WE all thought that the globally embarrassing Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study evaluations on the math, science, and reading and comprehension skills of our 10- and 15-year-olds, plus the World Bank's findings on our learning poverty level, would be the last of the international indictments of our mediocre educational system. The thinking was that this trifecta of bad news was enough, especially for a nation that was once a leading light in Asia's educational sphere. We fervently hoped that after this trifecta, no further indictment, no follow-through report, would come.
Then came another downer. PISA — the same one that reported that our 15-year-olds have been consistently among the global laggards in math, science and reading skills — has conducted another global test, this time on the creative thinking skills of our 15-year-olds. The results, which covered 64 countries, were beyond depressing.
Our 15-year-old junior high school students had a mean score of 14.2, so low that we were lumped in the bottom 4 with Albania, Uzbekistan and Morocco. No East or Southeast Asian country was on the list of dead-enders. Expectedly, our Southeast Asian peer Singapore scored the highest with a mean score of 41, beating the wealthiest Western economies. Imagine we are with Albania, which barely survived as a nation under the 40-year Stalinist rule of Enver Hoxha.
On the day the newspapers carried the story of that new epic fail on the part of the country's educational system, Vice President Sara Duterte, whose educational priorities had not been geared to encourage creative thinking among the young, resigned as secretary of the Department of Education. It was a collective relief to Filipinos who believed that education should be about Mao Xedong's "Let a hundred flowers bloom," plus imparting to children the value of creative thinking instead of Duterte's limited agenda. The vice president — and this was the consensus of education experts — was ill-suited for the education portfolio in the context of a world ruled by the knowledge economy. She is a national leader who viewed the complex, multidimensional and deeply rooted problems of our bankrupt educational system through her Davao City lens.
You probably want to ask this question: Is public education — if upgraded from its current state of utter mediocrity — adequate and capable enough to produce the best and the brightest for the knowledge economy? Yes, and that is true universally. The living proof of this is the man who founded the company that is now the world's biggest in terms of market capitalization: Nvidia's Jensen Huang.
A recent story in the New York Times had this brief, catchy lead: "Move over Microsoft and Apple. The stock market has a new king." That new "king" — the world's biggest public company with a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion — is Nvidia.
Huang trained in electrical engineering not in the usual universities attended by the tech pioneers and the current tech lords — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Harvard and the like — but in the comparatively lesser-known Oregon State University. Huang's obscure public school drilled into him the importance of thinking out of the box, thinking creatively and always being ahead of the curve. Thus, Nvidia, the California-based chipmaking company he founded when Intel ruled the industry, veered away from that market leader's core businesses. Nvidia ventured into making specialized chips, the graphics processing units (GPUs) used by gamers, the path not taken. It was a profitable company but out of the radar of major stockpickers.
That is, until artificial intelligence (AI) arrived, upending how technology works. AI required specialized chips, the GPUs that form the core business of Nvidia. And no company rode the wave and surge of the AI boom better than Nvidia, which now supplies 80 percent of the specialized chips powering AI.
The AI boom ushered in a new chapter in the story of the United States stock market. Nvidia has not just toppled Microsoft and Apple from their traditional roles as market leaders. Nvidia, thanks to Jensen Huang's foresight and creative thinking, engineered the fastest rise in the history of American bourses.
The exit of Duterte from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s Cabinet may have nothing to do with the fresh body blows to our mediocre educational system, but the timing is providential. The Marcos administration is now free to appoint a new education secretary with two attributes: the brightest educational theoretician in the country and the best and most pragmatic implementor of brilliant educational policies.
The next education secretary should be given this marching order: train our own version of Jensen Huang and many more like him. Transform our mediocre, globally embarrassing educational system into the spawning ground of the most creative minds for the knowledge economy.
Reform and upgrade everything from the ground up, from elementary to tertiary education. Our radically transformed educational system may not only produce the Filipino version of Jensen Huang but also two women who have been in the news recently: Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's new president who was once part of a climate panel that won a Nobel Prize, and Marlene Engelhorn, the Austrian heir of the BASF fortune, who is teaching the world some great lessons on nobility and selflessness.