In Finland, there are no private tutors, no standardized testing mania, no pay-to-play schooling — and yet, Finnish students consistently rank among the world’s best. The secret isn’t competition; it’s equality. Every Finnish child attends a public school funded equitably through national tax revenue. Teachers hold master’s degrees and earn professional respect on par with doctors. School days are shorter, homework lighter, and creativity prioritized. As a result, Finland boa

Education in Brazil is a mirror of the nation’s contradictions: world-class universities coexist with schools where the roof collapses in the rainy season.In São Paulo’s wealthy suburbs, the literacy rate among ten-year-olds is 98 percent; in the country’s northeast, barely 60 percent of children that age can read a simple text. The disparity is not cultural—it’s geographical, and it begins with how Brazil funds its schools. The national education budget is distributed throu

Thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa’s classrooms still bear its scars. A child in Johannesburg’s affluent suburbs attends a school with robotics labs and digital libraries. Meanwhile, in Eastern Cape, another studies under a leaking roof, with no access to the internet. Despite constitutional guarantees of equal education, the legacy of segregation persists through economics. Roughly 70% of South African schools lack adequate libraries, and nearly half still

When schools shut down in 2020, education didn’t stop — it moved online. Yet millions of students didn’t follow. Across the world, more than 1.3 billion children experienced school closures, and nearly half lacked reliable internet access. The pandemic didn’t create the digital divide; it exposed and widened it. In the United States, digital inequity remains stark. Students in low-income households are three times more likely to depend on a single mobile device for learning.

Chicago is a city of sharp contrasts, and nowhere is that more visible than inside its classrooms. A short drive can take you from a...