As big of a fan as I am of good news, something wasn’t right in the latest PISA report. 

Like all reports, you can look at stats in any number of ways. 

For example, if you want to feel good about yourself have a look at the Australian results. They're not good. 

So for a bit of Trans-Tasman rivalry, their numbers will give you no end of good vibes. 

The socio-economic gap the Government talked up seems real, so that’s indisputably good. 

But I have two major worries: 

We look good because essentially, we went nowhere, and we went nowhere against an OECD that went backwards. Standing knee-deep while others drown doesn’t seem to me to be a thing. 

I mean you'll take it. But I would've thought that comparing yourself to the ordinary is not quite as fulfilling as actually moving forward. 

But the really big one is the OECD going backwards, and the 'why'. 

I surmise the 'why' is the death of critical thinking. Kids no longer think for themselves and it's only going to get worse. 

The reports raise issues around disruptive classrooms, the old screen-time issue, and of course the fact that kids don’t read. 

This is global. We have multiple generations of non-readers and reading is the key to everything. 

Mix the lack of reading with AI, which will answer whatever you want, and basically, we are headed for intellectual oblivion. 

Like the calculator before it, technological advance is efficient and gets you the answer. But the link to critical thinking is "do you know the answer is right"? 

Of course you don’t and you don’t care either. 

No one asks questions No one is inquiring. The rise of gormlessness is frightening. 

It's there in the PISA reports – our kids are going backwards. Not reading, not adding and not firing up the ol' brains. 

In the intellectual swamp that is global education, we aren't too bad. So instead of worrying about that, we decide to pretend it’s a good news story. 

But being okay, or average, in a world of the hopeless isn't what I call achieving.