- GENEVA (Reuters) - Students
in South Korea and Japan scored highest in academic surveys comparing 24
industrialized countries, with teenagers in southern Europe lagging in
both reading and math, the United Nations said Tuesday.
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- Finland and Canada came third and fourth in the table
compiled by the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), while Spain, Italy, Greece
and Portugal held the lowest overall rankings. The report, issued by UNICEF's
Innocenti Research Center in Florence, Italy, is based on results from
three surveys testing 14- and 15-year-old's literacy and ability to apply
essential math and science.
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- "A child starting school in Canada, Finland, or
(South) Korea ... has both a higher probability of reaching a given level
of educational achievement and a lower probability of falling well below
the average," UNICEF said.
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- "The United Kingdom, where hand-wringing over educational
failures is a national pastime, fares better than all other countries in
the European Union except Finland and Austria."
-
- Britain ranked seventh overall, followed by France at
12, the United States at 18 and Germany at 19, the agency said.
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- The report examined performance in 24 member countries
of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose
30 members account for most of the world's wealth.
-
- "The 'big picture' shows that some OECD countries
are consistently performing better than others when it comes to educating
and equipping their young people for life in the 21st century ..."
it said.
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- "In all countries under review, a strong predictor
of a child's success or failure at school is the economic and occupational
status of the child's parents," it added.
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