maybe check out ``western`` birth rates without immigration before spouting next time

I don't think so. While I believe more in the student than the school for success, in the formative years, a good foundation is necessary, as somebody can't know better if they don't know anything.

So, a good education system's effects are compounded for younger children w.r.t. higher education.

So, these education systems need a check and tune-up to adapt them to current age and perform at their peak again.

Living in one Asian country, phone scrolling still happens with adults but kids get a lot of homework and definitely do it. Honestly excessive amounts, quantity over quality but at least studying is happening.

If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.

> news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media

FTFA: “Digital distraction also affects the wider classroom. More than one in four students said that classmates were distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson. Students surrounded by distracted classmates performed less well, were less engaged in learning and felt less connected to their school. Students who say they did not use AI to draft text for writing assignments outperformed those who say they did. Among frequent users, however, students who used AI to help them learn and were taught how to assess the quality of AI-generated information tended to perform better than those who received no such guidance.”

Here's a data point that should help:

Poland's math score dropped by just 5 points. As for other tests:

Science: -4

Reading: -7.

Much like with GDP per capita, my country is climbing the rankings, but only via walkover.

>Given the big gap between the east and the west

I thought the reason that China and Singapore were so far ahead of everyone else was that they were urban populations vs everyone else include rural areas.

I assumed that Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang were purely urban, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm very curious about this as well, because BSJZ is almost an entire proficiency level above (almost) everyone else. That's an insane gap.

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You know I pulled these figures out of their table on the bus in to work. I selected the largest economies in the OECD (Germany, France, America, South Korean and Japan are the largest economies in the OECD). I added Taiwan and Singapore for context since my contention related to east Asia and only two countries is unbalanced. I should have added UK (-9) instead of Sweden (all the Brexit dooming made me forget that the UK is still a bigger economy and I actually buy some Swedish stuff). As for your list - it seems very arbitrary. Sweden is a good proxy for Finland and they share the same exact trend. Israel is the only other OECD country on your list. The rest are simply random non-OECD countries.

Since you and others have brought up immigration I felt the need to review this thesis. For the OECD plotting foreign born population against Pisa math changes gets a decent correlation (Spearman r = −0.384; p = 0.017). Obviously foreign born is an imperfect proxy for classroom demographics, but it's a start. Definitely a trend, not a huge one, but hard to ignore. I'm honestly surprised that it is not discussed much in a 400 page report with correlation plots between composite indices (a sign of a very extensive data analytics project). Total failure on the part of the researchers). Putting aside any racial claims, I would leave open the possibility that training a large percentage of kids in a language they don't really understand is not likely be be as effective as speaking a language that they do understand. Seems pretty obvious actually. In fact if you drop the English speaking countries from the OECD list (English is very commonly spoken across the globe), then the correlation coefficient goes up to −0.55; p = 0.001).

Would love to see a more detailed breakdown. In the US, often the highest performers are children of immigrants.

Yeah, it's useless to look at time-series changes in this data without accounting for the fact that, e.g., 29% of students in Germany now have a migration background. A huge chunk of German students are growing up with parents who don't speak German at home, of course that's going to cause test scores to decline.

> you can torture your children with ever harsher "education"

Harsh educations don’t work. Neither does modern coddling, prevalent in the West. If any adversity prompts a mental health crisis, you’re at a global disadvantage. Economically and, I’d argue, in terms of quality of life.