Education Terms
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/terms/education · Effective October 16, 2026
In plain terms. Teach from us for free. A teacher may put our pages in front of a class, copy them for that class, and build lessons on them without asking us, paying us, or filling out anything. Students owe us no account, no identity, and no data — a school can assign us without a privacy review, because there is nothing to review. Student newspapers may go further and reprint our work whole, with credit. The lines are few: name us, keep class copies inside the class, and never let anyone sell our free record to students — copying costs may be recovered, our content is not for resale. This summary is part of the terms and binds us like any article below, and ambiguity is read in favor of the teacher.
Article 1 — The Grant
1.1. The Massachusetts Times Company grants the use of The Massachusetts Times's published record for teaching and study, free of charge and free of permission.
1.2. Education pays this institution in the only coin that compounds: readers who can tell good information from bad. We would rather be read aloud in a classroom than licensed into one.
1.3. This grant is a term, enforceable by those who hold it under the Dispute Terms, not a program we may quietly retire. Its narrowing is governed by Article 12 and by nothing less.
Article 2 — Who Holds the Grant
2.1. Everyone engaged in bona fide instruction or study holds this grant: teachers and professors, students at every level, schools public and private, homeschooling families, libraries, tutors, literacy programs, and the self-taught reader working alone.
2.2. No accreditation, affiliation, or paperwork is required. The test is the activity — teaching and learning — not the letterhead above it.
2.3. The grant does not depend on geography, as the Access Terms' grant does not.
Article 3 — What the Classroom May Do
3.1. Display our pages in class — projected, printed, or passed around.
3.2. Copy a work for the class: physical copies for the roster, digital copies within the course's own enclosure — a learning-management system, a course folder, a packet — for the students enrolled.
3.3. Build on the work: annotate it, excerpt it in lesson materials, assign it, test on it, translate it for instruction, and have students mark it up to their hearts' content.
3.4. Keep it: students' own copies of assigned work are their personal copies, which the Access Terms already treat as reading, and no bell ends that.
Article 4 — What This Grant Rides On
4.1. Much of what a classroom needs, everyone already has: reading is free to all under the Access Terms, and quotation is granted to all under the Citation and Quotation Terms.
4.2. What this page adds is reproduction for the class — the multiple copies and course materials of Article 3, which exceed the quotation grant and which publishers customarily sell. Here they are given.
Article 5 — The Conditions
5.1. Name us. Class copies and course materials carry the attribution of the Citation and Quotation Terms: The Massachusetts Times, and the byline where the work carries one.
5.2. Keep class copies inside the class. The enclosure of a course — its roster, its system, its packet — is the boundary of reproduction; publishing our work to the open public is a different act, and for that, a link is free to everyone and needs no grant at all.
5.3. Our free record is never sold to students. The cost of duplication may be recovered — a print shop's per-page charge, a course-pack binding — but no one, from a copy shop to a courseware platform, charges students for our content itself. A fee pinned to our work's value rather than the copying's cost is a sale, and sales run through the Licensing and Reprint Terms, never through a student's pocket.
Article 6 — Students Owe Us Nothing
6.1. A student reading us creates no account, surrenders no identity, and sheds no data — the Access Terms and the Data Terms apply to the youngest reader with their full force, and we built the reading lane to collect nothing it does not need.
6.2. A school may rely on this in writing: assigning The Massachusetts Times introduces no student tracking, no advertising profile, and no third-party harvest through us. There is no parental-consent apparatus to administer here because there is no collection to consent to.
6.3. We do not build a separate, instrumented "education product" that trades access for telemetry. The classroom gets the same clean record the public gets.
Article 7 — Student Journalism
7.1. Student publications hold everything every press holds from us — the Access, Citation, and Correction machinery — and one thing more.
7.2. A recognized student publication — a newspaper, magazine, or broadcast run by students at a school, college, or university — may reprint individual works of ours in full, with credit in the form the Licensing and Reprint Terms prescribe, without charge and without asking.
7.3. The reprint grant is for student journalism, not for mirroring: it covers works chosen one by one for the student outlet's own pages, not systematic republication of our record, and it is non-commercial — a student paper's ordinary operations, ads and all, do not make it commercial for this purpose; syndicating our work onward does.
7.4. We extend this because this institution regards the student newsroom as the seedbed of the craft, and a publisher who charges the seedbed has confused harvest with planting.
Article 8 — Scholarship
8.1. Research use of the record — close reading, comparison, criticism, the scholar's ordinary work — is covered by this grant and by the universal grants it rides on, through to publication of the scholarship itself under the Citation and Quotation Terms.
8.2. Computational research — text and data mining, corpus building, machine analysis — is automated collection, and the Machine Terms at massachusettstimes.us/terms/machine govern it exclusively. The posture bona fide scholarship will find there is hospitality; the lane discipline is kept all the same.
Article 9 — Stability for the Syllabus
9.1. Assign us without fear of rot. The Archive and Permanence Terms hold our addresses stable and our archive free, so a reading listed in a syllabus resolves for every cohort that follows.
9.2. A work's corrections travel with it under the Correction Terms, which means an assigned reading quietly improves rather than silently changing — what changed and when is marked on the work for the class to see. We commend the corrections notice itself as teaching material.
Article 10 — Where the Grant Ends
10.1. Republication to the open public beyond the course enclosure is not classroom use. For excerpts, the Citation and Quotation Terms already serve everyone; for whole works, the Licensing and Reprint Terms govern — except where Article 7 answers for student publications.
10.2. Commercial anthologies, textbooks for sale, and courseware products that incorporate our work are sales of it, and run through the Licensing and Reprint Terms, where educational purpose is weighed in the asking price's favor.
10.3. Platforms ingesting our record at scale to serve it from their own systems are in the machine lane, whatever market they sell to. An education company's crawler is a crawler.
Article 11 — Comfort Without Charge
11.1. An administrator, counsel, or review board that wants this grant confirmed in writing may have it: the License Desk at massachusettstimes.us/licensing issues confirmation of educational use within these terms without charge.
Article 12 — Changes to These Terms
12.1. Any narrowing of this grant is a material adverse change and takes effect no earlier than thirty days after we publish a dated notice, as the Terms of Use require.
12.2. No narrowing lands mid-term. A course already relying on this grant when a change is noticed finishes its academic term under the grant it began with, and copies lawfully made for a class remain lawful, forever.
12.3. If The Massachusetts Times Company's business changes hands or form, this grant travels with the record to the successor under the assignment article of the Terms of Use, on these same terms.
Article 13 — The Spine These Terms Share
13.1. These Education Terms incorporate the Open Covenant and the general articles of the Terms of Use: the reader's canon, one-way severance, assignment to successors, the record of versions, and the governing law and open courts carried by the Dispute Terms.
13.2. Where these terms and any other page we publish could be read to conflict about a teaching use, the reading that permits the teaching governs.
Article 14 — The Record of These Terms
14.1. The current text of these Education Terms lives at massachusettstimes.us/terms/education, with its effective date at the head. Prior versions and their dates are kept and published alongside it, so what the classroom held on any given day can always be checked.
These terms are part of the Terms that govern this publication.