VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese students win high prizes at all the international competitions and surveys conducted by international organizations. But Vietnam is among the countries with the lowest labor productivity index in the world.

The fact that Vietnamese students were among the top performers in the 2013 PISA survey was a big surprise to Vietnamese themselves. It ranked the 17th among the 65 ranked countries and territories, though it was the poorest among them and spent less money on education.

When asked about the surprisingly high results of the Vietnamese students, an educator related the “World Cup story.”

After every World Cup tournament, a football team, representing the whole world, comprising the most excellent footballers from all over the world, called the FIFA team, would have a match with the champion squad.

In most of cases, the FIFA team lost the match, even though it comprised of a lot of super stars.

The FIFA team was defeated because they did not enjoy a long and effective enough training. Meanwhile, the champion team experienced effective training for a long period.

PISA test (Programme for International Student Assessment) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) highly appreciates Vietnamese students’ ability. However, the result does not show the quality of the Vietnamese education.

Vietnamese students can be described as FIFA stars.

“Learning well” and “good at learning”

Experts comment that the Vietnamese education aims to make Vietnamese students learn well, i.e. they obtain knowledge well.

The US education and the education of other developed economies strive to help their students become good at learning, i.e. the students can use the knowledge well.

According to Dr. Le Thi My Ha, PISA Vietnam Country Director, Vietnamese students are also weak at arguing or expressing their viewpoints. To some questions, the Vietnamese students’ answers were “I don’t know”, or “it is really a difficult question.”

Ha said that this is a big problem that the Vietnamese general education needs to fix. The education needs to do more to provide Vietnamese students with the capability of presenting and protecting their viewpoints, so that the students can create the knowledge for themselves.

Vietnamese labor productivity low

Vietnam’s labor productivity is just equal to 61.4 percent of ASEAN, 12 percent of Singapore, 22 percent of Malaysia. The index of Vietnam is just above that of Myanmar and Cambodia.

The labor productivity means the ratio between the volume of output products (in GDP or GVA) and the input factors (working hours, labor force and number of workers).

The survey “Lacking skilful workers in Vietnam” conducted by the Labor and Society Science Institute in 6,000 enterprises showed that employers did not highly appreciate Vietnamese workers. Twenty five percent of businesses said Vietnamese workers lack the knowledge about technology and creativeness, 1/5 said the workers lack the ability of getting adapted to new technologies.

As such, a paradox has been existing for many years: Vietnamese are the very good students when they are small, but they are not the good workers when they grow up and need to devote themselves to the country’s development.

Mot The Gioi