The picture is quietly striking: a steel capsule buried under a university courtyard and sealed. Inside the capsule is not just news stories or pictures, but also a pack of trading cards. Not 1950s baseball cards. Not things for a child’s room. Academic theory trading cards are used in college to teach ideas, start debates, and encourage focused, tactile thinking that you can’t get from scrolling through your phone.
Three universities in the United States have now agreed to put trading cards for theories in time capsules that will be opened many years from now. It might sound like a strange side note. Most likely, it’s not.
Putting things in academic time capsules has always been a way to freeze a cultural moment, recording not only what happened but also what people thought was important at the time. Students at Parkland College buried a steel capsule in December 2020. Inside was a rainbow flag, a Black Lives Matter pin, a voter registration card, and a face mask. Small objects, but ones that are loaded. Each thing was picked out because it held significance at a certain point in time. Lori Garrett, the project’s faculty advisor, said, “Sometimes things get more romanticized as time goes on.” “This way we’re leaving a frozen-in-time snapshot.”
The decision at these three universities to ban trading cards seems to be based on the same urge to keep something alive before it goes away. A good question to think about is why now and why cards.
People who study education will tell you that the answer has a lot to do with what’s being lost in the background. There were $15.8 billion worth of trading cards sold around the world in 2024, and that number is expected to grow to $23.5 billion by 2030. People are buying in because they miss the old days and because their kids are interested in Pokémon and sports figures. Cards in the classroom, on the other hand, help kids form habits that are harder to put a dollar value on: the kids don’t even realize it, but the hobby helps them think. Handling talks. Be patient. Being able to judge value, wait for a better deal, and plan two moves ahead.
Screens tend to break down these skills instead of building them up. That’s not a good reason to be against technology. I’m just being honest about what I’ve seen different tools do to my attention over time.
The universities that chose to store these cards may know something that hasn’t quite made it into the mainstream conversation yet: that analog objects used in classrooms in 2024 and 2025 have a certain cultural meaning. These things are a choice to slow down, to work with real things, and to interact with concepts in a way that doesn’t ping, refresh, or automatically reward the fastest response. In a way, putting them in a time capsule is like testifying. In other words, we wanted whoever opens this vault to know that we knew it was important.
It’s really not clear if future students will understand that context. By the time these capsules are opened, technology will have changed a lot. The Parkland team actually sent backups on flash drives along with their physical items. They joked that 30 years ago, people were still using floppy disks. If someone opens a time capsule that was sealed today, they might need an archivist to figure out what was meant to be inside.
That could be the point, though. When you have to decide what to keep, it forces you to be clear about what you really value. It’s not just trading cards that these schools are keeping. They’re saying something about how people learned at a certain time in history, when there was a lot of digital information, short attention spans, and a growing, somewhat anxious search for slower ways of thinking.
It seems likely that this event will seem more important in the future than it does now. A steel box, a deck of cards, and thirty years to wait. It’s a small thing, but it’s part of a bigger conversation about why we go to school and what we lose when things get faster.
