The Great Education Panic

A Global Tour of How We’re All Failing Our Children (Differently)

There’s something deliciously democratic about the way every developed nation on Earth has simultaneously decided that its education system is broken. Not “needs improvement” broken. Not “could use some tweaking” broken. Proper, full-blown, “the children are doomed and it’s everyone else’s fault” broken.

It’s like we’ve all arrived at the same catastrophic conclusion via completely different routes, which is oddly reassuring. At least we’re rubbish together.

America: Where Everything Is a Culture War

Let’s start with the Americans, because they’ve turned education into the sort of blood sport that makes gladiatorial combat look like a friendly game of tennis.

In the land of the free, public schools have become the primary battlefield for every conceivable anxiety about the future. Transgender students in toilets? Battleground. Books featuring gay penguins? Battleground. Teaching actual history that includes uncomfortable bits about slavery? You’d better believe that’s a battleground.

The Trump administration has helpfully suggested shutting down the entire Department of Education, because apparently the best way to fix something is to set it on fire and walk away whistling. They’re also proposing to eliminate Head Start and Title I funding, which predominantly helps poor children, because—well, I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps poverty builds character. Perhaps it’s more efficient to simply let the market sort out which five-year-olds deserve early education.

Meanwhile, parents are storming school board meetings like they’re storming the Bastille, except instead of demanding bread, they’re demanding that their children never learn anything that might make them feel slightly uncomfortable about being white, straight, or American.

The irony is exquisite: a nation founded on the principle of questioning authority now has a significant portion of its population demanding that schools teach children never to question anything at all.

Britain: Austerity With a Smile

Across the pond, the British have taken a characteristically more passive-aggressive approach to destroying their education system: they’ve simply stopped paying for it properly.

Schools are facing budget shortfalls that would make Dickens weep. Inflation has galloped ahead whilst funding has shuffled along behind like an elderly tortoise with a gammy leg. The result? Teachers buying supplies out of their own pockets, crumbling buildings, and class sizes that would make a Victorian workhouse overseer think twice.

But here’s the brilliant bit: instead of having enormous rows about curriculum…well, alright, they do have those too, particularly about trans issues and whether schools should be telling parents when their child wants to change pronouns…the British controversy du jour is about international students.

Should universities be allowed to import clever foreigners who pay extortionate fees that keep the lights on? Should those foreigners be allowed to bring their families? The previous government said no to the families bit, because apparently we’re worried about too many people coming here to… contribute to the economy and get an education. The logic is impeccable.

Meanwhile, British parents engage in elaborate property schemes to get their offspring into the “right” state school, because nothing says “we believe in equality” quite like remortgaging your house to live in the catchment area of a school with a good Ofsted rating.

France: Liberté, Égalité, Hypocrisie

The French, bless them, have managed to achieve peak irony in the education wars.

Picture this: the new French education minister, freshly appointed to oversee the glorious Republic’s public school system, has just been revealed to have sent her own children to an exclusive private school. Not just any private school, mind you, but one of those places where the fees could pay a teacher’s annual salary.

The French public was, shall we say, unamused.

But here’s the thing…she’s not an outlier. France’s education system has become a masterclass in social reproduction. The wealthy have increasingly abandoned the public system entirely, creating a two-tier structure that would make Marie Antoinette blush. “Let them eat public education,” except the aristocrats certainly aren’t eating it themselves.

French teachers earn around $50,000 annually compared to nearly $90,000 for their German counterparts. France’s education budget as a percentage of GDP has been shrinking for decades. Tens of thousands of teaching posts have been cut. And yet somehow, in both France and Germany, your family background remains one of the strongest predictors of educational success in the entire OECD.

Liberté for the rich, égalité for nobody, and fraternité only if you’re in the same social class.

Germany: Efficiently Mediocre

The Germans, ever practical, have approached educational inequality with characteristic thoroughness: they’ve simply baked it into the system from the start.

Germany’s tripartite secondary school system sorts children at age ten into different educational tracks. It’s streaming, but with the efficiency and permanence that only German bureaucracy can achieve. Your postal code and your parents’ income will largely determine whether you’re Gymnasium-bound (hello, university!) or heading to Hauptschule (hello, vocational training!).

To be fair, Germany doesn’t have quite the same explosive culture war battles as America. They’re too sensible for that. Instead, they’ve achieved a sort of peaceful acceptance of educational stratification that would make a Victorian class apologist proud.

The result? Social mobility that makes a concrete block look dynamic.

The Common Thread: Inequality Dressed Up as Principle

Here’s what’s genuinely fascinating about all of this: every country is having a completely different argument about education, but they’re all actually arguing about the same thing.

They’re arguing about who deserves resources and who doesn’t. They’re arguing about whether the future belongs to everyone’s children or just to some people’s children. They’re arguing about whether we’re a society that invests in the next generation collectively, or whether we’re just a collection of individual families frantically trying to secure advantages for our own offspring whilst pulling up the ladder behind us.

In America, it’s dressed up as parental rights and religious freedom. In Britain, it’s austerity and “difficult choices.” In France, it’s a resigned shrug at the inevitability of privilege. In Germany, it’s efficiency and vocational practicality.

But strip away the rhetoric, and it’s the same everywhere: the people with money are ensuring their children get one kind of education, whilst everyone else gets something rather different. And we’ve all collectively decided that this is fine, actually, because we’ve each found our own locally appropriate way to pretend it’s about something else entirely.

The AI Wildcard

Oh, and just to make things more interesting, we’re now facing the prospect of artificial intelligence potentially making large portions of educational credentialing obsolete within the next decade or two.

Imagine spending your entire adult life arguing about whether to teach critical race theory or phonics, only to discover that the jobs your children were being educated for no longer exist because a chatbot can do them faster and cheaper.

It’s going to be brilliant. We’ll have fought brutal culture wars over preparing children for a world that disappeared whilst we were shouting at each other.

What Now?

Look, I don’t have solutions. If I had solutions, I wouldn’t be writing satirical essays…I’d be running for office or starting a think tank or doing something else vaguely important-sounding.

But I do know this: every single one of these countries claims to value education. Every single one claims to care about children’s futures. Every single one wraps itself in the rhetoric of opportunity and meritocracy.

And yet somehow, we’ve all built systems that increasingly sort children into winners and losers before they’re old enough to tie their own shoelaces, and we’ve all found clever ways to pretend that this is either inevitable, necessary, or someone else’s fault.

The Americans are fighting about pronouns whilst their school buildings crumble. The British are implementing austerity whilst calling it prudence. The French are championing égalité whilst their elites flee to private schools. The Germans have systematised inequality so efficiently that it barely counts as inequality anymore.

We’re all failing differently, which means we can all point at each other’s failures and feel slightly better about our own.

And the children? The actual children we claim to be doing all this for?

They’re watching us argue about them instead of investing in them, and they’re learning the lesson we’re really teaching: that adults are very good at talking about the future, and very bad at actually building one.

But at least we’re all rubbish together. That’s got to count for something.

Until Next Time