Vietnam is spending in education a fraction of what others spend and results are very good; the reason of this success, they told us, was: ‘because they wanted it’

Lant Pritchett in conversation with Ann Bernstein. The Centre for Development and Enterprise, Jun 2021. https://www.cde.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lant-Pritchett-in-conversation-with-Ann-Bernstein.pdf

Ann Bernstein: From your knowledge of India and Indonesia, what are the core causes of their lack of educational progress? These are places with highly qualified civil servants and, at least in India’s case, a democratic government. How do you see this problem? How do we get out of this trap? 

Lant Pritchett: I’m head of this very large research project called RISE and we’re spending millions of dollars to find out the answer to that question. One of the countries where education improvements have been dramatic is Vietnam. At a tiny fraction of the spending in most countries – including South Africa – Vietnam is achieving OECD levels of learning. When we asked our Vietnam team why the country has produced this amazing success, they told us: ‘because they wanted it’.  On one level, that seems silly; on another level, it is the key. Unless, as a society, you agree on a set of achievable objectives and actually act in a way that reveals that you really want those objectives, you cannot achieve anything.

So, let me talk briefly about the two different experiences of India and Indonesia, because I think they both illustrate ways you can go wrong.

India never changed its mind about having a selection system rather than an education system. A selection system is where you put all children in a classroom, but provide a poor or indifferent environment for learning, and see what happens. The students that learn in that environment must be brilliant. As for those who do not learn, teachers will say they must be the type of children who cannot learn. India took that option because they expected that 2-3% of the population would be an educated elite, and that would be good enough. And so, they committed themselves to selection rather than education. Things will only change once they fundamentally change their ideas, which they are hopefully in the process of doing now.

Indonesia was different. They decided to provide a standardised product for all learners at a fairly low level, and they reached a decent level of learning where most kids learned some basics. In fact, they were superior to India. Many people think of India as doing better, but India does worse for the average person while also producing a smart elite whose members sometime win a Nobel Prize. Indonesia did far better at covering the basics for everyone as a way of building national unity around a common language. But they never really provoked themselves to go further. Now, they’re stuck at this low-level equilibrium of mediocrity, and they haven’t been able to budge past it in spite of making an important transition to democracy.

The fundamental issue is commitment. Do we have a clear vision of what we expect every child to know and do? Is it a reasonable set of commitments? Can we actually achieve it with the resources we have and the teaching force we have, and what we know how to do? And are we really committed to achieving it? Are we going to hold ourselves to account for achieving the reasonable and important objectives we’ve set? Once you get that right, there are some other things that need to happen, but those are minor details.

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Very sensible, progressive, well-intentioned, etc., but do we really know? We don't, the successes are not replicable. To me, there is no known "fundamental issue," "key," anything that will make success happen.