National Education Needs a Unified Command

Jakarta (ANTARA) - Yudi Latif’s article (Kompas, 21 May 2026) on the disarray in education should be read as a serious warning that Indonesia’s educational problems lie not merely in a lack of programmes, but in the weakening integration of direction and governance of national education. When various educational policies operate under sectoral, partial, and fragmented logics, education loses its holistic orientation as a strategic instrument for national development.

This view is crucial because education is fundamentally not just an administrative matter, but a process of shaping the complete Indonesian person, as mandated in the Preamble to the 1945 Constitution. National education is not only about producing a workforce, but about forming citizens who are faithful, have character, are knowledgeable, creative, productive, and capable of sustaining the nation’s civilisation. Therefore, all education policies should move within a single, complete, and integrated architecture.

In this context, the governance of national education requires clear leadership and a single, strong policy command. This does not mean a centralistic approach that stifles regional or institutional creativity, but rather a unified steering system that ensures all components of education are moving towards the same national goals. Early childhood education, primary education, secondary education, vocational education, higher education, teacher education, religious education, and workforce training should not develop in separate policy orbits without clear interconnection.

A tendency has emerged for various ministries and institutions to develop their own educational programmes according to their sectoral interests. As a result, education risks being treated as a collection of institutional projects rather than a single, interconnected national system. This has led to the emergence of special schools managed across different ministries, training programmes that are not integrated with the national education system, and various human resource development policies that sometimes proceed without synchronisation of curricula, competencies, or the national development direction.

In fact, the National Education System Law has already affirmed that national education is a unified system. The word ‘system’ implies interconnection between components, unity of direction, continuity across levels, and clear institutional coordination. If each institution operates with its own logic and design, what emerges is not a strengthening of national education, but policy fragmentation.

Various international studies show that a nation’s progress is often correlated with the quality of its education governance. Countries with strong education systems, such as Finland, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, despite having different social and political characteristics, exhibit relatively similar patterns: a clear direction for education policy, strong institutional coordination, continuity of vision across administrations, and interconnectedness between education, research, and national economic development.