News this week revealed that a full three-quarters of Australian high school students admit they aren’t “fully trying” in their Pisa tests. File this under the category of water being wet or the Pope’s Catholicism not being much of a shock.

The Save Our Schools Coalition has surveyed the year 9 students about shared attitudes towards the “Programme for International Student Assessment” exams that are taken annually. The tests exist to create international ranking tables for reading, science and mathematics. The idea is that national education systems can have some means of benchmarking to establish if their educational policy and investment is yielding comparable results with the rest of the world’s.

In reality, these tests create a data set that provokes a lot of media jingoism on an educational theme if countries do well and hysterical condemnation if they don’t of 1) government incompetence, 2) bureaucratic failure, 3) wokeist teacher-activists introducing cultural Marxism to young minds through SECRET MIND TUNNELS, 4) teacher unions or 5) kids today being lazy, lacking gumption. Tick own box, yell loudly.

The latest Pisa scores were released in December. Pity the poor reactionary, rightwing columnists at other publications who were instructed to manufacture a crisis from the contradictory news that Australia’s year 9 students had climbed into a top 10 Pisa ranking among........

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