Germany is becoming poor - PISA results show declining educational trends

I'm a boomer. This is perhaps why I sarcastically put the headline on my last comment on the school dropout rate: “Germany is becoming poor.” The reactions were enormous. I received a lot of encouragement. A teacher even wrote to me saying that she had discussed the article with her students.

I could leave it at that and let the results of the current PISA 2025 study speak for themselves. 464 points in mathematics, 465 in reading and 486 in science. That's OECD average, far from the top where China and Singapore and, from Europe, Estonia are. But above all: There are fewer points than in the past. Germany's students have been getting worse for the past ten years - German education policy is not making them smarter from generation to generation, but rather dumber.

Of course, Germany also has its strengths. The world is the envy of our dual vocational training. German students also enjoy going to school above average and are becoming more and more interested in natural sciences. Their performances aren't disastrously bad either, they're just average. And average will neither get the individual students nor the country as a whole where it wants and needs to go. Germany must not, to quote myself once again, become a poor idiot.