Former schoolboys at the private school gave raw testimonies about abuse meted out by John Brownlee

• ‘Sadistic’ teacher found to have assaulted pupils for 20 years

The enormity of the abuse suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh Academy housemaster became clear when the first witness was asked a simple question about the moment his mother left him alone at the elite private boarding school.

John Graham, now a trim 56-year-old with a goatee beard, was asked: how did he feel? Until then fluent and factual in the witness box, Graham froze. His face crumpled. In that moment, Graham again became the eight-year-old boy who had felt “not good” that day, but with the awful adult hindsight of the abuse he would endure there.

John Brownlee, deputy head at private Edinburgh Academy, inflicted pain on children as young as eight, sheriff hears

• Beatings, humiliation and a loss of self-worth: how Edinburgh Academy victims were scarred

A “sadistic” deputy headteacher at one of Scotland’s most prestigious private schools has been found to have conducted a systematic campaign of violence and torture against children as young as eight over a 20-year period.

John Brownlee was found by a sheriff on Wednesday to have committed more than 30 assaults after the former Edinburgh Academy housemaster was formally excused from trial due to his advanced dementia.

How did a small, relatively poor country become an educational powerhouse? Creativity, autonomy and a deep embrace of the digital age

Today’s subject in the sci-fi class at Pelgulinna State Gymnasium is Blade Runner. Thursdays are “voluntary” lesson days, where students at this upper secondary school in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, can choose from a range of subjects; others taking place today include a rights and democracy course, programming and creative writing in English. The seven 17-year-old students in the sci-fi lesson have just finished watching 30 minutes of the film and are preparing to discuss it when I sneak in at the back, switching to perfect English for my benefit. “We’ve talked about Jungian archetypes, persona and the superego,” says Triin, one of the students. “It has been really helpful for me to understand the different aspects of being human and how to create deeper characters.” They’ve also studied Brave New World and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the few minutes I am there, the students touch on US history, child labour, empathy and more. “I have so many questions,” says Triin.

Me too. How did Estonia, a small country that is relatively poor compared with most of the EU, become an educational powerhouse? In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) rankings, which measures 15-year-olds’ abilities in maths, reading and science, the top spots are held by a handful of Asian countries, but Estonia ranks next – the best in Europe. Its teachers are highly educated, the focus is on social and personal skills as much as academic learning and the typical curriculum is packed with a wide range of subjects, from robotics to music and arts. British politicians are taking note. In 2022 Labour’s shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, visited to see what Estonia is doing right.

This is a fun story, detailing the hack a group of high school students perpetrated against an Illinois school district, hacking 500 screens across a bunch of schools.

During the process, the group broke into the school’s IT systems; repurposed software used to monitor students’ computers; discovered a new vulnerability (and reported it ); wrote their own scripts; secretly tested their system at night; and managed to avoid detection in the school’s network. Many of the techniques were not sophisticated, but they were pretty much all illegal .

It has a happy ending: no one was prosecuted.

A spokesperson for the D214 school district tells WIRED they can confirm the events in Duong’s blog post happened. They say the district does not condone hacking and the “incident highlights the importance of the extensive cybersecurity learning opportunities the District offers to students.”

“The District views this incident as a penetration test, and the students involved presented the data in a professional manner,” the spokesperson says, adding that its tech team has made changes to avoid anything similar happening again in the future.

The school also invited the students to a debrief, asking them to explain what they had done. “We were kind of scared at the idea of doing the debrief because we have to join a Zoom call, potentially with personally identifiable information,” Duong says. Eventually, he decided to use his real name, while other members created anonymous accounts. During the call, Duong says, they talked through the hack and he provided more details on ways the school could secure its system.

EDITED TO ADD (9/13): Here’s Minh Duong’s Defcon slides . You can see the table of contents of their report on page 59, and the school’s response on page 60.