With Toy Story 5 out tomorrow, I filled in for Ben in tonight's Whiteboard Notes to write about the film and what the franchise's evolution tells us about today's techlash. When the first Toy Story premiered in 1995, America was racing to get more technology into children's hands. AT&T was wiring schools for the internet, Bill Gates was giving away classroom software, and President Clinton argued that technological literacy should be as fundamental as reading and math. Three decades later, Toy Story 5 arrives in a different moment. This time, the movie worries about something else: that screens have replaced imaginative play. As debates over smartphones, classroom devices, and children's attention intensify, the question has flipped, from how to get kids online to whether they need a little less technology in their lives.

The question for education isn't whether attitudes have changed. They have. The harder one is whether we can still tell the difference between technology that helps children learn and technology built to capture their attention.

But I’m going to take a break from tech and talk about civics, with the country's 250th bearing down. In Philadelphia, nearly 100 teenagers took over City Hall for the day, elected a mayor, and debated a $72 million bill before voting it down. "We are debating the ideas, not the people," the YMCA's Lindsay Doyle reminded them. Real City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, on the failed vote: "That's the democratic process."

Two more reads pull the same thread. In The Hill, historian Jonathan Zimmerman argues the wave of campus civics initiatives keeps piling on coursework while ignoring the people at the front of the room: "civic education won't get better unless we get better." And in Education Week, Boston teacher Maureen O'Hern makes the case for a business-school case method that has her high schoolers reasoning through secession and the Constitutional Convention "with respect and integrity."

For a humbling footnote to all the 250th birthday planning: a century ago, Philadelphia threw the nation's 150th in that same city, and Smithsonian revisits how it became "America's greatest flop." Organizers predicted 30 million visitors; fewer than 5 million showed, and the fair helped bankrupt the city.

— Thomas

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