Policymakers are sounding the alarm about AI and social media in schools, as PISA’s latest report confirmed that student performance in reading continues to decline. French Education minister Édouard Geffray lamented the “cognitive destruction” of a generation, while his Spanish counterpart, Milagros Tolón, recommended a focused effort to improve reading because “reading is the foundation of everything”.
The Economist’s editorial board called it a “slow-moving catastrophe”, emphasising that “while machines are getting brighter (… ) teens are getting dimmer”, and pinned blame on the weak, “radical” leftists in university education departments. Meanwhile, the “radical left” is taking meaningful action. On September 2, shortly before the publication of the PISA scores, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a ban on student-facing generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) use in New York City public schools from pre-school through eighth grade (approx. 4-14 years of age), to be complemented by “twice-yearly AI critical thinking modules for high schoolers, limited AI pilots for a small number of high school classrooms and age-appropriate screen time restrictions”.
