What striked me in the article is that it seems the international gap is opening. There are countries striving to improve their education decade by decade, and I have seen countries (e.g. in Eastern Europe) that formerly had an OK education system and it is getting worse and worse every decade, largely due to attracting the lowest dregs into teacher positions because the position is underpaid, spending is constantly cut, and underrespected, being the constant kicking dog of parents and uppity children.

Humankind, or even the West and its fairly close satellites are not all constantly improving. Perhaps on the average yes, but not overally.

It is not even just the old first vs. third world anymore. In the last 10 years or so e.g. Greece is becoming less and less "firstworldish". There are new and new gaps opening, not simply something along the lines of white man is rich brown man is poor, ex-colonizers rich ex-colonies poor, or even global north vs. global south. These heuristics worked in 1970, not anymore.

I keep a fairly close eye on Budapest, in Hungary, and I have no idea what ever could be done even not even to improve e.g. education but at least to stop its free-fall. Virtually anyone with half brains would rather wash dishes in London than to be a teacher there. Every time a decent old teacher retires, someone entirely useless fills their place. Meanwhile children becoming increasingly aggressive, bigger ones beating teachers, parents promising a beating if he does not give better grades, it's a war of all against all. Greece is not much better either. Or Romania.

Sometimes it looks like you should press a reset button on countries to start it all over, but not simply politically, like a revolution, but more like rearranging all human relationships. Like telling kids to respect teachers and telling teachers to behave respectably, spending enough money to give them educational resources which means taxes which means the rich will pretty please with sugar on top of it not keep cheating on the taxes by buying fake invoices from Tajikistan and the tax inspectors will pretty please yield to neither bribery nor death threats when they discover it and so on, and so on. Basically virtually everybody's behavior needs readjusting in some places before they can even think about improving as such. Where do you even find such a reset button?

Any community e.g. a nation can only improve itself if it has trust. If it has the kind of trust that I do not need to grab absolutely everything I can right now, because the community can supply me with what I need in the long run too. I mean for example in a low-trust society everybody takes bribes and is corruptible but not because they want to buy nice things, but rather they need savings as they have no idea if they will have an income next year or not. It may sounds strange, but if you accept that if you are hungry you would steal, then the corollary is that you will refrain from stealing only if you are fairly sure you will never go hungry because your community will reward your honest effort and it requires trust. If you do not trust it, you steal all you can and build a safety stockpile. And without this trust you cannot improve the community - at all.

Basically to kickstart improvement in a society - you need to inject fake trust.