Since the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) started surveying student performance in 40 countries 15 years ago, Finnish students have been continuously topping the overall scores.

Pisa tests 15-year-old students of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations and their partner countries in math, reading and science.

Education is highly valued in Finland which, incidentally, placed as the sixth most-competitive economy in this year’s Global Competitiveness Report. Because of its culture of innovation, Finland has consistently ranked high in the report, even snatching the top spot in 2004.

At a time when globalization has pushed multinational companies to look for talent and skills in developing countries, Finland maintains its high-wage earning, high-skilled labor force as a competitive advantage.

Education officials around the world, no less than from the United States, have been visiting Finnish schools to figure out its secret formula and apply it in their own education systems.

There are many factors contributing to Finland’s success, and some of them might not even be applicable to realities here in the Philippines. For instance, Finland has an entirely different education system than ours. Schools implement a nine-year comprehensive basic schooling, after which students may choose to go to vocational schools or upper-secondary schools.

Graduates from the latter must first pass an exam before going to college, while graduates of vocational schools may choose to work or pursue further studies. Other analysts also point out that because of the idiosyncrasies of the Finnish language, it is fairly easier for students to learn.

One key difference in Finland’s educational system is the importance it gives to recruiting highly qualified teachers. Teachers must have master’s degrees, and the profession is highly competitive—40 people usually apply for a single position. They also have more academic freedom in planning their classes. Teachers pick the books they will use for class and customize lessons to meet national standards.

By contrast, in the Philippines, 59 percent of nonscience and nonmath majors are teaching science and math at the high-school level, and of the 815 Teacher Education Institutions, only 27 percent comply with the minimum standards established by the Commission on Higher Education for Teacher Education.

Consequently, our students have been lagging behind in international education standards. For instance, our students have performed poorly in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, where they ranked 41st in science and 42nd in mathematics out of 45 countries.

At the same time, our global competitiveness has been consistently waning. While Finland has remained in the top 10 of the Global Competitiveness Report, we have been stuck at the bottom half. In 2001, the Philippines ranked 49th out of 102 countries. Seven years later, we slid further down to 71st among 131 countries.

Technical education is a crucial aspect of competitiveness, and one way of ensuring quality education is by making sure the people who provide them are qualified. This is one of the issues currently being tackled in the Congressional Commission on Science Technology and Engineering. We’ve got to bring this issue to the center of policy debate and action, lest our children—in which our country’s future rests—suffer from incompetent teaching. 

E-mail: edgardo_angara@hotmail.com. Web site: www.edangara.com.

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Since the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) started surveying student performance in 40 countries 15 years ago, Finnish students have been continuously topping the overall scores.