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.