A one-minute mystery: Sherlock Holmes and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

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by Sasha Alyson

On a visit to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Sherlock Holmes examined the line chart showing global education levels, region by region.

The chart, reproduced here, shows in each of seven regions how many children, fail to achieve Minimum Proficiency Levels (MPLs) in reading. UIS wanted to show that global education was in crisis, and thus UIS needed more funding to collect more data about it.

“Aha!” Holmes suddenly exclaimed. “Watson, this isn’t a statistics institute. It’s a propaganda department!”

How did he know?

See if you can solve this, then read the full answer here.

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Other stories of interest:

Left: Schools in the global South are getting worse. The aid industry doesn’t ask why, and for good reason. It created much of the problem.
Right: Book dumping. The U.S. Navy gives books to schoolchildren in Nigeria. It seems nice. But (brace yourself, this isn’t pretty) they’re handing out leftover Florida test preparation manuals.
Left: Junk data. A lot of numbers published by the U.N. and aid agencies are garbage. It’s useful to understand why they are so motivated to publish such data.
Right: Willful blindness. As it tries to control school policies in the global South, the aid industry has data about every subject except one: Are students learning anything? It doesn’t want to know.