Genuine bilingual education possible

I refer to the article Bilingual education remains a fantasy for Indonesian schools by Simon Marcus Gower, published on Monday July 1. This questioned the capability of Indonesian private schools to offer genuinely bilingual English/Indonesian education.

Gower made the claim that bilingual schools can only be effective if, "there are parallel languages in existence within the society or community that the school is part of... It is simply not possible to suppose that this kind of parallelism of languages exists in Indonesia".

Oh? Sekolah Cita Buana is a private school offering a genuinely bilingual curriculum partly because of careful planning and effective teacher recruitment and development. However, the main reason is because the school definitely exists within a wider community that is itself bilingual.

Approximately 80 percent of our students come from an Indonesian family background where at least one parent is a native English-speaker or is fluent with English as a second language. Gower may not realize that huge numbers of Indonesians have studied, worked or lived in English-speaking countries. Thousands of Indonesians, including many parents of Cita Buana's pupils and the school's teachers, are married to native English- speakers.

Every member of the Board of Yayasan Cita Buana and every member of the school council is bilingual. The majority of teaching staff are comfortable communicating in either language in all modes. Most of our children happily read, write and chat in either language, and at high school matriculation level our students directly, and successfully, compete for university entry in English and Indonesian.

We know it is possible to attain genuine bilingualism in our curriculum, and we know that is what our parents like about us. There are still things to improve and attitudes to change, however bilingualism is certainly not a fantasy at Cita Buana, and does hold educational reality and value for our students.

RADEN DUNBAR

Jakarta