Every time new PISA results are released, the reaction is the same: headlines for a few days, a passing sense of outrage, and then everything goes back to normal. We have grown used to hearing that Brazilian education performs poorly. And it is precisely this familiarity that makes most parents read the news, shake their heads, and fail to notice what the numbers are actually saying about their own children’s future.
Because the problem PISA reveals is not limited to what the headline says.
More importantly, there is an answer to it — and that is what matters to anyone deciding how to educate a child.
What the numbers really say
PISA is an international comparative study conducted every three years by the OECD to assess students around age 15. It examines reading, mathematics, and science, and it has one characteristic that changes everything:
it is not limited to what a student can reproduce; it also assesses whether the student can apply what has been learned in new situations.
Inep itself explains that the assessment looks at the ability to apply knowledge and skills, analyze, reason, and communicate while interpreting and solving problems. Keep that distinction in mind, because it is the key to everything.
of Brazilian students performed below the basic level of proficiency in mathematics.
reached at least Level 2, the basic benchmark defined by the assessment.
since that cycle, results have shown only small variations, generally without statistical significance.
In the most recent edition with published results, PISA 2022, nearly three out of every four young Brazilians performed below this basic benchmark in mathematics. At Level 2, students are expected to recognize how a simple situation can be represented mathematically — for example, by comparing routes or converting prices. Because PISA also measures application and reasoning, this figure says more than it may seem. It does not merely mean that our children know too little. It means that many of them are not being formed to think with what they learn — and that is exactly what adult life demands every day.
But not all the news is bad. There is a path for forming a child who thinks — and it is not new: it is more than a thousand years old.
The answer the West knew a thousand years ago
For centuries, the West formed thinkers, scientists, and saints through a model with a name and a structure: the seven liberal arts.
Wikimedia Commons
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They are divided into two groups: the Trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric — brings together the arts of language and thought; the Quadrivium — arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy — brings together the arts of number and the order of the world. Together, they formed an ordered path for developing the intellect, respecting the way a child’s mind matures. It is in the Trivium that we find the most direct answer to what PISA exposes:
Grammar
It nourishes the child with the foundations and vocabulary of each field.
Logic
It teaches the student to connect what is known and to distinguish cause, consequence, argument, and opinion.
Rhetoric
It prepares the young person to express clearly and beautifully what he or she thinks.
It is a sequence that leads the child from knowing to thinking. It does not treat information as the destination, but as the first step on a path that ends in independent reasoning.
Explore the Acutis curriculum
See how the Trivium and Quadrivium organize an education that leads students from the foundations to clear thought and eloquent expression.
How Acutis applies this today
Acutis Academy was built on this model: a Christian classical pedagogy structured around the Trivium and Quadrivium. Not as a vague inspiration, but as a method for teaching students to think clearly, write logically, and communicate eloquently. In practice, it is a school organized to form the child’s intellect in an ordered way. Grammar nourishes students with solid foundations — which is why Acutis takes the content of every subject seriously. Logic teaches them to reason and distinguish. Rhetoric prepares them to argue clearly and therefore appears as a formal subject in the later years of the curriculum. This attention to reasoning even appears in mathematics. In the early years, Acutis uses the Singapore Math method, in which the child begins with the concrete, moves through visual representation, and only then reaches the symbol. In short, the student learns to think mathematically, not merely to calculate. And there is a dimension PISA does not measure, but which matters just as much to Acutis. In Christian classical pedagogy, faith is not an isolated class in the middle of the schedule: it is the ground from which every subject is taught. The child learns to think while oriented toward what is true, good, and beautiful. The intellect and the whole person are formed at the same time.
In the end, the question that matters is not about the problem
The PISA numbers describe a real problem. But for anyone deciding now how to educate a child, what matters most is not merely the scale of the problem, but knowing that there is an answer to it — an educational tradition with more than a thousand years of history. An education that does not confuse accumulating information with developing intelligence and that has a clear method for leading the child from knowing to thinking.
This is the mission of Acutis Academy: to form minds for the world and hearts for eternity.
Acutis Academy
See how Acutis does this in practice and discover why the right question may never have been “which school teaches more?”, but “which school teaches students to think?”
Note on the data:
as of July 2026, PISA 2022 is still the most recent edition with published results. PISA 2025 has already been administered, with the OECD expected to release the results in September 2026. See also the
official PISA page on Inep
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