UBC October 2026 - Are We Making School Too Easy?

Every few years, Switzerland gets to pat itself on the back when the PISA results come out.

PISA stands for the Program for International Student Assessment, an OECD study that tests 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science. The idea is not simply to find out what teenagers have memorized, but how well they can apply what they know to real-world problems.

And Switzerland generally does pretty well. Our 15-year-olds score above the OECD average in the main PISA subjects, putting Switzerland among the better-performing countries in the international comparison. 

Cue the headlines about how well our education system is doing. 🇨🇭🎓

But then I looked at the distribution of the results, and I had a question.

Because when roughly one in four Swiss 15-year-olds falls below PISA's baseline proficiency level in one of the core subjects, I'm not entirely sure “we're among the best” tells the whole story.

Switzerland has plenty of exceptionally high-performing students. But we also have a sizeable group struggling to reach the basic PISA proficiency level, and that group has grown over the past decade. At the same time, the performance gap between students from more and less advantaged backgrounds has widened.

But there is another thing in all of this that concerns me.

I recently read an article about spelling in Swiss primary schools. One teacher described a problem that really stuck with me: when correcting pupils' written work, she sometimes doesn't mark the spelling mistakes anymore because otherwise “everything would be red.” Her concern is that seeing a page covered in corrections would frustrate the children and take away their enjoyment of writing.

I understand that concern.

But it also made me wonder whether we are sometimes confusing protecting children from discouragement with helping them overcome their weaknesses.

The article discusses the decline of traditional dictations, partly because they are considered too deficit-oriented: they highlight what a child gets wrong rather than what they get right. There are certainly good pedagogical arguments for teaching spelling in other ways, and I don't think the answer is simply to bring back the old red-ink regime.

But if a teacher is faced with a page where correcting the spelling would leave virtually the entire thing covered in red, that is not merely a problem with the method of assessment.

It is information.

And information about what children cannot yet do is precisely what we need if we want to help them improve.

This is where I see a connection to the broader picture emerging from PISA and the Swiss basic-competencies assessments. We can argue about individual teaching methods, and we should. But at some point we have to be willing to look at the results, even when they are uncomfortable.

Because a page without red ink isn't necessarily evidence that the child is doing well.

It may simply mean that we stopped marking the red.

And frankly, this is where my frustration turns into outrage.

When did it become acceptable to make so many compromises on the most basic requirements we have of our schools and of our students?

We are talking about children who will eventually leave school and have to enter the workforce, communicate with customers and colleagues, write an email, prepare an offer, document their work, understand instructions and make a living. These aren't obscure academic skills. They are the foundations on which everything else is built.

Yet somehow, when the foundations start to crack, the conversation increasingly seems to be about how we can make the cracks less visible, how we can avoid frustrating students, avoid covering their work in red, adjust the assessment, lower the demands.

And just when I thought I was done being outraged about this subject, I heard from a vocational school teacher about his own experience with the recent final apprenticeship exams: apprentices in business and trade professions were allowed to use AI.

Oh, I have thoughts about this. But that's a story for another post. Actually, let's do it tomorrow!