THE PROGRAMME for International Student Assessment (PISA) loves to drop some truth bombs about the Philippine educational system.
PISA did it again in June when 15-year-old Filipino students logged a dismal mean score of 22 in tasks related to creative thinking, placing the Philippines at the bottom of 81 participating countries. This was the first time PISA, the assessment conducted by rich countries under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development every three years, measured how well students could formulate diverse ideas, solutions, and expressions.
In December 2023, PISA reported that the firestorm of reforms enacted in the past half-decade made almost no difference in the Philippines’s performance. Students still lagged in mathematics, reading, and science, inching up only a few spots and overtaking poorer countries including Guatemala, Paraguay, and Cambodia.
“We are around five to six years behind,” a Department of Education official told reporters when the results came out.
The PISA results fell largely in line with a situation report published by the Commission on Human Rights in February 2023 that said senior high graduates lacked soft skills, such as empathy, creativity, resilience, and communication, making employers hesitant to hire them.
“New graduates experience culture shock upon entering the workplace because their expectations differ from what they were taught at school, and some fail to adjust to their work and decide to resign but have a hard time being hired again,” the report, titled “Human Rights Situation Report: School-to-Work Transition 2022,” stated.
The Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II), in a 398-page document published in January titled “Miseducation: The Failed System of Philippine Education,” says the antidote to the country’s educational woes is “synergy” between various actors of society: “All of us must work, and must work together. Stakeholders, from the top level of policy-making to the frontlines in our communities, must begin to think of themselves as part of a larger whole.”
Applying this mindset, how can creative thinking be fostered? Sure, the government should allot adequate funds to build more libraries, computer laboratories, science halls, and art studios to enhance students’ skills in writing and problem-solving.
For teachers, the most valuable tool at their disposal is time. Classroom activities, from essay writing to science experiments, must be tailored within a sufficient timeframe to spur dialogue, debate, and evaluation.
According to a 2022 study by Ph.D. students at Texas A&M University in the United States, flexible learning time, along with a cumulative learning process and problem-based learning activities, promotes various creativity skills such as fluency, originality, and elaboration. It takes time for a seed to bloom into a tree.
The same study reveals that online activities provide space for students’ creative development. Social media, for all the dangers it poses, “broadens students’ horizons.” Video games, for all their supposed detrimental psychological effects, feature a “high level of interactivity that constantly reacts to learners’ actions and inputs.” Adobe and Microsoft applications boast of “wide-ranging design features for learners to develop their original ideas.”
At home, parents—considered their children’s first teachers—should clear away two roadblocks to fostering creative thinking: the puwede-na-yan (mediocre) mentality and the ban on joining pang-matandang (adult) conversations.
Mediocre mentality saps students’ motivation to exert more effort in performing tasks and producing quality outputs. Take a 2022 policy brief published by De La Salle University, which argued that public school students might have floundered in mathematics because of pessimism toward finishing a degree and low appreciation for attending school. When students begin to settle for the lackluster, creative thinking hits a dead end.
Leaving children out of adult conversations forecloses an opportunity to develop creative thinking, even incrementally. An education expert at the University of the Philippines said asking questions—a way to nurture curiosity—is not practiced in Filipino homes. Sure, young people may find it stressful to process emotionally charged or sensual conversations. But on matters involving societal and community issues, students deserve to have a seat at the table, ask the basic questions, and receive thought-provoking answers.
Science already has proof that healthy adult-children conversations benefit the latter’s brains in the long run: A study by Columbia University found that “children who experience more conversations with adults or adult speech have patterns of cortical structure in language-supporting regions that are linked with greater reading proficiency.”
Reversing the country’s slide to the bottom of PISA’s creative thinking test requires students, teachers, and the government to rise above the mediocrity of the entrenched and corrupted system of basic education. And while education officials find a way to escape the quandary, the people in school and at home can do their share to foster learning and thinking outside the box.
