Not only a wakeup call

“Academic preparedness in the global context therefore is a curricular must for the denizens of more than a thousand universities, colleges and institutions in this country.

Of course, we can always question the reliability or the accuracy of the report by Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA), a research-based arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, putting the Philippines at the bottom among the 79 participating countries on student performance in mathematics, science and reading comprehension.

The sample selection of the 5,000 participating students in each country in the testing could be biased depending on the category of the schools they culled the examinees from.

As in other places, private school students fare better than those in public schools since, in the former, the parents’ participation is more pronounced and solicited.

In public schools, however, students, mostly from poor families, despite the fact that public school teachers are better prepared than private school mentors, perform less since they and the teachers cannot engage the poor parents, since most of them are academically unequipped.

There are still several factors contributing to disparaging statistical results in the PISA report.

The mills of blame game have churned and critics had a festival hurling unpleasantries against the government and the Department of Education, as if the latter is the be-all and end-all of Philippine education.

As one quip goes, “It takes one village to educate one child.” Education today is no longer a one-way street between a teacher and the student.

Interactivity, of the meaningful genre, is the cover and trend.

The steps for instance in reading comprehension, such as background setting, establishing the main theme, questioning, inferring and summarizing, should hook into the paradigm of interactivity.

Why? Because the problem with students today is focus. With the advent of social media, where cryptic messages often replace the boring written narratives of books and library stuff, where visuals and imagery could bring confusing, interlocking, suffused messages dominating the ability to comprehend, where time spent in Facebook and Mobile Legends eat up academic

The PISA started in 2000, but the Philippines joined the study group only last year.

The results of the study and survey become handy to member countries, as they use the findings as base line for developing further their respective academic programs, student proficiency for economic development and global competitiveness.

The positive note is that our country has enrolled itself to the organization because this could be one of the methodological strategies to compare our students with the students of other countries. The bitter pill is out on us and we have to swallow it.

In a global setting where the whole world is reduced into a five-inch mobile phone, convergence becomes a challenge or even a threat. And we have to face such in order to be competitive.

Academic preparedness in the global context therefore is a curricular must for the denizens of more than a thousand universities, colleges and institutions in this country.

Reading comprehension, mathematics and science are subjects which are sine qua non for any developing country. Reading comprehension is translated into global communication and links, while science and mathematics into technology which is now transforming the world’s economy to robots doing farming and fishing in the farmlands via a sophisticated system of cyber controlled satellites.

The results of the PISA report are not only a wakeup call. It is sounding the emergency alarm. It is not confining our educational systems, teachers, parents and students in hospital rooms, but rushing them into the emergency ward or ICU.