PISA 2025 should worry anyone who cares about prosperity.

Comment “Human Capital” and we’ll send you an article on why skills matter for prosperity. Across much of the developed world, reading and mathematics performance has continued to deteriorate, even after decades of expanding educational resources. Education is not valuable merely for the credential it produces: it builds human capital, the stock of knowledge and skills that makes people more productive and economies more capable of growing. It is tempting to blame phones, social media, or the pandemic, and each may matter. But the deeper question is institutional. If existing education systems struggle to adapt, the answer shouldn’t automatically be more spending or more technological repression. We should be asking how competition, experimentation, entrepreneurship, and parental choice can help education discover better ways to teach.