Across the west, secondary school test scores are declining. This has been happening for a decade. It accelerated during covid, but has not reversed with a return to in-person classes. A recent study showed us how bad the problem has become in the US. But OECD data shows the trend is actually global, with only East Asia breaking the trend. That data is from 2022, but I am prepared to go on record now saying that the 2025 data (the PISA scores are published every 3 years) which will be released later this year or early next year, will show the same pattern.
A recent Breaking Points video I watched (which brought the recent US data to my attention) lamented this as a “SOCIETAL COLLAPSE” and blamed:
Mostly, they blamed the screens, with Sagaar suggesting the data was clear that reading and writing with pen and paper was superior to digital alternatives. However the data is not at all clear or conclusive.
My position, standing on the shoulders of the philosophical giant Mark Fisher puts the social collapse causally upstream from the devices based distractions. In his book Capitalist Realism, Fisher describes exactly the digital-distraction behaviour reported by western students in the PISA studies, but rather than blaming the devices, or the teachers, or the students, he blames society at large. Given he was a teacher himself, this might be seen as a cop out. But I think he’s right.
Here a comparison with Asia is insightful. Because, despite having widespread access to digital devices, China, Korea, Japan and other countries in the region have bucked the global trend. The difference? They live in a civilisation with a future. After a 500 year eclipse by the west, they are reclaiming their natural position at the centre of the world and the forefront of culture and technology. Europe, the US and her Five Eyes Allies as well as Latin America, have no such horizon of opportunity to look forward to.
Since our leaders cannot articulate a desirable collective future. Individual teenagers cannot imagine their place in it. It is not the phones in their bags – Asian kids have those too – it’s the neoliberal boomer nihilism. This is both directly, as societal sense of dread sinks in from all directions, with people casually and consistently saying that everyone should expect everything to get worse and no one will do anything about it, and indirectly, as this nihilism leads to policies which annihilate their material opportunities.
It’s important to note that the distinction is not national. It is civilisational. Confucian civilization is resilient in the face of digital distraction. Western civilization is not.
The answer to this is not to engage in some absurd and synthetic effort to reanimate the rotting corpse of Western idealism. It is exactly the incompatibility of those two things: a self consciously “Western” identity and the universal idealism which as a matter of historical happenstance was articulated at the western end of the Eurasian landmass, which is the impossible contradiction.
The answer as I have argued elsewhere is to move as rapidly as possible to a truly global and egalitarian system, which is the only system compatible with enlightenment derived ideas like universal human rights.
