Every three years, the OECD's PISA assessment holds up a mirror to the world's classrooms, and the 2025 reflection is a sobering one. Across dozens of nations, fifteen-year-olds are reading and reasoning at measurably lower levels than their predecessors, with American teenagers posting their weakest reading scores in nearly a quarter-century. The breadth of the decline — spanning continents, curricula, and cultures — suggests this is not a failure of any single system but a signal that something fundamental in the relationship between young people and learning has shifted. How societies choos