Let’s face it – STEM education in Cambodia is terrible.
First, some statistics: Countries the world are ranked by PISA scores of 15-year-olds in math and science. Of 81 countries measured (Africa excluded), the average score is 472, while Cambodia scores 336 in math and 347 in science – in both cases dead last, far behind its nearest competitors Dominican Republic and Uzbekistan, respectively. Neighboring Vietnam comes in at 469 and 472, respectively.
PISA itself says:
Since a high ranking on PISA corresponds to economic success, researchers have concluded that PISA is one of the indicators of whether school systems are preparing students for the 21st-century global knowledge economy.
OECD, the organization behind PISA, has published a list of 10 steps that a country may take to improve their PISA scores. www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html. I won’t delve into these here. Rather I want to suggest another reason for Cambodia’s abysmal results.
My two opening paragraphs show a vicious cycle between school STEM education and university STEM education. Students do poorly in school math, and they graduate, saying, “I hate math and can’t do math.” So they won’t go into math at university level. With no university math graduates to teach high school math, the quality of school teaching is reduced to cook-booking through a textbook and memorizing some definitions and formulas without understanding them.
Poor school education leads to poor higher education which then reinforces the weakness of school education.
This vicious cycle also applies to other quantitative-oriented subjects, like accounting and finance. If university graduates in finance do not even understand compound interest, who is going to teach it to high school students?
I saw a useful solution to this problem in the tiny African country of Lesotho. They imported dozens of American Peace Corps Volunteers to teach math and science. These were STEM graduates from American universities. By teaching real math and science to remote mountain schools, they partially broke the cycle. We had actually real math and science majors at the National University of Lesotho, and most of them went into teaching.
It’s pretty embarrassing to compare Cambodia with Lesotho.
It must be said that Cambodia’s PISA scores have improved. They had been even lower at the previous measurement. Private schools are advertising their STEM programs to attract more students, but many of those STEM programs are just sham window-dressing – buy some fancy lab equipment to show off but never use, or pretend that your students are winning international gold medals (kind of like all those beers). At least, there’s an attitude that it’s good to excel at STEM subjects. That attitude may foster greater interest and incentive in those subjects.
Cambodia must address this problem seriously. The country risks falling behind the rest of the world in science-based achievement. We live in the age of the ‘knowledge economy’. Cambodia must either keep up with this trend, or else be relegated to a producer of agricultural products and other commodities.