Building Literacy from Homes and the Nation's Peripheries

Education has always held an important position in various discussions about the nation’s future. When talking about education quality, public attention generally focuses on schools as the centre of the learning process. Classrooms, curricula, teacher competence, and academic achievements often become the primary measures of educational success. Various improvement efforts are continuously made to strengthen these aspects as part of the endeavour to build higher quality human resources.

However, this picture becomes different when we turn to areas far from city centres, where access to technology, reading books, and even stable schooling remains limited. In some villages, children first encounter letters not from a school bench, but from the voice of their own mother, slowly spelling out letters at home whilst accompanying daily activities. It is in these simple spaces, before blackboards and curricula arrive, that language and meaning begin to be introduced at their most basic level.

Yet, behind the dominance of this perspective, there is one fundamental question that often escapes attention: where does education actually start? Does a child’s learning process truly begin when they enter a classroom, or much earlier, when they start interacting with language, hearing stories, and forming ways of thinking through their immediate environment?

In reality, the learning process has been ongoing long before a child recognises a school bench. Conversations at home, the habit of listening to stories, daily interactions, and adult responses to a child’s curiosity slowly but consistently form the early foundations of literacy. At this point, literacy does not appear as an academic achievement, but as a life experience that shapes how children understand the world and interpret meaning.

In the practice of education policy in Indonesia, literacy still tends to be understood as an achievement anchored in the school space. State intervention is mostly directed at strengthening the curriculum, classroom learning processes, and academic evaluation instruments. This perspective often reduces literacy to the final product of formal education, rather than a social process that grows in a child’s daily life.

This approach gives rise to serious structural implications: the school becomes the single centre of literacy production, whilst the family is positioned as a non-strategic supporting space. Sociologically speaking, however, children first recognise language, symbols, and thought patterns precisely outside formal institutions.

If we continue to regard schools as the sole centre of literacy, children on the nation’s peripheries will be left far behind. For example, in some schools in the 3T regions (frontier, outermost, underdeveloped), although physical buildings exist, children still struggle to read because teachers must divide their teaching time among dozens of students at once, and there is no literacy support at home. Consequently, these children’s reading abilities are far below the national standard, even though the school is formally ‘functioning’.

This gap is visible in the still-limited integration of families into the design of national literacy policies. Reading habits, language skills, and the way children understand the world are shaped not only at school but also through daily interactions at home. When policies rely too heavily on formal institutions, the domestic space, which is exactly the starting point for literacy formation, does not receive adequate attention.

In fact, without active family support, literacy programmes at school often stop at the reading activity in class, without continuing at home. This shows that a child’s literacy development cannot be measured merely by the number of books in the library or study hours in the classroom. As a result, literacy issues cannot be resolved simply by strengthening schools. Without strengthening the family ecosystem, efforts to improve education quality will continue to face the same structural limits.

If the home is understood as the early foundation of literacy, there is one crucial node that has so far received insufficient attention in education policy design: women in the domestic sphere. In daily life, women, especially mothers, hold a central position in shaping a child’s language and thinking abilities. Through repeated interactions, they introduce language, build communication, and form the cognitive habits that become the basis of early literacy.

A number of empirical studies show that maternal education correlates with a child’s literacy development. However, this relationship is not direct or mechanistic. Its influence works through the quality of the home environment as an early learning space, which is determined by how maternal knowledge and experience are translated into daily parenting practices.

Micro-indicators within the family, such as conversation frequency, shared reading habits, responsiveness to children’s questions, and the availability of reading materials at home, are key factors that bridge this relationship. For instance, a mother who routinely reads storybooks to her child, asks about the story’s content, and invites the child to write new words indirectly prepares the child’s reading and critical thinking skills long before they enter formal schooling. Thus, the home functions as a space for early literacy production that operates long before a child enters formal education.

The reality is that children’s literacy at school does not always reflect adequate basic skills. There are still many junior high and even senior high school students who stammer when reading simple texts, indicating that literacy is not solely a matter of school facilities.