A 2022 global assessment by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that ranked 15-year-old students worldwide in producing and evaluating original ideas that would translate into effective solutions put the Philippines at 63rd out of 64 countries, or the 2nd worst.
The 2022 Programme on International Student Assessment (PISA) Volume III, published this week, gave the Philippines a mean score in creative thinking of 16, which is way below the global average of 33. The only country the Philippines scored better in the study was Albania, which had a score of 13.
Singapore topped the list with a score of 41, followed by South Korea and Canada which both scored 38, Australia – 37, 36 for New Zealand, Estonia, and Finland, and 35 for Denmark, Latvia, and Belgium.
The OECD study was conducted in 2022 with about 690,000 15-year-old students from 66 countries.
The OECD said one in four students in the Philippines, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia said they found learning new things boring.
Additionally, students from the Philippines did not provide a response for over a fifth of all items in the written problem-solving tasks in the assessment.
In PISA’s 2022 assessment for student performance in mathematics, reading, and science, Filipino students were also among the worst weakest, ranking 77th out of 81 countries and performing worse than the global average in all categories.
“Beyond preparing students for the labor market, creative thinking in education contributes to students’ holistic development – it supports learning, problem solving, and metacognitive skills through exploration and discovery, helping students to interpret information in personally meaningful ways,” the OECD said. “Creative thinking helps prepare young people to adapt to a rapidly changing world that demands flexible and innovative workers.”
With so much ground to be recovered and work to be done, from mathematics, reading, science, and even creative thinking, the country’s education sector definitely needs a massive overhaul. Hopefully President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. can take this opportunity presented by the resignation of Vice President Sara Duterte as head of the Department of Education, to urgently find and tap a true Filipino educator who is ready, willing, qualified and capable to face these numerous momentous challenges facing the educational system of the country, which remains in a profound crisis that, if left to fester, is bound to have long term impacts on the future of the country.*
