France, Germany, Finland see worst PISA scores on record
The 2025 PISA assessment shows major European education systems collapsing, with nearly one in three teens lacking basic literacy and math skills.
What to know
- France, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands all hit all-time low PISA scores in 2025; roughly one in three teens in these countries now lack basic literacy and math skills.
- Inequality is stark: in Germany, only 2% of low-income students achieve high competence versus 25% of wealthy students—double the gap seen in Nordic peers.
- Root causes span pandemic disruption, chronic teacher shortages, curriculum neglect of basics, widening school segregation, and smartphone-driven attention collapse.
- Germany's education minister pledged urgent action by year-end; the UK was the sole major European performer to buck the decline.
EU spending and integration policies failed to improve outcomes; UK's EU exit may have insulated it from broader continental decline.
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“I thought infinite social spending would make our countries better and the UK would perish because they left the EU! shocking!”
throwaway3433432 · Reddit ↗
Youth cognitive decline is real and measurable; smartphone culture has made today's students genuinely less capable than prior generations.
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“These are the first generations for which someone can say 'the youth is getting stupid' and actually be right.”
meremetallica · Reddit ↗
Samuel Greiff German PISA study coordinatorKarin Prien German education minister
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage postscomments
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background
German education minister pledges urgent response and new child protection measures — Education Minister Karin Prien said the report required an urgent response, highlighting the negative influence of excessive social media use and pledging to present new measures to protect younger children by the end of the year.
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Germany's PISA failure reveals stark inequality tied to family income — In Germany, only 2% of pupils from low-income families achieve high levels of competence, compared to 25% from higher-income families—a disparity twice as strong as in Denmark or Norway. Samuel Greiff, the German PISA study coordinator, warns of an alarming rise in teenagers lacking basic skills for citizenship and employment, including text comprehension and consumer math.
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Education experts identify pandemic learning losses and structural failures as root causes — Analysis attributes the collapse to multiple overlapping factors: pandemic-accelerated learning losses, chronic teacher shortages, repeated curriculum reforms that neglected basic skills, and widening inequality in increasingly segregated school systems. Incessant smartphone use is cited as a compounding factor, reducing attention spans and replacing deep reading with scrolling.
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2025 PISA results released, showing historic lows for European education leaders
The PISA assessment, which measures how effectively 15-year-olds apply school knowledge to real-life situations, reveals France's worst-ever scores, Germany's worst-ever scores, and all-time lows in the Netherlands and Finland. In all four countries, approximately one in three teens lack basic functional literacy and math skills. The UK, by contrast, bucked the downward trend.
“The 2025 Pisa scores, which assess how effectively 15-year-olds apply school-learned knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics and science to real-life situations, have rocked some of western Europe's education powerhouses.”
— The Guardian -
first by Mastodon, 5d ago · also The Guardian
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# Education "In France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, the proportion of 15-year-olds lacking basic functional literacy and maths skills rose to nearly one in three." European education powerhouses rocked by falling scores in global study: https://www. theguardian.com/education/2026…
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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but but but I thought infinite social spending would make our countries better and the UK would perish because they left the EU! shocking!
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These are the first generations for which someone can say "the youth is getting stupid" and actually be right.
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What people are saying 8 voices from 2 sites · best of 11 · verbatim
- Sep 20
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Test scores plunge in # Finland and other European education powerhouses. The pandemic, smartphones, AI and budget cuts are partly to blame, but there are longer-term factors here, too. # pisa # education # literacy https://www. theguardian.com/education/2026…
- Sep 19
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The rigor and knowledge based instruction from Asian schooling, the broader focus and lower competitiveness of Western schooling.
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and the goal should not be that 14 year olds can do calculus or balance chemical equations, unless we think this is actually useful later in life for them. Except if you do want inventive, creative and critically thinking people, you have to adopt a notion that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is also valuable, even if you cannot directly link…
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Do people in Japan or Korea make much better scientists, make more discoveries, invent better things, build better companies, are more informed, than people in Norway, Australia, Denmark, Germany? As somehow who does meet scientists or people making discoveries everyday, the answer strongly depends on the field you work in. East Asian people…
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# News # Europe # WTF https://www. theguardian.com/education/2026 /sep/19/european-education-powerhouses-rocked-falling-pisa-scores-global-study-france-germany-netherlands-finland
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It's not an easy challenge when so many students arrived so recently from countries that do much worse. Germany's average score among natives across the three subjects was the 3rd best in Europe behind Estonia and Switzerland. So countries with less than 2% of Europe's population.
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They are not better just more . Basically the same idea of mass production of industrial goods with lowest cost and sufficient quality. So the whole system is designed to be run at minimum cost and provide enough education to the mass population in accordance with the national industrial policy. The opposite of humanism approach, it is not for…
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I'm a teacher and University professor. The parents are dumb and the kids are dumb. I teach well off kids, and their parents want them to do well and are willing to pay for it, but they don't really know how. I taught rich kids whose parents knew what they had to do. Chalk and cheese. So many parents don't know basic facts outside of their…