Pinocchio and the information society ...News

UNESCO data suggest a new global reversal: as gadget-raised children come of age, school participation is no longer rising

In many countries around the world, the number of children not attending school is rising. UNESCO has already recorded this alarming trend, and it demands an explanation.

UNESCO regularly collects and publishes information on progress toward one of the key Sustainable Development Goals: the universal inclusion of school-age children in primary and secondary education. In recent years, negative developments in this sphere were often linked by experts to the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. But the latest Global Education Monitoring Report 2026 allows the picture to be clarified significantly: it appears that we are dealing not with temporary difficulties, but with a change in the global trend – and the turning point seems to have occurred even before the pandemic.

While in the 1990s and 2000s most countries in the world recorded high growth rates in children’s participation in education, after 2015 those gains slowed almost everywhere. Moreover, in a number of countries, the number of children not attending school has increased. Since this primarily concerned countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, it might have seemed like just another example of ordinary African difficulties: tribal wars, corruption, and so on. Then the pandemic began, and everyone was sent home. But now ten years have passed, and it turns out that the share of children not going to school is not shrinking at all – on the contrary, it is growing, and already on a global scale.

The UNESCO report, of course, says nothing about this new global trend and, following the statistical reports of governments, paints a picture of the steady development of primary and secondary education systems worldwide. At the same time, the report notes that in “the four most populous regions of the world (Europe and North America, East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa), growth in children’s participation in school education has stopped over the past ten years. And in a number of countries, the share of children not attending school has even increased somewhat after 2015.”

To understand what this means, we should first assess the scale and geography of the phenomenon. The best to do this way is to compare out-of-school rates for 2024 versus 2015, as reported by UNESCO, and looking at the countries where such growth was recorded.

As we can see, in 148 countries – that is, almost all countries of the world with only a few exceptions – full upper secondary education is de facto not universal. Moreover, 131 countries do not ensure lower secondary education for all children. And in 128 countries, a noticeable share of children do not even attend primary school.

At the same time, in 66 countries, the share of children not attending school has risen over the past decade. So the “number of countries” mentioned in the UNESCO report turns out to be very large indeed. Let us now look at who they are.

The authors of the report emphasize the difficult situation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet of the ‘black list’ of 66 countries, only 20 are in Africa. Incidentally, the situation south of the Maghreb is not so straightforward: for 20 countries with negative dynamics, there are 11 where the share of children not attending school has noticeably declined; in the remaining countries there is no clear trend.

So, the historically reversed, regressive increase in the share of children not attending school is far from being an African phenomenon alone. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the trend is not limited to the ‘underdeveloped periphery.’ The example of Singapore is revealing – a beacon of globalization, a city-state with one of the highest standards of living and near-universal access to education. The idealized image of Singapore now needs revising, because over the past decade a sharply growing share of children there has appeared outside the school system: 5% of children do not attend primary school, 10% remain outside lower secondary education, and 14% are without upper secondary education.

Singapore is not the exception but the beginning of a list of developed countries where the share of children not attending school has risen. The list speaks for itself: the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Estonia. Meanwhile, EU member states such as Romania and Bulgaria are, by this negative indicator, already comparable to African countries, including those south of the Maghreb.

The global share of children not attending school is also significantly increased by the new leaders of the global economy – India and China, home to around three billion people, the lion’s share of the world’s population. The growth of their vast economies is not accompanied by growing school participation in primary and secondary education. The same can be said of the third economy of North America – Mexico.

In short, if anyone has not yet guessed, we are dealing with a global counter-trend: the inclusion of children in primary and secondary education has stopped growing and has begun to decline.

To grasp the meaning of what is happening, let us return to UNESCO’s formulation: in “the four most populous regions of the world (Europe and North America, East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa south of the Sahara) growth in children’s participation in school education has stopped over the past ten years.” The most populous regions of the world are also the most urbanized. Think about that.

It was always assumed that urbanization, despite its many downsides, had an overall beneficial effect on humanity because it promoted information exchange, individualization, enlightenment, and the development of science and technology. Much skepticism has accumulated regarding the social consequences of scientific and technological progress, but the imperative of mass education – and especially children’s education – survived even the excesses of postmodernism and until recently retained its force. The link between education and urbanization seemed beyond doubt.

And now, at the beginning of the 21st century, when the absolute majority of humanity has concentrated itself in large cities, something unimaginable is happening: children’s participation in school education stops growing and begins to reverse. And this is happening not on the margins, but in the hyper-urbanized core of a unified ‘world civilization.’ How should we understand this?

Let us recall and combine several simple truths.

The philosopher Karl Popper correctly saw the cultural dominant of human development in the growing individualization of people, though he poorly calculated its consequences. Progressive individualism has led to the atomization of society. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called modern individualized humanity “liquid,” because as the wills of emancipated individuals collide, all institutions and concepts lose certainty and binding force. The result of concentrating atomized humanity in megacities has been the transformation of the city – historically the cradle of individualization – into a space of maximum ‘liquidity,’ that is, the epicenter of advancing chaos.

Today’s ‘world civilization’ is a globalized world-system of capital accumulation. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, chrematistics – or, in modern language, capitalism – destroys society because it denies the principle of reciprocity on which human coexistence rests. In other words, capitalism absolutizes and cultivates individualism as the psychological, mental, and behavioral prerequisite for its own reproduction and triumph – for the capitalization of all humanity. That is why capitalism consistently profanes and nullifies the traditional social bonds and supports of life – religion, peoplehood, nation, historical memory, family – thereby deepening the natural individualization of human beings and returning progressive humanity to a ‘natural state’ in which churches, courts, state hierarchies, and universities become merely specialized arenas of a war of all against all.

‘Free’ individuals, driven and set against one another by the logic of capital accumulation, having lost mutual trust and the habit of cooperation, can no longer realize alternative scenarios. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful and increasingly narrow elite circles, concentrating ever more resources, become fully unbound from the constraints of human society. Social responsibility, having lost its former binding force and become intolerably burdensome under conditions of shrinking profit, is simply cut away.

In the previous century, when the end of history had not yet been declared, the scenario of humanity’s desocialization had to be sold in the wrapping of social optimism. Into expert consciousness, and then mass consciousness, were implanted the ideological constructs of the ‘post-industrial’ and ‘information’ society, which seduced the westernized global middle class with the prospect of joining the ‘creative minority’ governing a new ‘cybernetic’ world. In reality, the industry of processing large volumes of information was capitalized and monopolized just like every other resource of life and power – with the corresponding consequences for the middle class and mass society. Informatization did not change the logic of capitalism’s development; it only intensified the war of all against all.

The existentially important quality of the human being lies not in consuming and transmitting ever-larger amounts of information, but in the ability to verify it. Information, like rare-earth ore, consists of vast heaps of slag and only hard-won grains of knowledge. Therefore, the intensification of information exchange maximizes inequality and social power. The lives of great masses of individuals become transparent to outside observation, control, and influence – while the centers of power remain informationally and physically closed. Under conditions of growing informational noise, knowledge becomes harder to verify, and therefore even less accessible and more elitist. Participating in the production and consumption of informational noise, the masses easily and imperceptibly lose the ability to verify information and to learn. The main risk group in the information society is children.

Why did growth in school participation stop in 2015, and why did the number of children not attending school begin to rise? Because eight years earlier, in 2007, a new era began: the release of the iPhone launched the mass spread of smartphones, providing constant connection to the internet and apps – that is, instant access to entertainment and remote communication. This caused a fundamental shift of attention and an explosive rise in time devoted to digital leisure. And then, seven years later, the first human generation raised with gadgets reached school age. After that, every year there were more children with gadgets – and at the same time, more children not attending school.

Incidentally, the children who do attend school are also children with gadgets, who at best part with them only during class hours. Field research shows that in countries where students spent a lot of time using gadgets for entertainment during the school day, test results fell sharply between 2012 and 2022. So non-attendance is only the most vivid negative effect of informatization from childhood, not the only one.

Unfortunately, it can be predicted with confidence that both school participation and levels of knowledge will continue to decline – and the longer this continues, the steeper the decline. For we are now passing yet another turning point and entering a new stage in humanity’s informatization: the expansion of artificial intelligence has begun.

To better grasp the anthropological consequences of this new information revolution, let us listen to those who articulate – or even draw up – the roadmap of global change.

The famous visionary Klaus Schwab proclaims the “age of intelligence.” Speaking in May at the University of Johannesburg, Schwab said:

“What is the Intelligent Age doing? It is replacing our cognitive capabilities by algorithm.”

“You no longer need to go to university. For any question that requires knowledge, you can ask Claude, ChatGPT, or wherever else. Knowledge surrounds us and is available for free.”

As we can see, Schwab with the straightforwardness of a salesman presents us with the alienation of intellect from the human being and offers us to hand over “our cognitive abilities” in exchange for easy access to knowledge. Why think when you can instantly get the answer?

One should not overestimate the cognitive resilience and evolutionary stability of Homo sapiens, while sentimentally invoking the ‘thinking reed.’ Let us look at things soberly: Schwab has made us an offer we may not be able to refuse.

What is especially striking is his use of the word “free.” Compare Schwab’s promise to African youth with a statement made in March by Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, at the BlackRock infrastructure summit in Washington. With his target audience in mind, Altman was not offering propaganda, but a business model:

“We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter.”

To make the prospect even more attractive to investors, Altman suggested a likely scenario of shortage in computing power, under which “the price gets really high.”

So knowledge will become more expensive. Informational garbage will grow in both volume and aggression. Most people’s ability to verify information will decline. Artificial intelligence will quickly become the dominant, and for many the only, source of knowledge and decisions. Easy access to ready-made answers will minimize the motivation to get an education. And if there is no longer any need to go to university, then there is all the less need to go to school – this is obvious. The withering away of mass schooling will happen faster than we can now imagine. The decline in children’s participation in education will preserve and deepen the apartheid between a rich, educated elite and a digitized mass.

Already at the end of the 20th century, the agenda of capitalist globalization included the erosion of historical nations. The withering away of mass schooling will finalize this process – nations will finally become shadows of the past. The roadmap for world civilization’s transition from humanism to transhumanism is perfectly clear. The question is whether nations with sufficient resources and sovereignty will be able to find an alternative path of development and preserve their social well-being.

Hence then, the article about pinocchio and the information society was published today ( Wednesday 15/07/2026 - 02:00 AM ) and is available on Russia Today ( News ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

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