September 13, 2026

This week, we take a look at two moments in history and their connection to education.

In a 2005 "This I Believe" essay, Gloria Steinem wrote: "I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being — the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again." Steinem died Wednesday at the age of 92. She's pictured above in 2022.

John Lamparski/Getty Images North America

Just a few months before she died, trailblazing journalist and activist Gloria Steinem made time for an interview with a special friend, student journalist Jeju Daisy Ahn-Miles, a high schooler at the Punahou School in Honolulu.

In Jeju’s NPR Student Podcast Challenge entry Democracy for Everyone or No One, she asked Steinem about aging and death, to which Steinem, then 91, responded: “Contemplating a world without yourself is different.”

She said in Jeju’s podcast that seeing the “continuation of generations upon generations without being able to dictate or know the future is like the ultimate gesture of faith.”

Steinem said she had high hopes for the next generation of women, including Jeju, and shared a few final words of advice.

“You should be able to do what you love, what you feel enthusiasm for, what you're angry that isn't happening already, what will create more justice, more compassion, more humor.

I have total faith that you can do this."

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Educators reflect on teaching 9/11, 25 years later: “Students are really not closely emotionally tied to it,” Taylor Browne, who teaches AP U.S. history at BASIS Charter School in Washington, D.C., told NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe, though they do grasp some of the lasting effects on everyday life. “Oh, that makes sense on why we have security, and we have TSA, and we can't bring water bottles, or we can't bring certain things on the airplane — oh, OK, let's move on to the next thing,”

Education professor and researcher Jeremy Stoddard, from the University of Wisconsin, has been analyzing how schools do and don't teach about the attacks. He echoed Browne during the conversation. “I think one of the challenges is for teachers, especially that have direct memory of 9/11, they want to convey that to students. They oftentimes then talk about their experience that day — that it was a shocking attack, that the sort of heroes of the day were the firemen and first responders, and that one of the results was sort of the U.S. coming together and the world around it in response to these terrorist attacks.

“Students aren't really connecting it to all the things that have come since it,” Stoddard continued. “So in most of what we've done, we encourage teachers to use the events of the day as a starting point to inquire either into the events that came before it, such as the role of the U.S. in Afghanistan in the 1970s, or what happened in the response and sort of connect that to what's today.

“And at the beginning of the year, that's not a bad thing to do in terms of starting to help students understand the connections between the present and the past and hopefully learn how to be informed and what those decisions mean,” he said. “I mean, that's one of our goals of teaching history in the first place.”

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Good reads and listens...

This shop room at the Greenway Institute was nicknamed "the sandbox" by students during a prototype semester in which they worked on real-world projects under the supervision of faculty mentors.

Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report

Rethinking college: A group of business and education leaders in Vermont is taking a vacant campus and building a college from scratch. Liam Elder-Connors of Vermont Public and Jon Marcus of The Hechinger Report delved into their plans in this report for NPR. The Greenway Institute — "green" as in new — will adopt instructional methods proven to work well, such as real-world training under the supervision of faculty mentors, while stripping away such things as layers of administrators and nonacademic amenities that make college in the United States so expensive. "It's not fancy. It's a place where you do have a meaningful relationship with your faculty members. But you also take out your own trash," said Mark Somerville, the founding president.

Head of special ed quits Education Department: Kelly Rogers announced her resignation to her employees the day before they were physically moving from the department’s main office building to the one that houses Health and Human Services, NPR Ed’s Jonaki Mehta reports. The move is one of many drastic changes in progress as the Trump administration works to dismantle the agency. Disability rights advocates have widely condemned that shift. "Now that the staff are physically moving, and one of those people is taken out, it adds even more confusion," Chad Rummel, chief executive officer of the Council for Exceptional Children, told Jonaki.

Sweeping new rules for child safety online in California: Operators of AI companion chatbots will have to assess the risks their products pose to children, document what they find and hand the results to an independent auditor. Large social media companies face paying even more in damages if their conduct harms a child. Social media platforms will be barred from serving addictive engagement features to users under 16. Rachael Myrow of NPR member station KQED lays out all of the changes.

Turning Point USA, a year after Charlie Kirk’s death: When Jacob York found out that Charlie Kirk had been fatally shot, he was at baseball practice. Standing in the outfield, he broke down in tears. That night, he decided that Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, should have a chapter on his campus, Olivet Nazarene University south of Chicago. But, as Charlie Kirk's young supporters reflect on the past year, some paint a complicated picture of the organization he left behind, NPR’s Elena Moore reports. Rather than a unified and growing coalition of young voters, they describe a movement facing questions about its future — one that has yet to fully coalesce around a new leader and that is grappling with the same issue divides causing friction within the Republican Party more broadly.

A last look at the first day of school...

Gerald Gomez-Reina high-fives new kindergartener Ian Patterson after they track down his cubby just before the first day of school at Micheltorena Street Elementary in Los Angeles.

Julie Leopo for NPR

NPR and member station reporters fanned out across the country to capture some of those magical moments of the first day of school.

Fifth graders helped kindergartners get excited, and feel secure, at their Los Angeles school.