For years, international education rankings have encouraged countries to ask: who is ahead of us?
The recent release of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) 2025 results offers Malaysia and Indonesia another opportunity to look at that question.
But perhaps the more interesting story is not who is ahead, but how quickly the distance between them is changing.
Malaysia remains ahead of Indonesia in three core Pisa domains – science, mathematics and reading – with gaps of between 28 and 33 points. At first glance, Malaysia is performing better. But rankings can hide movement, and that is where the more interesting story begins.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which conducts the global Pisa study, the gap between Malaysia and Indonesia has narrowed substantially since 2018 in all three domains, from between 44 and 62 points to between 28 and 34 points.
The OECD describes this as a more positive trend for Indonesian students than for Malaysian students across all three subjects. This does not mean Indonesia has solved its education problems, nor does it mean Malaysia has lost its educational strengths. Rather, it tells us something more interesting: the educational landscape of South-East Asia is moving.
That movement matters because Pisa 2025 comes at a particularly difficult moment for education systems everywhere.
Across the OECD, average performance in mathematics and reading reached its lowest level ever recorded in Pisa. Reading has deteriorated sharply over the past decade, while mathematics has also experienced a significant long-term decline. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing how students access information, write, calculate and learn.
For South-East Asia, this creates a double challenge. Countries must improve foundational learning while preparing students for a world where technology can perform tasks that schools once treated as evidence of intelligence.
AI may be able to summarise an article, generate an explanation or solve an equation, but students still need to understand the answer before they can judge whether it is correct. A student who struggles to read critically will also struggle to evaluate AI-generated information. A student without mathematical reasoning may accept an impressive-looking calculation without noticing that it is wrong.
Technology therefore does not make basic competencies less important. It makes them more important. Malaysia’s experience with AI illustrates the scale of this transformation. In 2025, 56% of Malaysian students reported using AI chatbots to help them learn at least once a week, compared with 46% across the OECD.
Malaysian students also reported using AI for preliminary research, summarising texts and drafting written assignments at relatively high rates.
The question is no longer whether AI will enter the classroom. It already has. The real question is whether education systems can teach students to use it without allowing the technology to replace the intellectual work that education is supposed to develop.
That question extends beyond Malaysia and Indonesia. It is an Asean question. South-East Asia is not a single educational system. Singapore operates at a very different level of performance from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.
The Pisa 2025 results show substantial differences across the region, but also reveal something else: several South-East Asian systems are changing in different directions and at different speeds.
Singapore remains among the world’s highest-performing systems, while countries such as Cambodia and the Philippines recorded gains in several areas between 2022 and 2025.
The lesson is not that every country should copy Singapore, Malaysia or Vietnam. Education systems are shaped by history, institutions, language, inequality, culture and economic structure.
There is no single Asean model waiting to be downloaded. What South-East Asia does share, however, is a rapidly changing economic environment. The region’s future competitiveness will increasingly depend on human capital: people who can learn continuously, work across borders, understand technology, solve unfamiliar problems and distinguish reliable information from misinformation.
Pisa measures only part of this picture, but it provides a useful warning when foundational competencies remain weak. This is where the narrowing Malaysia-Indonesia gap becomes more than a statistical curiosity.
For Malaysia, the message is that being ahead today does not guarantee being ahead tomorrow. For Indonesia, the message is that narrowing a gap is not the same as closing it. For Asean as a whole, the message is that educational advantage is increasingly dynamic.
The next decade may produce a different regional education map from the one we know today.
The countries that succeed will not necessarily be those that simply climb the Pisa table. They will be those that can combine strong foundational learning with digital judgement, capable teachers, equitable access and the ability to use AI without becoming intellectually dependent on it.
DR WAODE NURMUHAEMIN, M.Ed.
Public policy observer and national columnist, Indonesia
Research fellow, INTI International University, Malaysia
