The 400-word text we can no longer read
Yesterday the results of the PISA report came out, and the news for education in Spain is, simply put, historic. Just not for a good reason.
Spain has just posted its worst result since the test began, back in 2000.
Our 15-year-olds are dropping across all three core subjects - reading, math, and science - compared to the last edition, and falling harder than the average across the 90 countries and territories tested.
The numbers are brutal:
- The hardest hit is reading: Spain goes from 474 points in 2022 to 451 in 2025 (-23 points), and has now dropped 45 points since 2015. According to the OECD's own benchmark, 20 points is roughly equivalent to a full school year: that's over two years of learning lost in a single subject.
- Math falls 16 points (473 to 457) and science, 8 (485 to 477). Spain now sits below the OECD average on all three: 461 in reading, 463 in math, 482 in science.
- A third of students don't reach the minimum level: 32% in reading and 33% in math can't, for example, identify the main idea of a moderately difficult text. At the other end, only 2% of Spanish students reach the excellence level in reading, compared to 6% across the OECD.
So who's behind this attention crisis?
Tue Halgreen, senior OECD analyst and lead coordinator of the study, puts it plainly: "the less time spent on phones, the better the performance," and adds a very specific data point: students start struggling as soon as a text passes 400 words "which is about what fits on a screen."
The OECD itself is cautious here (it speaks of correlation, not a single proven cause) and the report also points to other factors, like teacher shortages (49% of Spanish schools report a deficit, versus 39% across the OECD) and each country's own context.
But the pattern - less screen use, better results - repeats across dozens of countries with very different education policies, which, according to Halgreen himself, is exactly what points to a shared underlying cause: the way this generation has learned to look at a screen.
And let's be honest: this isn't just about 15-year-olds.
Today's hyperstimulating technology is built to capture our attention and fragment our minds and it does that so well it doesn't even take many hours to notice.
This isn't about living off the grid or giving up essential connectivity. It's about getting your balance back.
The OECD has just sent an entire generation the clearest wake-up call of the decade: sustained attention - the kind you need to read, to learn, to think - is shrinking.
And the phone, the way we use it today, is one of the reasons even the OECD isn't ready to rule out.
Don't let your attention (or your family's) keep free-falling ;)