Highschool students are unable to read or do simple Maths in the majority of India

Back-to-basics education is in free fall worldwide. Fifty million children are going through the motions in school, unable to read Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, not even able to read a sentence or simple maths problem.

The pandemic was followed by an invisible crisis, but the learning poverty is a hard pedagogical failure of our era. The crisis is not just rich countries' crisis, however. Reading literacy in America during the January 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) remains at historic lows, with about one-third of eighth graders at or below basic.

Mathematically, American performance was no stranger to stagnation and increasing disparities, most especially for those who had long been underrepresented. The UNESCO 2025 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report puts the scale of this learning crisis globally into perspective: six of every ten school-age young people in the world today are at or below minimum level of mathematics and reading at the end of primary schooling.

Minimum proficiency capacity is a metric of whether kids are able to achieve a minimum of math or literacy for their grade. But even that is not achieved by more than 60% of primary school students, the survey states. And in most low- and middle-income nations, things get worse again, revealing the harsh disparities built into education systems across the globe.

It is weakest in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and the improvement there is weakest. In most countries in Africa, less than one in five are minimum in number and reading skills at the end of primary school. For instance, there was no improvement—and even deterioration—for some nations in learning despite increased schooling.

Latin America has also fallen behind its own plateaus, especially because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Decades' progress was undone by closures of some of its schools.

And what about wealthier nations like Europe and North America? Their average learning proficiency scores are higher, but there too, slightly qualified groups—majority of whom are immigrants and poor citizens—trail behind.

What is fueling the world learning crisis?

The world we're used to has tens of millions of illiterate kids who can't read or do elementary arithmetic under the umbrella of a record-high historic school enrollment rate.

Systematized, structural—and entrenched—are the causes.

Following on the roll call of what's wrong:

• Inadequate instruction and dearth of teachers: Too many low-achieving, overenrolled classrooms, particularly in developing nations, by untrained or under-certified teachers.
• Inadequate infrastructure: Billions of school-going children study with no electricity, water, or even the simplest of learning materials.
• Poverty of learning: Poor children have higher chances of being late to school, being absent from school on sporadic instances, or dropping out of school early.
• Gender discrimination and conflict: Girls in conflict-affected, politically unstable, and conflict environments suffer disproportionately.
• Language deficit: The majority of children from the majority of countries are taught home languages they themselves can no longer read, again resulting in issues of comprehension.
• Early childhood development deficit: It cites learning early before primary in trying to establish foundations, but far too late again for those children with insufficient chance to benefit from high-quality early childhood education.