What do you think of when China is beseeched to bail out the eurozone – and America, and pretty well any western country fallen on grotesquely indebted times? Think, with a shiver, of what lies beneath. Think of the leaning tower of Pisa, otherwise known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, with tests run every three years on 15-year-olds around the globe by the OECD. Think of one league table you'd rather forget.

Who's top in maths until the next round of assessment in 2012? China-Shanghai by miles, with Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan clustered behind. The UK is 28th, the US 31st. And in reading? Shanghai, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong all over again, with only gallant little Finland, in third place, to disrupt this tale of eastern promise. UK: 25; USA: 17. Science? Japan joins Finland in the top five, but China-Shanghai is far and away top, with the UK at 16th and America in 21st spot.

So let's be clear. This is our future, our Anglo-American future, our European future – and we're blowing it. We trot out the old Blair mantra from memory. Education, education, education. We demand that entrepreneurs start new businesses to ease the crushing weight of unemployment. But when it comes to turning out entrepreneurs and technical wizards, the job creators of tomorrow, we are way off the pace. A facile parody of Chinese achievement sees workers toiling for 12 or 14 hours a day for pitiful reward. A more accurate version would see us being outgunned, year after year, in quality and in numbers.

Tom Friedman of the New York Times broods over this in his latest book (That Used to Be Us, co-authored with Michael Mandelbaum) and finds naught for either Washington or Westminster comfort. Are the samples representative? Yes they are. Does Finland do so well because it's a small, homogenous nation that puts teacher standards and teacher pay high on its agenda? Yes again. So perhaps we can't expect the US or the UK, with its wide spread of immigrants, languages and backgrounds, to do anything close to as well … Except that Canada – huge, very mixed, multilingual Canada – is in Pisa's top 10 under all three categories.

There are no excuses. Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Switzerland are consistently above OECD average. The powerhouses of Obama and Cameron are severely underpowered. Not everything is identical. American primary education is good enough; the problems set in at high school. British primary schooling, in contrast, turns out thousands upon thousands without elementary reading or numerical skills, kids condemned to failure at an obscenely early age.

Part of our difficulty lies in bringing deprived inner-city schools up to snuff, of course; but the difficulty beyond that – the one that ought to be haunting us just as much – is that the schools we deem adequate, OK to middling, are falling far, far off the world pace as well.

Don't forget the riots, the poverty traps, society's chronic instabilities, to be sure. But look outwards, towards competitor countries where high levels of education and application keep growth rolling along. Of course all the familiar principles of fairness and equal opportunity still matter. But if Singapore can turn out 10,000 brilliant computer programmers and we can only manage 1,000, then equality won't give us the critical mass of talent we need. OK isn't OK any longer. Revoltingly fat pay packets for OK business managers from Baltimore to Bradford aren't OK either. China isn't bailing out the euro or the dollar by chance this time round. It's putting so much more in to get so much more out of us in a jam.