Human resources investment pays off

Human resources investment pays off

By Sayidiman Suryohadiprojo

JAKARTA (JP): Reading the newspaper these days one easily gets the impression that superschools are considered the right answer for improving the quality of education in this country. How valid is that opinion?

It is common knowledge that the quality of human resources play an important, if not decisive role in determining a nation's place in the future of mankind. To earn a proper place in the world today, a nation must demonstrate its capability to cooperate with other nations, but at the same time it must also be highly competitive. This is true in all aspects of life, be it in economics and business or in the arts and sports.

It is generally agreed that the quality of human resources in Indonesia still needs much improvement. An important measure for that purpose is education.

The experiences of other nations have shown that a highly qualified elite does not guarantee a high performance of a nation as a whole. It has been said, for example, that about 30 percent of the Indian nation, meaning more than 200 million people, has reached a degree of progress equal to an advanced nation. That includes the standard of education, the quality of its scientists, its production capacity, the activity of business and others. However, the rest of the population is still at a level of low development, with some at a stage of backwardness. Therefore the level of progress of India as a whole is still lower than Indonesia. That can be seen from its income per capita of about US$310 compared to Indonesia's $780. It seems that to acquire a high degree of progress for a nation, it is not enough to have a highly qualified but small elite. But proper attention must also be given to the progress of the majority of the people.

Superschools certainly provide high quality education. But only a very small part of the nation will benefit from its existence since superschools are by nature very limited in number. We can certainly build a highly qualified elite through these superschools, but it will be far from enough to satisfy our requirement since the quality of a nation's human resources depends on the quality of the majority, not just of a small minority. We need a highly qualified and effective labor force. A strong and large middle class must be formed and several government and private organizations with leaders and managers of the right standard. That means that apart from superschools, there is also a need for mass quality education.

The answer to that is the establishment of compulsory education. The government of Indonesia actually introduced compulsory education six years ago and has now decided to increase compulsory education to nine years. This is a very important decision because it will affect the whole nation. Not only the people of Java, especially of Jakarta, long for education. The children of Irian Jaya and Aceh deserve the same treatment as those in Java. That is a matter of fairness, and also a way to develop hidden talents in all parts of the nation. Not only will we gain by having more bright and clever people coming from all parts of the country, but the unity of the nation will also be enhanced if every locality receives the same quality of education.

Considered from the viewpoint of strategy, Indonesia is certainly on the right track in having a nine-year compulsory education. However, the problem we face today is the implementation of that wise decision.

Since it is compulsory education, the government must finance and execute the nine years of compulsory education, consisting of six years of elementary school and three years of junior high school.

To implement it properly, the standard of schools all over the country must be equal. It is not enough for the government to have elementary and junior high schools with good standards in the center of Jakarta, but the same standard must prevail at all government schools in the whole of Indonesia. An overall standard of quality in every school is very important because bad education would negatively affect the nation for a long time.

That means that we need the right amount of teachers with proper capabilities. We certainly want to have good basic education, because that would determine the quality of our human resources. It means that our teachers must perform well enough at all places.

That requires good training and schooling of teachers, and that the teaching profession is attractive enough to draw good students to the teachers colleges. With the present state of teachers' living standards, only good students with strong idealism enter the teaching profession. The average good student prefers not to enter the profession if he or she can enter another profession with more hope for better living standards. We need a radical improvement of teachers' pay and allowances before the teaching profession can become attractive for good students.

We need also build proper school facilities to achieve an acceptable minimum standard of basic education. Every school must have good classrooms with a library and a playground; junior high schools must have laboratories for the study of sciences. Teachers colleges need dormitories to facilitate education and training.

All these efforts must be financed and executed by the government because it is for compulsory education. That cannot be done as long as government spending on education remains less than 15 percent of the total government budget. Among the other ASEAN nations the lowest figure of government spending on education is 15 percent of their budget, while in Indonesia it is no more than 8 percent or about 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. With this limitation the future of human resources in Indonesia remains questionable. How can we expect to compete properly in ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2003 or APEC in 2020 if we cannot improve our basic education at the right time and with the right standard?

In addition to basic education the government must also take care of public senior high schools, universities and colleges. These institutions can also be established by the private sector. Today there are more private than government universities and that tendency will remain.

The private sector must also be encouraged to increase its amount of senior high schools. Nevertheless, the government has to take care that the smaller number of government universities and senior high schools are of the right quality, because they will become the model for private schools. Moreover, the government must also build professional high schools, like technical and agriculture high schools. The private sector is usually not very enthusiastic about building those kinds of schools because of their high cost of establishment and maintenance. All this needs a high government budget on education.

It seems the government finds it very difficult to dramatically increase spending on education with the present situation. Infrastructure building and the improvement of agriculture, both of which require a huge investment, are given the highest priority. The government is trying to attract private participation in the implementation of basic education. First, that is contradictory to compulsory education. And second, how can we expect the private sector to invest in so many schools located all over the country. Perhaps the private sector will establish one or two schools of high quality, but located in big cities. That is not what is needed to achieve our objectives.

But the people in government and legislature who make the decision on government spending should realize that the most important investment for a nation is the investment in human resources improvement. They must therefore show more commitment to develop better education if they are really serious in serving and building the nation.

Perhaps they can improve government financial capabilities by trimming the size of the government bureaucracy. The Indonesian Army has streamlined its organization at least twice in its history. The time was in 1947 to 1948 when we were fighting the Dutch colonial government.

Many Army people were forced to leave at that time and it caused a lot of bitterness and hatred among them. But we had to do that to make the Army a more effective organization to fight the Dutch. And we weathered all the problems and consequences successfully.

Will the present leaders in the Indonesian government be brave enough to act similarly with its bureaucracy so that we can have human resources of a higher quality to safeguard the future of the nation in a world full of competition?