There are some subjects that I always click on a news story about. Like anything to do with the decline of reading. A couple of years ago I posted on some of the findings at the time, including the fact that the number of young American teens who read for fun daily had, in 2024, been cut in half in only a decade. That’s not so much a historical trend line as it is a total collapse. Then, just last year, there was a story out of the UK about how over a quarter of 4-5-year-old kids didn’t even know what a book was or how to properly “use” it. That’s bad.

Well, last week another story dropped with still more concerning findings. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development dropped its Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, report, assessing reading, math, and science skills. This study measures logic and reasoning skills and it is huge, testing more than 760,000 students across 91 countries.

You can probably guess the results.

Now apparently Canada still rate above the OECD average, but the rate of decline (at least as I’ve read the report) has been steeper. Apparently students are on average two years behind where they were a decade ago.

Are we even surprised at results like this anymore? Or the fact that China and Singapore were the highest performers? Should we be learning something from them?

Most of the blame for what’s happening is directed at phone usage among young people and the pernicious effects of social media. But it made me think of a post I did of my “final thoughts” on the pandemic and its aftereffects. One of the groups I thought would be most affected by the lockdown was going to be kids. Here’s what I said five years ago:

The second affected group [by the COVID shutdown, after people with medical conditions whose treatment had been delayed] are schoolkids and what UNESCO has dubbed the “shadow pandemic” of “education disruption” (you can read more about this in an excellent article in the July 2021 issue of Maclean’s by Sarmishta Subramanian). I didn’t think the educational system was ready to switch to online learning, and it wasn’t. From what I’ve seen just over the course of the last couple of months, it never really got up to speed. Top students, those most, privileged, disciplined and motivated, have managed. They usually do, and there’s no need to worry about them. But for everyone else (which is to say, the overwhelming majority of students) it’s been nearly two years down the drain. I don’t blame the teachers. I met some new teachers who had just graduated before COVID struck and I can’t imagine how at sea they felt being thrust into such a situation. But based on the online classes I saw, and the students I spoke to, “school” this past year was a total waste.

That these kids lost a couple of years out of their education would go some way to explaining why they are two years behind today.

You do have to look at the charts and wonder where the bottom is in all this. And if we’re looking at assigning blame we have to be clear about one thing: the “kids these days” didn’t do this to themselves. It’s the adults in the room that let them down.