That the pandemic messed up schooling is well known. Between 2018 and 2022 an average teenager in a rich country fell some six months behind their expected progress in reading and nine months behind in maths, according to the OECD. What is less widely understood is that the trouble began long before covid-19 struck. A typical pupil in an OECD country was no more literate or numerate when the coronavirus first ran amok than children tested 15 years earlier. As our special report argues, education in the rich world is stagnating. This should worry parents and policymakers alike.
In America long-running tests of maths and reading find that attainment peaked in the early 2010s. Since then, average performance there has gone sideways or backwards. In Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, among other places, scores in some international tests have been falling for years. What has gone wrong?
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External shocks have played a part. Migration has brought many newcomers who do not speak the language of instruction. Mobile phones distract pupils and keep their heads out of books at home. The pandemic was hugely disruptive. Many governments closed schools for too long, encouraged by teachers’ unions, and children lost the habit of studying. Attendance in many places is lower than before covid. Classrooms have become rowdier.
Yet education policymakers also bear much of the blame for stagnant standards. In America, for example, fixing schools was once a bipartisan issue. Today the right obsesses over culture-war trivia, while many on the left practise what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, and argue that classrooms are so biased against minorities that it is impossible and immoral to hold all pupils to high standards. Others want homework and exams to be lightened or scrapped for the sake of pupils’ mental health.
Faddish thinking is the enemy of rigour. One theory holds that technology such as AI will make traditional learning less useful, so schools should nurture “problem-solvers”, “critical thinkers” and students who work well in teams. Inspired by such talk, countries have adopted curriculums that focus on vaguely defined “skills” and play down the learning of facts as fuddy-duddy. Several, such as Scotland, have seen pupils grow less numerate and literate as a result. Those that have resisted, such as England, have done better.
Policymakers should focus on the fundamentals. They must defend rigorous testing, suppress grade inflation and make room for schools, such as charters, that offer parents choice. They should pay competitive wages to hire the best teachers and defy unions to sack underperformers. This need not bust budgets, since small classes matter less than parents imagine. Fewer, better teachers can produce stronger results than lots of mediocre ones. Japanese pupils thrash their American peers in tests, even though their average secondary classroom contains an extra ten desks.
Another task is to gather and share more information about what kinds of lessons work best—a task many governments neglect. Unions may prefer it when good teaching is seen as too mysterious to measure, but children suffer. World-class school systems, such as Singapore’s, experiment endlessly, fail quickly and move on. Others keep on doing what does not work.
The stakes are high. In rich countries the workforce will shrink as the population ages. Productivity will have to rise to maintain living standards. Well-trained minds will be needed to tackle complex challenges, from inequality to climate change. H.G. Wells, a novelist and futurist, wrote that human history is a “race between education and catastrophe”. It is a race societies cannot afford to lose.
© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
