Education Under the Stranglehold of Commodification

For decades, Indonesia has been trapped in the delusion that the quality of education can be improved merely by injecting funds into schools or changing the label on curricula. We have forgotten the most basic foundation of civilization: the tripusat pendidikan (the three arenas of education) — the family, the educational realm, and the realm of youth movements — a concept conceived by our own education pioneer Ki Hadjar Dewantara. Tragically, the failure of our education system today is not just a technical administrative problem, but also a breakdown of the humane relationship between home and school.

Education has been reduced to a cold economic transaction. The relationship between parents and schools is now no different from buyer and seller in a shopping centre. The consequence? Schools lose their bite and parents lose their spirit as the first teachers.

THE TRAGIC OUTSOURCING CULTURE AND PARENTAL APATHY

The bitter reality on the ground is that many Indonesian parents experience a crisis of parenting competence. Because they do not know how to educate their children at home, they take the shortcut: outsourcing education (outsourcing education).

The logic is simple, but deadly: