Government should invest more in education: National commission
Government should invest more in education: National commission
Leo Wahyudi S, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The National Commission on Education in a report has
underlined the need for the country to invest more in education,
noting that despite the higher allocation in the 2002 State
Budget, spending in this field lagged far behind other countries.
The Commission pointed out that just 1 percent of Gross
Domestic Product was spent on education, far below the 4.5 to 7
percent levels of developed countries, or the 2.5 to 7.5 percent
levels in many other developing countries.
Despite the potential of many Indonesian children, evidenced
by the country's successes in various scholastic Olympiads,
overall Indonesian education had continued to regress.
A 1998 World Bank study showed Indonesian children did poorly
in even basic literacy tests, while a recent report by the Hong
Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) also
ranked Indonesia at the bottom of its 12-country study.
The new government under President Megawati Soekarnoputri has
increased the budget allocation for the development of the
education sector to Rp 11.6 trillion, or nearly a quarter of the
2002 budget's spending on development, a 19 percent increase
compared to the previous budget.
But this was still deemed insufficient.
"There needs to be coordination between the Ministry of
National Education and other relevant ministries on how to
increase the education budget," the Commission said in its report
without mentioning a specific sum.
Referring to a study jointly sponsored by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and
the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), Fasli Djalal, the Commission's
deputy chairman, suggested that a rough estimate of about Rp 1.3
million should be allocated for the education of every one of the
28.4 million elementary students in the country.
Meanwhile, Rp 1.8 million per year should be allocated for the
9.4 million junior high school students, and Rp 2.6 million for
every one of the 5.3 million senior high school students.
While urging the government to fork out more, the commission
at the same time also called for greater public participation in
education investment.
Data from 1995-1996 shows that the government supplies 94
percent of the funding for overall primary education in the
country.
The commission underlined that if public funding was to
increase, the government would have to reform its management of
schools thereby ensuring financial transparency and
accountability.
The commission also stressed that Indonesia's education system
must abide by principles which guaranteed the poor the right to
access education through the use of cross-subsidy schemes, among
other mechanisms.
Commission chairman and former education minister Fuad Hassan,
during the submission of the report to the ministry on Thursday,
said elementary education must get immediate priority.
"Elementary education forms the foundation of higher
education, thus it must be the core consideration in determining
education policies," Fuad said.