New curriculum not up to snuff

New curriculum not up to snuff

The article Indonesia to introduce new education curriculum
(The Jakarta Post, Feb. 23, p. 1) suggests that the Ministry of
Education may be a bit out of step with recent political and
legal changes, which began with the 1999 Decentralization Law.

In many decentralized/federal countries, education is the
right and duty of regional or even local governments. The
argument is that local educators know local needs and conditions
best, and this is given a limited recognition by the "local
content studies" proposed by the Ministry of Education here. A
limited experimentation by decentralized educational authorities
benefits the entire country: results from these experiments are
easily evaluated when students take standardized tests or compete
for places at the better universities, institutes, etc., and
educational disasters are quickly detected and affect fewer
students.

The old adage of "Jakarta knows best" is increasingly being
questioned; if regional governments are forced to pay much of the
cost of a curriculum they have little control over, this will be
a source of dissatisfaction in a democracy.

Education in Indonesia is widely held to be overcentralized,
overregulated and overly routinized. The ministry's proposals do
little to deal with this criticism, and I hope the subsequent
debate will clarify what Indonesians want from their educational
system.

PAUL H. BRIETZKE

Jakarta