Focus on education

Focus on education

How important is education for the future of Indonesia? The
question is almost absurd in its folly. After all, everybody
agrees, and plain common sense tells us, that education is one of
the main pillars on which a modern society rests.

In fact, the pioneers of the Indonesian independence movement
in the late 1920s started to realize their dream of modernizing
Indonesian society by setting up the Budi Utomo organization,
whose main aim was to bring modern education within the reach of
the Indonesian people at large.

Present Indonesian leaders from the President down have also
stressed the importance of education for the nation.

Yet, education is still not getting the proper attention it
deserves. Vice President Megawati Soekarnoputri, in a meeting
with delegates of the Muhammadiyah youth organization, recently
said the government realized the need for allocating sufficient
funds to education but was forced by reality to compromise.

The government, according to the Vice President, would like to
set aside 25 percent of the state budget for education, as many
legislators have demanded. Some members of the House of
Representatives even threatened to reject the draft budget now
before the House unless that demand is approved by the
government.

In the meantime, Commission IV of the House, which is in
charge of education, has come up with a compromise plan and
suggested a budget of 10 percent to 15 percent of the current
year's budget allocation -- a suggestion that is not likely to be
agreed to by the government.

Given the circumstances, educators and others concerned about
the state of education in this country now place much of their
hope on the impending implementation of regional autonomy in the
provinces.

Minister of National Education Yahya A. Muhaimin, for example,
told a regional meeting of educators in Malang, East Java,
recently, that Jakarta was hoping that in view of the central
government's inability to provide enough funds for education the
provinces could do their part in this respect by putting a
greater emphasis on education.

The autonomous provinces, he said, could do this by, for
example, setting aside some 20 percent of their regional budgets
for education.

The need for greater attention to be paid to education once
regional autonomy has been granted to the provinces was similarly
stressed by experts and officials during a recent seminar to mark
the establishment of Banten province.

Bambang Brodjonegoro, an economist of the Jakarta-based
University of Indonesia, said one of the first challenges the new
province would face if it wants to catch up with more developed
areas of Indonesia is to improve the quality of its human
resources. For this, improving education in terms of both number
of institutions and quality is imperative.

Banten, he said, must have an adequate number of educational
institutions ranging from kindergartens to colleges and
universities to improve the quality of its human resources.

A survey last year showed that the majority of the province's
four-million work force was illiterate. About 22 percent of the
population is still jobless and life expectance is about 50
years, or 10 years below the national figure.

About 32 percent of workers in the area are elementary school
dropouts and the majority of the Badui people in the southern
parts of the province are illiterate because they live
practically isolated from the rest of the province.

It may be true that Banten cannot be taken as a standard by
which other regions must be measured. It is equally true,
however, that some regions in this vast archipelago are worse
off, due to their isolated geography.

Whatever the case, hopefully autonomy will bring some
improvement to educational standards in the regions since it
seems that not much hope can be put in the central government in
Jakarta.

Eventually, though, it is the duty of the government in
Jakarta as much as those of the regions to see to it that
Indonesians everywhere get the kind of proper, modern education
to which they are entitled.

It is difficult to foresee what future this nation will have
in the increasingly competitive modern world unless the standard
of its education system is dramatically improved.