financials. But analysts estimate that it will cost tens of billions of dollars. That narrows the buying pool pretty quickly. And a lot of the companies that could afford to buy it, like Meta, the owner of Facebook, or Google, which owns YouTube, would probably be kicked out of the running because they are simply too big. Regulators would say, you already own these big apps. You can’t possibly add this to your stable.

There’d be a monopoly concern there.

Exactly. And then, there’s a lot of questions around how this would work, technically. ByteDance and TikTok are very much global organizations. You have the CEO in Singapore. They have huge operations in Ireland. They have this big workforce in the US. And of course, they do have engineers in China.

So how do you extract all those things, make it all work? It’s a very big international transaction.

And then there is the chance that the Chinese government blocks this sale and says, you cannot do this, ByteDance. We will not allow it.

So Sapna, how does that actually work, though, in terms of China? I mean, can China actually just ban the sale of this company? I mean, it is a private company after all, right?

Well, here’s one way it could work. The Chinese government could block the export of TikTok’s algorithm. And let me explain that in kind of plain English.

They could basically block the technology that fuels the TikTokiness of this app, the recommendations, the magic of it, why you see what you see when you’re looking at TikTok.

TikTokiness, is that an adjective?

That is now an adjective.

[LAUGHS]: Nice.

And there’s a chance that Beijing could say, hey, you can’t export this technology. That is proprietary. And if that happens, that suddenly makes TikTok way, way less valuable.

So the Chinese government could let the sale go through potentially, but as a kind of an empty shell, right? The thing that makes TikTok TikTok, the algorithm, wouldn’t be part of the company. So that probably isn’t very appealing for a potential buyer.

Exactly. And I mean, the role of the Chinese government here is really interesting. I’ve talked to experts who say, well, if the Chinese government interferes to try and block a sale of this app, doesn’t that underscore and prove all the concerns that have been expressed by American lawmakers?

If you’re worried about China being in control of this thing, well, that just confirmed your fears.

Exactly. And I mean, it’s an interesting thing that ByteDance and TikTok have to grapple with.

So bottom line here — selling TikTok is quite complicated, and perhaps not even possible for these reasons that you’re giving, right? I mean, not least of which because the Chinese government might not allow the algorithm to leave the country. And that’s not something that the US Congress has a lot of control over.

So is this law fundamentally just a ban, then?

That’s what TikTok is calling it. Right after this bill was signed into law on Wednesday —

Make no mistake, this is a ban, a ban on TikTok and a ban on you and your voice.

— Tiktok’s CEO made a TikTok — what else?— that explained the company’s position.

Because the freedom of expression on TikTok reflects the same American values that make the United States a beacon of freedom.

He actually argued that TikTok reflects American values.

TikTok gives everyday Americans a powerful way to be seen and heard. And that’s why so many people have made TikTok part of their daily lives.

And he said that this law infringes on the First Amendment free speech rights of Americans who love it and who use it every day.

The facts and the Constitution are on our side, and we expect to prevail again.

So it’s very clear that TikTok plans to challenge this law in court. And the court fight to follow will determine the fate of TikTok’s future in the US.

So is that First Amendment argument that the TikTok CEO is making here going to work?

Nobody wants to put money on that. I mean, the company is really approaching this with the idea that the First Amendment rights of Americans are being infringed on. But if you remember, the government has been working on this law. They’ve been anticipating those challenges. And they can justify an infringing of First Amendment rights in certain cases, including with national security concerns. And so it’ll be up to a judge on whether those concerns pass muster and justify this sale and even a potential ban of TikTok.

Got it. So TikTok will argue free speech, First Amendment. And the government will counter by saying, look, this is about China. This is about America’s national security interests.

That’s right. And the legal experts that I’ve spoken with say this is a really big and sticky area of the law, and it’s a huge case. And they really think that this will go to the Supreme Court, regardless of who wins in the first round of this.

So where does that leave the millions of Americans who use TikTok, and many of them, of course, who earn a living on the platform?

I mean, it’s really uncertain what happens now with the company, and the clock has started ticking. When I’ve looked at TikTok and looked at videos from users —

This is about the impending TikTok ban. And it just triggered me so much. It makes my blood boil, and I have to get this out there.

There’s a lot of shock —

The most success I’ve had has been here on TikTok, and now they’re trying to take it away.

This is so stupid!

— and anger.

You can’t ban apps! You can’t ban things from people!

People are confused.

Word on the street is that in the next 9 to 12 months, TikTok could be banned.

And they’re also caught a bit off guard, just because there have been these years of efforts to do something about TikTok. People on the app have been hearing about a TikTok ban, really, since 2020.

The government can take away a literal app on our phones, and we’re supposed to believe we’re free?

A few TikTokers have said, how can this be the thing that the government is pushing through so quickly?

Can we stop funding a genocide? No. Can we get free COVID tests? No. Can we stop killing the planet? No. Can we at least watch videos on an app of people doing fun things and learn about the world around us? No.

So there’s this sense of distrust and disappointment for many people who love this app.

We got rid of TikTok. You’re welcome. Protecting you from China. You know that phone was made in China. Ah!

And I think there’s also this question, too, around what about TikTok makes it so harmful? Even though it has increasingly become a place for news, there’s plenty of people who simply use this app for entertainment. And what they’re seeing out of Washington just doesn’t square with the reality they experience when they pull out their phones.

And I wonder, Sapna, I mean, just kind of stepping back for a second, let’s say this ban on TikTok succeeds. If it goes through, would Americans be better off?

It depends who you ask. For the users who love TikTok, if it actually disappeared, it would be the government taking away a place where maybe they make money, where they get their entertainment, where they figure out what to read or what to cook next. To free speech advocates, this would be dystopian, unheard of for the government to crack down on an app with such wide usage by Americans.

But for the American political class And the National security establishment, this is a necessary move, one that was years in the making, not something that was just come up with on the fly. And ultimately, it all comes down to China and this idea that you can’t have a social media app like this, a source of news like this, that is even at all at risk of being influenced by the Chinese government and our greatest adversaries.

Sapna, thank you.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Monday, in its latest high-profile showdown with pro-Palestinian protesters, Columbia University gave students until 2:00 PM to clear out from an encampment at the center of campus or face suspension. It appeared to be an effort to remove the encampment without relying on New York City Police, whose removal of a previous encampment there two weeks ago inspired similar protests on campuses across the country.

Free Palestine!

Hi, this is Sharon Otterman reporting for “The New York Times.”

00 PM deadline for protesters to clear out of the encampment at the center of Columbia University has come and gone, and there’s still quite a large contingent inside the encampment.

But Monday’s warning seemed only to galvanize the Columbia protesters and their supporters.

And hundreds of students and others from around the campus have come out to support them. They are currently walking around in a picket around the encampment.

Hundreds of students, standing for or five people deep, encircled the encampment in a show of solidarity. They were joined by members of the Columbia faculty.

There’s also dozens of faculty members, who are prepared to stand in lines in front of the main entrance to the encampment, in case Public Safety or the NYPD move in. But as of 2:00, there was no sign of that happening.

Then, on Monday evening, Columbia announced it had begun to suspend students who had failed to leave the encampment. It was unclear exactly how many students had been suspended.

[PRO-PALESTINE CHANTING]:

Today’s episode was produced by Will Reid, Rachelle Banja, and Rob Szypko. It was edited by Marc Georges and Liz O. Baylen, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sharon Otterman.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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• May 1, 2024   •   35:16 The New Abortion Fight Before the Supreme Court
• April 30, 2024   •   27:40 The Secret Push That Could Ban TikTok
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• April 26, 2024   •   21:50 Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out
• April 25, 2024   •   40:33 The Crackdown on Student Protesters
• April 24, 2024   •   32:18 Is $60 Billion Enough to Save Ukraine?
• April 23, 2024   •   30:30 A Salacious Conspiracy or Just 34 Pieces of Paper?
• April 22, 2024   •   24:30 The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
• April 19, 2024   •   30:42 The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
• April 18, 2024   •   30:07 The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Sapna Maheshwari

Produced by Will Reid ,  Rachelle Bonja and Rob Szypko

Edited by Marc Georges and Liz O. Baylen

Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

American lawmakers have tried for years to ban TikTok, concerned that the video app’s links to China pose a national security risk.

Sapna Maheshwari, a technology reporter for The Times, explains the behind-the-scenes push to rein in TikTok and discusses what a ban could mean for the app’s 170 million users in the United States.

On today’s episode

Sapna Maheshwari , who covers TikTok, technology and emerging media companies for The New York Times.

Background reading

A tiny group of lawmakers huddled in private about a year ago, aiming to bulletproof a bill that could ban TikTok.

The TikTok law faces court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility .

Love, hate or fear it, TikTok has changed America .

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Special thanks to Sharon Otterman .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Sapna Maheshwari reports on TikTok, technology and emerging media companies. She has been a business reporter for more than a decade. Contact her at [email protected] . More about Sapna Maheshwari

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