[ad_1]
It is well known that the pandemic has crippled schooling. According to the OECD, between 2018 and 2022 an average teenager in a rich country fell about six months behind their expected progress in reading and nine months behind in maths. What is less understood is that this problem began long before Covid-19 arrived. When the coronavirus first spread, a typical student in an OECD country was no more literate or numerate than children tested 15 years ago. As our special report argues, education in the rich world is stagnating. This should worry parents and policymakers alike.
Long-standing math and reading tests in the U.S. show that achievement peaked in the early 2010s. Since then, average performance there has declined or gone backwards. In other places, including Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, scores on some international tests have been falling for years. What went wrong?
View full image
External shocks have also played a role. Migration has brought in many newcomers who do not know the language of instruction. Mobile phones distract students and take their focus away from books at home. The pandemic has caused a lot of disruption. Many governments, encouraged by teachers’ unions, kept schools closed for too long and children lost their habit of studying. Attendance is lower in many places than before Covid. Classrooms have become noisier than before.
Yet education policymakers also shoulder much of the blame for stagnant standards. In the US, for example, fixing schools was once a bipartisan issue. Today the right obsesses over culture-war platitudes, while many on the left practice what George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” arguing that classrooms are so biased against minorities that holding all students to high standards is impossible and unethical. Others want homework and tests to be lightened or eliminated for the sake of students’ mental health.
Cynical thinking is the enemy of rigour. One theory holds that technology such as AI will make traditional education less useful, so schools should foster students who are “problem-solvers”, “critical thinkers” and those who work well in teams. Inspired by such talk, countries have adopted curricula that focus on vaguely defined “skills” and dismiss the learning of facts as futile. Many countries, such as Scotland, are seeing declining student literacy and literacy. Countries such as England have resisted this, but have fared better.
Policymakers should focus on the basics. They should defend rigorous testing, suppress grade inflation and make room for schools, such as charters, that offer parents choice. They should pay competitive salaries to hire the best teachers and defy unions to fire poor performers. This need not bust the budget, because smaller classes matter less than parents imagine. Fewer, better teachers can produce better results than many mediocre teachers. Japanese students outperform their American peers on tests even though their average secondary classroom has an extra ten desks.
The second task is to gather and share more information about what kinds of lessons work best – a task many governments ignore. Unions may love it when good education is treated as too mysterious to measure, but children suffer. World-class school systems like Singapore experiment endlessly, fail quickly and move on. Others keep doing what doesn’t work.
The stakes are high. The workforce will shrink as populations in rich countries age. Productivity must rise to maintain living standards. Well-trained minds will be needed to tackle complex challenges ranging from inequality to climate change. H.G. Wells, a novelist and futurist, wrote that human history is a “race between education and catastrophe.” It’s a race that societies cannot afford to lose.
© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. Original content can be found at www.economist.com.
[ad_2]
