Why this is, is an interesting question but it hits on too many taboo topics. Though perhaps rational discussion becoming taboo is itself a part of the reason. When you accept reality, whatever it gives you, you're obviously going to have a far more rational population and better outcomes than one that insists on bending reality to fit a desired narrative, even when it obviously does not. After all this is precisely what brought Greater Arabia from the center of education and learning in the world to rather the opposite. It wasn't religion, but letting ideology dominate reality instead of the other way around.
[1] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
I wonder to what extent demographic shifts account for the observed reversal? It would be interesting to tease out what happens where composition remains constant, i.e. Poland. Though I doubt this explains the entire effect.
> By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'.
seems like the Flynn effect doing its thing just as it did in western countries in the 20th century.
In my opinion we just have it too easy nowadays. Too much entertainment, screens and not enough challenges to keep kids thinking they need to be as sharp as they can be.
Japan: -3
S Korea: -1
Singapore: +1
Taiwan: +9
---
Germany: -45
France: -38
Sweden: -33
US: -10
This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently than their East Asian counterparts and stop pursing those actions as national policy
*edit for formatting
So, a good education system's effects are compounded for younger children w.r.t. higher education.
So, these education systems need a check and tune-up to adapt them to current age and perform at their peak again.
Given the big gap between the east and the west... does anybody know if these are somehow less used/abused in asian countries?
Any other reason why this gap might happen?
Thanks
If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.
Elementary school is 8-5, longish day but not too bad on homework.
Middle school (grades 6-9) there's been a recent drive to have less homework so they stay till only 7:00 (!) doing it at school and only a little take home done between dinner and bed.
High school is your life revolves around homework, everyone realizes it's counterproductive to learning but they're all stuck in this trap grinding for the big exams that will shape the rest of your life.
Actual Chinese (and other asian countries) can chime in where I'm mistaken.
FTFA: “Digital distraction also affects the wider classroom. More than one in four students said that classmates were distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson. Students surrounded by distracted classmates performed less well, were less engaged in learning and felt less connected to their school. Students who say they did not use AI to draft text for writing assignments outperformed those who say they did. Among frequent users, however, students who used AI to help them learn and were taught how to assess the quality of AI-generated information tended to perform better than those who received no such guidance.”
Poland's math score dropped by just 5 points. As for other tests:
Science: -4
Reading: -7.
Much like with GDP per capita, my country is climbing the rankings, but only via walkover.
what that means?
In sports it's victory because the opponents didn't show up or were disqualified.
I thought the reason that China and Singapore were so far ahead of everyone else was that they were urban populations vs everyone else include rural areas.
I assumed that Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang were purely urban, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm very curious about this as well, because BSJZ is almost an entire proficiency level above (almost) everyone else. That's an insane gap.
My comment did not preclude either of these from being true. I didn't say "On average, children of immigrants do better in the US." I said "often the highest performers are children of immigrants."
> But looking at test scores for hispanic students is a rough proxy because more than 60% of hispanic students are immigrants or the children of immigrants:
Looking at the test scores for Asians is also a rough proxy of children of immigrants, and you can see what your link shows: They are the lowest of all groups in being "below average", and the highest of all groups in the top category ("Advanced") - over double the next highest race in math, for example.
I expected better reasoning from you, given the whole "Asian and child of immigrants" ;-)
(As an aside, not sure how relevant your link is, given that it's from 2015, and the thread is about the shift from 2015 to now).
Harsh educations don’t work. Neither does modern coddling, prevalent in the West. If any adversity prompts a mental health crisis, you’re at a global disadvantage. Economically and, I’d argue, in terms of quality of life.
There is also something else to be said about Mental Health, coming from one of the countries with the lowest rates of someone taking their own lives, and its not just due to underreporting.
Peru probably isn't the best place to live, but the food, weather, people, and general culture which almost normalizes suffering in an almost Buddhist way (Sufre Peruano sufre! lit. Suffer Peruvian, Suffer!) might have something to do with a more robust mental health situation?
Is there a credible source for “mental health” being an extinguishable quantity? This sounds an awful lot like the battery hypothesis of longevity.
See graphs on PISA 2025 homepage : https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers. Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That's not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday. I'm open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.
The AI they’re talking about is not EdTech AI-based teaching tools. It’s students who use ChatGPT to handle work for them so they can ignore any teaching parts.
Apples and oranges. Using this study to draw conclusions about AI EdTech would be a mistake
If everyone is hiring a "tutor" to just do their homework for them, that doesn't mean that all tutors are bad.
Simply put, there’s nothing better than old school pen to paper.
Kid pasting the question into ChatGPT and pasting its answer back is not the same as an AI teacher persona.
In my mind an AI teacher can be like a traditional education package (syllabus, material, questions, keeping track of progression) but way more flexible. I don't see no reason why AI teachers shouldn't give Bloom's 2 sigma effect to kids (and adults) very soon.
I think it's a double-edged sword.
I think some kids will absolutely use it that way, and it turns out to be revolutionary for them. Kids who couldn't afford a tutor now can have one.
But also, there will be kids that think they will do this, and they don't. Instead, they end up talking the AI into letting them off the hook of learning things for themselves, and society pays for the AI tutor while get nothing in return.
When I look at young people today, that's what I see. Some teenagers seem to have a college degree via self-study, while many others have completely fried their brains, while looking into the same devices for the same amount of time.
I believe it is probably a combination of several factors:
- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media.
- App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus.
- LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models.
- Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake.
- COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Surely this time banning things will improve test scores!
Even before you get to the scores in the report, it shows what percentage of students come from schools that have banned phones. There doesn't seem to be any obvious correlation where banning phones from school gives better results. Eg Estonia averaged 520 points with 26% of students from schools that ban phones. 88.9% of students were in NZ schools where cellphones are banned, but NZ averaged 511 points.
I think before we start banning more "random" things we should consider whether these bans actually produce results. Let the countries that are making these changes run their banning experiment and the rest of us should wait and see whether their scores meaningfully improve afterwards.
These days it's reversed, only 20% pass.
I was told this was the case around 2005 when I studied there.
The exam has not changed in difficulty.
Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s? For instance, have there been any, I dunno, new developments in technology over the past 60-odd years?
Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
"The school curriculum in England is the responsibility of the Westminster Government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for setting their own curriculum policies."
And I think this wasn't a "just my class" kind of thing.
> Hasty responses (percentage of responses that are both incorrect and fast – average across reading items)
Spain is at 9.7%, which is a bit over 8.9% oecd average.
Is there evidence for this attitude not generalizing?
Stable, above OECD average: Taiwan, Macao, Korea, Estonia, United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, New Zealand
Stable, around or below OECD average: United States, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia, Qatar, Montenegro, Mongolia, Mexico, Brunei
Dropping, previously above OECD average: Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Latvia, Portugal, Norway, Spain, France, Hungary
Dropping, around or below OECD average: Iceland, Israel, Malta, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Romania, Peru, Ukraine, North Macedonia
Improving, all below OECD average: Türkiye, Thailand, UAE, Philippines, Jordan, Georgia, Cambodia
Social and cultural expectations and conventions are extremely important. Even in supposedly laissez-faire Western countries where traditional cultural expectations have withered to the point of laxity, people still live their lives according to convention and expectation, even if those conventions and expectations are increasingly vulgar and dictated by powerful interest. (Indeed, the fertility crisis is determined largely by patterns of convention. It used to be that, for most people, it was expected that you would marry and have children earlier rather than later. Now, our cultural expectations actually penalize that kind of behavior. You're supposed to "find yourself", "play the field", or "build up your career" first.)
Human beings operate more by convention than by moral reasoning. Society needs an environment demands good things from them. Even when we know what the right or good course of action is through moral reasoning and discernment, it is very helpful for social convention and culture to support those choices.
The law is also traditionally a source of guardrails that help people attain better lives.
The U.S. is at 17.8% top performers, well behind Japan and Korea but around the same as Canada and Switzerland. But the U.S. is significantly ahead of the big EU countries: Germany is at 14%, France is at 9.8%, Italy is at 10.1% and Spain is at 7%.
Unfortunately, those scores are not reliable. It is a recurring problem with the USA for the PISA studies.
The preliminary chapter explains why data has lower confidence is some places. For the USA, there were many problems, including political reluctance in some states or schools, that lead to uncontrolled biases. Notably, the ratio of unreachable children is 40 %, twice more than their upper limit for valid results.
PISA 2025 was the largest assessment to date, involving 760 000 students across 91 countries and economies.
AI already writes most of the articles I see posted here, is doing math at the level of the best mathematicians, and is writing a ton of the code out there. Given another decade to develop, the kids will be hitting the workforce with very stiff competition. It's not a shock they're putting their energy elsewhere, and I can't say they're wrong.
They may be the first generation who grow up fully catered to by AI.
Terence Tao a few days ago [1]:
> When we point the AIs at really difficult problems where none of the standard techniques apply, they are still very, very bad, I mean they're just randomly guessing.
Please don't reply saying they'll be proving the Collatz conjecture next week. It adds nothing.
[1] https://youtu.be/svl_1upFpQo (worth watching on the role of LLMs in maths)
And we're only a couple of years in. Their capabilities aren't going to be getting worse over time. These kids will be hitting the workforce after AI has another decade of improvement put into it.
Your broader point is based on a future extrapolation of LLM capabilities that is far from guaranteed to play out, so it sounds like poor risk management to me, even accepting your framing of it purely in terms of value in the workforce (which I don't).
If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.
I mean, what's the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.
The situation will probably be like with airline pilots. The plane is mostly an automated system, but we simply don't let automation to work through exceptional situations, without human review. Therefore, lots of pilot training (and their presence) is still required.
But it's also hard to guess what exactly skill should the pilots have. It's clear that lots of things from manual aircraft do not translate well to automated.
>In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it "children of the magenta line," after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather than actually flying the plane, that they lost their own skills to manually fly the plane. This wasn’t a problem until it was a problem.
>VanderBurgh’s concern was not about autopilot itself but rather the complete dependency on autopilot at the expense of the internal knowledge of how it works and the loss of the judgment to know when to use it. In 2009, his warning came true in the very worst way possible over the Atlantic. When Air France 447’s sensors iced over, the autopilot handed a perfectly good airliner back to its crew, the pilots, confused and out of practice, stalled it into the sea.
-https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/children-of-the-magenta-...
Children Of The Magenta Line -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
Give yourself a few hours to write out some code in the old way. Can you really tell me that you could not have done a better job with AI in the same time?
Eg, implement chess or poker games.
Or write a component like a Swiss table.
It's not obvious to me that AI produces bad work at all.
I averaged around 18mo to either a promotion or a move in my 20s, mostly off the back of working harder (to get the promotions/comp increases) and working smarter (to work out when they aren't coming and jumping somewhere else).
If this makes sense for someone has a lot more to do with their ambition/desire and ability to work the system than anything else. It also helps a ton if you are also legitimately very good at what you do. Then it's pretty easy because you are just demanding you are paid commensurate with impact.
Simply doing overtime and having hustle doesn't cut it though, you actually need to be able to leverage it into career progress or it's just wasted life.