Accelerating School Revitalisation: Weaving Justice from the Classroom
A classroom is not merely an arrangement of bricks, cement, and zinc roofing. For a child in the remote corners of the archipelago, a classroom is the first laboratory where their imagination is woven, where aspirations are hung, and where the future of this nation is staked. When a classroom leaks during heavy rain, or its walls crack with age, it is not only learning concentration that is disrupted, but also the sense of safety and human dignity of our children.
Therefore, the news regarding the massive expansion of the Educational Unit Revitalisation Programme in 2026 is not just a report about budget absorption or a ministry’s physical project. It is a cultural and political manifesto asserting that the state is present to guarantee social justice through the most fundamental pathway: education.
The commitment shown by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (Kemendikdasmen) to boost the revitalisation target from the initial figure of 11,744 schools to 71,744 educational units is a breath of fresh air amidst the public’s thirst for real change. In other words, this effort represents a quantum leap with an additional 60,000 schools, which is genuinely not easy but is very feasible for the government. This figure reflects strong political will from the national leadership, a concrete response to the reality that the transformation of human quality can no longer be postponed.
This decision did not emerge from a vacuum. It was born from a foundation built the previous year, when the 2025 revitalisation programme was successfully completed one hundred per cent for 16,167 educational units, supported by a budget of Rp16.9 trillion. That achievement was not merely on-target budget realisation, but proof that our educational bureaucracy machine can move effectively when given clear direction and strong political support from the country’s top leadership.
For anyone who has followed the dynamics of education policy in Indonesia over the past few decades, such an achievement deserves to be noted as something unusual. Educational facility rehabilitation programmes in the past often faced a classic trap: large targets on paper, but realisation that stalled in the field due to administrative problems, delays in budget disbursement, or weak coordination between central and regional authorities. When a programme actually succeeds in fully exceeding its target, it signals an improvement in governance that warrants recognition and greater hope.
To understand the significance of the target leap in 2026, we need to look back at what was accomplished throughout 2025. The history of public policy often records programme failures due to overly ambitious targets without a strong execution base. However, what happened in 2025 provides a solid empirical justification for this expansion. With a budget allocation of Rp16.9 trillion, Kemendikdasmen successfully completed 100% revitalisation for 16,167 educational units across Indonesia.
The success of exceeding the target in 2025 serves as a moral and operational foundation. It proves that our educational bureaucracy machine has reliable execution capacity when driven by transparent and results-oriented management.
When the government now allocates Rp13.4 trillion as initial capital for 11,744 schools in 2026, and simultaneously formulates the budget for an additional 60,000 schools as directed by the President, we see a development strategy that is no longer incremental or merely ‘treading water’. This is an accelerative strategy.
In the study of education economics, the relationship between the quality of school infrastructure and student academic achievement has long been a focus of attention. This aligns with the results of reports released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) through various editions of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Such research consistently shows that adequate physical school environments—such as clean classrooms, good lighting, proper sanitation facilities, and safe supporting spaces—are positively correlated with student learning motivation and teacher teaching effectiveness. This means that when school facilities and infrastructure are met, the psychological burden on teachers is reduced, and students can fully focus their energy on absorbing knowledge.
Thus, the target leap towards 71,744 educational units in 2026 must be read as the government’s conscious effort to simultaneously raise the baseline quality of national education. We can no longer allow the disparity in school quality to become a chasm separating children in big cities from children in the hinterlands. By massively expanding the programme’s coverage, the government is striving to democratise learning facilities.
One of the most crucial points in the explanation by the Secretary General of Kemendikdasmen, Suharti, is the emphasis on the priority scale. This giant-scale revitalisation programme will not be distributed evenly in a blind egalitarian manner, but will be channelled based on the principle of distributive justice that favours the weak. Schools suffering severe damage, educational units in disadvantaged, frontier, and outermost (3T) regions, as well as schools requiring post-disaster rehabilitation, are the front line that will be touched by this programme.
The move to designate 3T regions and severely damaged schools as the top priority is a manifestation of the concept of spatial justice. For decades, Indonesia’s development has often been trapped in a centralistic paradigm, where regions far from the centres of power and economy tend to receive the ‘leftovers’ of development.