Reading difficulties in Germany: How good that there is no PISA study for adults

M a 20-year-old says, “AI takes care of things.” With a view to the current PISA study, I asked him how young people get through life when one in five can no longer read even the simplest texts comprehensibly. In tests of reading and arithmetic skills, young people in Germany performed worse this year than ever before.

How do these young people actually read the information leaflet for a medication? Or their training contract – if they even get one? My son is pragmatic about it. There are still plenty of people who can do it themselves. And everyone else just uses the technology. Education Minister Karin Prien sees it differently. She has to, after all, it's her job. She calls the results “worrying.” What I find much more worrying, however, is that politicians have made exactly such statements in previous years. Because the Pisa results were also terrible.

Here, Chancellor Friedrich Merz would have had the chance to make himself popular with the electorate. He could have loudly proclaimed a “turning point” and unpacked the “education bazooka”. “There has to be a shake-up in Germany’s schools!” he could have shouted into the journalists’ microphones in a pithy chancellor’s voice. But he didn't. Instead, teachers and parents blame each other. And social media. Without which 15-year-olds would of course read a lot more, of course.

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A short report on Deutschlandfunk recently made me sit up and take notice. The University of Basel examined the reading behavior of 6,000 adults in German-speaking countries. According to the sobering results, a quarter of those surveyed don't read any books at all. And only 4 percent read more than 11 hours per week. On average, adults in Germany read for 27 minutes a day. That's enough for two newspaper articles, a few chat messages and a bedtime story for the child.

If there were a PISA study that examined the reading habits of adults, society's horror would probably be much greater. Because that would perhaps show that many people can no longer concentrate on longer texts. Who would you blame then? And would there be consequences?