Elite schools must balance idealism and commercialism

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): This is a story about parents who felt betrayed by a school they once trusted, and about the difficulties they had in restoring that trust. The moral of the story is that trust cannot be restored by parents and teachers alone. The school yaysan, or foundation, which provides the capital and early running costs of private schools, must also be involved in this effort.

A young mother came to me recently expressing frustration at a rise in her children's school fees. This middle class woman had enrolled her children in a private school, at considerable cost to her family.

It is common for the initial investment capital and operating costs of many new private schools to be quoted in U.S. dollars. Some private schools also hire expatriate English teachers, who are usually paid in U.S. dollars.

As the rupiah has weakened against the dollar, so foundations controlling private schools have felt compelled to safeguard their financial position, and have done so either by increasing school fees when they are charged in rupiah, or stipulating that fees are paid in dollars. In the school attended by the children of this young mother, fees are charged in rupiah and have been increased by as much as 40 percent.

A number of parents panicked after hearing this bad news. The bill paid by the lady in question for her two children's monthly school fees rose to Rp 2.52 million, and will rise again, to Rp 2.8 million, when her son moves up to Elementary School at the end of the school year.

This is stretching her family's financial means to the limit. Both she and her husband are employed by Indonesian companies and are paid in rupiah. They are afraid that they will be unable to pay the tuition fees in the not-too-distant future.

"What shall I do?" she asked, "shall I keep my children at this expensive school and let the whole family suffer? Or shall I move them to an ordinary school and let them suffer? You know what traditional schools are like in Indonesia. Teachers have absolute power over children and if parents question their wisdom on any occasion they get angry and ask them to take their children to another school," she said.

I could not give any real advice, only suggesting that this young couple discuss the matter with other parents. Surely they are not the only parents on the horns of this dilemma. There must be other parents facing the same situation.

About two weeks later I heard that the parents did indeed have a meeting with other concerned parents and teachers at the school. The school principal told the parents that they too were shocked and upset by the increase in fees. Domestic teachers felt aggrieved at what they saw as favoritism demonstrated toward expatriate teachers. Foreign teachers were upset because they felt their colleagues, the parents and students blamed them for the entire school's problems.

The school management had received two very moving letters, one from a student in fifth grade, written in English, and another from a group of students in the junior high school composed in beautiful Indonesian.

The letter from the fifth-grader informed the principal that his mother was unable to pay the increased school fee. He pleaded with the principal not to increase fees and in return was willing to clean the classroom and toilets, and study without the cooling influence of air-conditioning. The letter from the junior high school students also asked that fees not be raised because, they said, their parents had become poorer.

The principal and teachers were entirely sympathetic to the plight of families with children at the school. However, the decision to raise school fees was not theirs, but had been taken by the foundation which provided the funds to set up the school. The school is effectively controlled by members of the foundation, who run it as though it were a business. The principal recommended that the parents met with the foundation board to discuss the matter directly.

The meeting took place and demonstrated starkly that an almost unbridgeable gap exists between parents and members of the foundation over the most appropriate response to present economic difficulties. The teachers are caught between professional loyalty and their paymasters. Wisdom is needed to find a solution that can serve the interest of all parties concerned.

There are two lessons that can be taken from this story. First, schools must strike a healthy balance between idealism and commercialism if they are to become respectable and durable educational institutions. A private school can be run neither as a business enterprise nor a charity alone, but must combine elements of both.

Second, the most important question to ask in the depth of this crisis is whether we each want to merely save our own respective skins, or if we sincerely want to emerge into better times as a whole and unified nation, wiser and bearing greater dignity.