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.