VIETNAM and India are the top two choices of global business giants on where to relocate their production lines and supply chain requirements from China because pools of highly skilled workers are available there. Such a move means setting up production lines for the manufacture of smartphones, electronic parts and technology-related products, which would generate jobs on a massive scale. That also means creating new industrial sites from former rice fields. Simply put, this means the infusion of fresh foreign direct investments (FDI). I mention the carving out of production sites from former rice fields because Vietnam and India also happen to be top rice exporters.
Vietnam has an 18-percent learning poverty rate, which means almost every young man and woman in its workforce can read and follow assembly diagrams and instructions well and is adequately equipped with technical skills. In addition, it has capable engineers to guide them on the assembly floors. Reading and math skills — the foundation for any massive pool of skilled workers — are the positive attributes of countries with that level of learning poverty.
As for India, it not only has the famous India Institute of Technology (IIT) but that university system has been transformed by the tech revolution into a feeder school for Silicon Valley.
Below the IIT, it also has prestigious engineering and technology schools, like the one where Satya Nadella — the chief executive officer of Microsoft, which recently toppled Apple from its long-held spot as the most valuable company in the world — trained before moving to the United States. At the lower rung are vocational schools that specifically cater to the assembly needs of foreign locators. Believe it or not, India-based engineers working for the global electronic commerce and tech giants mimic their Bay Area counterparts by dropping the word "juxtaposition" every now and then. (More than one-half of the members of our House of Representatives, sad to say, may not have come across that word. Being a "billionaire contractor" is not the equivalent of literacy. It may rhyme with "commission," which is probably the favorite word of legislators, but it is not the same.)
Thailand and Malaysia — like Vietnam, part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) —are the next top destinations of global corporations that are moving production out of China, either for geopolitical or cost reasons. Those two countries have improved, not neglected, their educational systems from the elementary level up. And they host research universities that rank higher than the University of the Philippines or Ateneo de Manila University in global rankings. In the 1960s, UP and the University of Malaya were the top competitors for the title of best university in the region. But sadly, UP has deteriorated academically and has been slipping in the global university rankings. That is a plus for the two countries when investors seek new production sites.
The fall of UP from academic grace and prestige — it can't hide this because there are yearly rankings — coincided with the general slide of the country's educational system into a state of horrific, deeply ingrained mediocrity. The World Bank's recent finding about our 91-percent learning poverty level was not an isolated assessment. The most recent Program for International Student Assessment report said our 15-year-olds are bunched up with the global laggards in math, reading and comprehension, and science, and nothing has moved from the grim assessment released during the previous administration.
Which of these two — the latest PISA report and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study's (Timss) findings in 2019 — is the more horrific indictment on our educational system is debatable. The Timss report said our 10-year-olds, or Grade 4 students, had the lowest proficiency in both math and science among the 58 countries assessed. Of the Grade 4 students assessed, only 1 percent were in the high-achieving bracket in both math and science.
Given the uniformity of the investment environment and the investment rules in much of Asia, except perhaps for Myanmar and Stalinist North Korea, foreign investors would bring their money to areas where pools of skilled workforce are available, not to areas where the young can hardly do math and struggle with basic text comprehension. Not to areas where the educational system is in a race to the bottom, like ours. Our Asean peers have a definitive edge over us in the state of educational competency, and that is the plain and simple reason they attract more FDI than the country.
The expected drop by at least 15 percent of FDI in the past year has nothing to do with the 1987 Philippine Constitution. The root cause, if the political mandarins would just take time and reflect on it, is the mediocre state of Philippine education. And the educational system's apparent preoccupation of late? Historical revisionism, reviving the Reserve Officers Training Core, and gutting courses on civics, Constitution and history.
To attract foreign investors, the focus should be on creating a pool of highly trained, highly skilled and highly nimble workers, which can only be produced by an educational system that is globally competitive and among the region's best.
Again, I repeat, there is nothing wrong with the Philippine Constitution. Chile, with its two failed attempts to write a new charter, would just be too glad to adopt in toto the Philippine Constitution. It has definitive guardrails against despotism. It has a strong Bill of Rights provision. It has none of the neoliberalist legacies of the Pinochet Constitution that is still binding in Chile now. Yet, it is replete with provisions on justice, equity and parity that those advocating for the scrapping of the Pinochet Constitution want.
Let us repeat this a thousand times: there is nothing wrong with the Philippine Constitution. The problem is that our political mandarins are finding a scapegoat for their many failings, and the Constitution is their convenient bogeyman and scapegoat.
Taiwan's newly elected leader, Lai Ching-te, was recently described by supporters with these words: "He makes clear-cut distinctions between good and evil. He insists that right is right and wrong is wrong." Filipinos should take that kind of moral stand on efforts to amend the Constitution. We should press and insist that it is wrong.
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