PISA and the sorry state of Spanish education

Spain's poor PISA results stem from a mix of flawed pedagogies, an egalitarianism that promotes mediocrity, and the politicization of the education system, rather than superficial factors like technology or immigration.

Education in Spain seems to be in a downward spiral, and the latest results from the **PISA** tests in **2026** have only confirmed it. It's not the first time we've seen worrying figures, but this time there seems to have been a certain shock. It's a novelty, perhaps, because we often treat education as an extremely important topic in the abstract, but no one bothers too much with its real problems.

The curious thing is that this pattern of poor results is not exclusive to Spain. Many Western countries seem to be in the same boat. There is an exception, such as the **United Kingdom**, which has achieved an interesting comeback, placing its students almost two years ahead of Spanish ones. And that's despite the British also dealing with serious problems similar to ours. What are they doing that we are not?

People often fall into easy analysis: it's the current government's fault, lack of technology, social media, immigration, or insufficient funds. But those who analyze this in depth point to other causes, more persistent and complex. They speak of the persistence of certain failed pedagogies and serious problems with children's attention.

## The pedagogies that don't work

One of the roots of the problem, and it's not recent, goes back to the pedagogical theories that triumphed in the West after **1968**. They set out to dismantle the traditional school, labeled as authoritarian and rote-learning. The idea was to replace it with a model where authority was suppressed, play and learning were confused, and a "learning to learn" approach was promoted that, in practice, has led to regression. Yes, playing is instructive, but learning requires effort. While other countries are putting the emphasis back on this, in Spain we seem to avoid the problem.

## The mirage of egalitarianism

Another great ill is the conversion of education into an egalitarian system of social promotion. What could have been a legitimate enlightened project degenerated into the cultivation of mediocrity. Manipulating information, promoting automatic grade pogre, and de facto prohibiting failure generates false pogre. Statistics are inflated, and real assessment takes a back seat. Selectividad exam grades, for example, often hide poor preparation for university.

Furthermore, the teaching profession has also suffered a degeneration. It has become a privileged job, often hostile to accountability. The excess of incapable teachers, resulting from poor prior training and union influence, is a taboo. The school ends up adapting to these privileges, instead of the other way around. Strikes, when they occur, rarely focus on bad pedagogy or politicization; they are usually to reduce workload or increase salaries.

## The school as a political weapon

The politicization of the school is another major burden. In the worst cases, it becomes a node of ideological indoctrination, as seen with obligatory nationalism or the far left. The results of **Catalonia** in the PISA tests, for example, were so bad that the region was expelled from the evaluation for cheating. The results of the Basque Country and Navarre are not exactly stellar either.

This politicization also manifests in the proliferation of superfluous education laws, in handing education over to failed pedagogies to maintain union peace, and in suffocating bureaucracy. The old teacher has become a scribe of useless reports, forced into constant meetings that seek to impose forced unanimity. The trap is thinking that everything is solved with more public money. The case of the Basque Country is paradigmatic: worse results with maximum spending per student. But spending for what, or for whom?

## Immigration and technology: scapegoats?

Mass immigration is often pointed to as one of the causes of educational decline. However, the data force us to qualify this impact. **Madrid**, for example, has improved its relative results, despite having one of the highest immigration rates. A large part of immigrants in Spain are Spanish-speaking, which is an advantage. The educational catastrophes in Catalonia and the Basque Country, however, do seem to denounce the consequences of obligatory language immersion in a language that is not the mother tongue.

Regarding technology in classrooms, it's a matter of common sense. There are magnificent digital tools that help learning, but disaster occurs when learning is reduced to knowing how to handle technology. The formation of a literate mind requires learning to calculate, to think for oneself, to read and write abundantly. It's about knowing how to ask questions and answer them, developing critical thinking, not just searching for answers, which can also be fallacies.

Dedicating most of the time to playing with screens leads to cognitive delay. Experts speak of a loss of attention capacity: inability to trinc a prolonged explanation, read and understand a simple text, or handle abstract ideas. Curiously, the group of students that regresses the most in Spain is that of high-income families attending schools obsessed with artificial intelligence and chatbots. The cult of some rich people for technology can be as harmful as illiterate poverty.

## Lessons from the East

China offers experiences that might interest us. Social media, which some try to blame for school failure, are not the problem in **Singapore**, **Japan**, or **China**, where schoolchildren are regular users without their education being frustrated. In the East, they rely on historical experience, evaluation of concrete results, and a reverence for teaching authority, disciplined learning, and personal self-control. There, perhaps, they show us the way forward.