Just for fun!
(Baonghean) - Good news for optimists. Not long ago, a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked Vietnam 12th in terms of math and science test results for 15-year-old students, ahead of the US and Australia.
And just a few days ago, Vietnam was ranked 59th out of 124 countries by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the 2015 "Human Capital" index, after Thailand, but higher than China, India, Brazil, Indonesia... Human capital, according to WEF, is an index that assesses the level of education, skills of workers and employment in 5 age groups from 15 to over 65. That is, it measures the ability to nurture talent through education, develop skills at all stages of the human life cycle. In other words, this is a score on the ability to exploit human potential. Finland is the leading country and exploits 86% of human capital potential, while Vietnam is nearly 68.5%, quite average. How amazing! Truly worthy of being a descendant of the Dragon Fairy!
But those who are less optimistic or skeptical are worried, wondering, even doubting the results that the outside world has "weighed and measured" our people's abilities. Because in the past, we were once dismissed by outsiders as "paper airplanes" when an international organization announced that Vietnamese people have the highest happiness index in the world. The story has become a topic for our own people to mock and gossip for a long time. But now, the story of our students being good at Math is not worth discussing. Because it is the truth. Every year when our students compete internationally, they bring home one or two Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals, that's fine, don't count. But the assessment that we have exploited up to 68.5% of the potential of human capital may need to be reconsidered.
The most obvious manifestation is that over the past decades, we have had hundreds of students winning Gold and Silver Medals in international Mathematics, Physics and Informatics competitions. But until now, their names have only been associated with medals and have not been associated with any product, program or project that is famous globally or nationally. After that shining moment, they have faded away like countless other ordinary students. No one has left any significant mark. That means their existing potential has not been exploited, utilized and fully developed to enrich themselves and contribute to the socio-economic development of the country.
Where is the fault? Of course, it is not entirely on one side. Partly due to the individual, but a very large part is probably due to the lack of a favorable environment and conditions to develop the initial, available capital. To put it a little jokingly, even a dragon cannot find water; without water, it cannot fully develop its divine power, let alone a "mortal person with flesh eyes". Only then can we see how important favorable conditions and environments are for talent to blossom and bear fruit. But to blossom and bear fruit, there must be a place to stand, which means being respected. And the matter of respecting talented people in our country is something that everyone knows and feels.
Not long ago, Hanoi City organized a civil service recruitment exam. Among the candidates who failed the exam, there were 30 good candidates. Specifically, there were 5 candidates with excellent master's degrees abroad in the fields of Economics, Business Administration, Financial Management, Chemical Engineering, and Literature. The remaining 25 candidates who failed the exam were all valedictorians, excellent valedictorians in the country, and bachelor's degrees abroad. Some of them claimed that they had done well on the exam but their published scores were not satisfactory. Meanwhile, the oral exam was not recorded, there was no supervisor, and candidates did not have the right to review the exam, so it was very difficult to check whether the exam scores were accurately and fairly marked.
What about those who passed and became civil servants? I would like to borrow the words of the Deputy Chairman of the Judicial Committee Nguyen Dinh Quyen, who spoke at the meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee on May 11 about the level of officials: "To be honest, it's not going up but down... I have been grading senior expert exams for 5 years now, and when I re-graded them, I saw that they really had no shame, they scribbled a few sentences and still asked for a re-examination. All the department heads and department directors, but the oral exam did not grasp the state management contents of their industry. I think that if they had self-respect, they should not take the exam." That alone is enough to say it all. And our country is still a raw exporter of everything, from natural resources to agricultural products and people are still just manual laborers. That is enough to imagine the truth about the so-called ability to exploit human potential in our country.
So just listen, just watch how outsiders evaluate, comment, and classify us to know. And know to distinguish what is right, what is wrong, what is real, what is fake. What is valuable data with practical effects and what is just for fun reference without counting towards results and achievements. And not everything "Westerners say" is objective and accurate. The matter of scoring and ranking the exploitation of our human capital potential should only be considered as a form of fun reference information!
Buddha Mountain
