Choose leaders committed to education

Choose leaders committed to education

Ardimas Sasdi, Staff Writer, The Jakarta Post, Berkeley, California

ajambak@calmail.berkeley.edu

Recent reports that 30 percent of about 149,000 public
elementary school buildings in urban and rural areas across the
country were either in a state of ruin or beyond repair is a
serious warning for the country to pay attention to education, a
tool that gives young people the skills they need to get jobs and
become responsible members of society.

In another heartrending report last month, the United Nations
Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) said
that 1.8 million children, or 7 percent of Indonesia's 26 million
children between the ages of seven and 12, were forced to drop
out of school before completing the fifth grade.

Of those who stayed in school to complete their primary
education, only 55 percent proceeded to secondary school. The
Unesco report said this figure still fared better than Asian
countries with big populations like Bangladesh, Pakistan, China
and India, but was below Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, a
country which was ravaged by war two decade ago.

The director general for elementary education at the Ministry
of Education, Indradjati Sidi, said it would take between five
and 10 years to renovate the dilapidated schools based on the
existing budget assumption of Rp 625 billion (US$ 75 million) per
year. Budget constraints will make it extremely difficult, if not
impossible, for the government to build new schools to
accommodate new students amid annual population growth of 1.52
percent.

The high figure of dropouts and large number of decrepit
schools both have the potential to slow if not completely stop
the nine-year compulsory education program, which is just the tip
of the iceberg of national education.

These problems are happening as more and more foreign schools
and universities enter Indonesia, either in the form of joint
operations or joint management. The onslaught of foreign
educational institutions has the positive effect of prodding
local competitors to raise their quality, but it may aggravate
societal problems like jealousy among graduates of domestic
schools and universities who cannot compete with foreign
university graduates in the job market.

More importantly, education also functions to adjust students'
attitude and behavior as members of a democratic society, in line
with the principles of nation building.

The government, thanks to a more conducive political
atmosphere, has done a relatively good job on education through
organizational, pedagogical and political approaches in the last
three years. A striking example was the approval of a national
education law in 2003, despite objections by some quarters to
some of the clauses in the law.

But the government has done little to address the pressing
issues of the hiring, retention and dismissal of teachers,
systems of merit pay, more effective use of instructional time
and improved curriculum.

There has also been no concrete plan by the government to
resolve a long-standing but fundamental aspect of the pedagogical
approach. Should schools stick to the existing concept of
instruction, which is suitable for a paternalistic society like
Indonesia but blamed by experts for a lack of creativity, as this
model places students as passive objects, like receptacles. Or
should the country introduce a more libertarian approach, which
puts an emphasis on how to engage students in critical thinking
and the quest for humanization.

The programs to rectify the education system should include
efforts to fight corruption and abuses of power. Transparency,
simpler bureaucratic procedures and rigorous control in the
planning and implementation of education projects should be a
main agenda of the campaign.

Experts say that only about 40 percent of the budget for
education projects like school buildings goes to its target,
while the remainder lands in the pockets of officials and
developers. This results in shoddy construction and a shorter
lifespan for school buildings.

Efforts to end criminal practices in the production and sale
of textbooks, which result in higher prices for students, must be
part of the anticorruption campaign. Publishers continue to print
new textbooks every year with slight modifications in content,
additional graphics and color photos, and sell them to schools
with the tacit approval of officials at the Ministry of National
Education.

The government should also be made to conduct a total review
on education and put a stop to the partial or patchwork solutions
of the past. The overhaul should target an area considered
sensitive by Muslims, like a review of the education system at
Islamic boarding schools (pesantren), home to more than two
million students throughout the country.

Pesantren played a key role in national education before and
during the early years of independence in the 1940s, but six
decades later standards, curriculums and teaching methods in most
of these schools are comparatively low when compared to the
standards at public schools, an explanation often given by
experts for the inability of pesantren graduates to compete in
the job market.

Experts agree, however, that a plan to build Indonesia into a
modern country will remain an illusion if the country does not
reform its education system and address the chronic illiteracy
problem and backwardness among some groups.

The recent revelations of an education crisis ahead of the
elections gives Indonesians the opportunity to demand the
legislative and executive branches make a change in education.
The fact that the Constitutions mandates the state allocate 20
percent of the budget for education is not enough, as proven by
the reality that not a single area in the country follows this
budget requirement.

In any democratic country the government is a main provider of
education, and the elections are a chance for citizens, as the
real holders of power, to judge and decide who will be their
future leaders. Choose leaders with vision, leadership and a
commitment to education.

The writer is a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of
Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.