No cause for celebration

No cause for celebration

It is certainly symbolic of the lot that teachers in this
country have to endure that yesterday -- Nov. 25, National
Teachers' Day -- passed practically unnoticed by all but a very
few. This is tragic, given the nation's need for better-trained
and better-educated human resources in an increasingly
competitive global environment.

Among teachers of the old generation, those who received their
training under the Dutch colonial system, the caustic joke still
goes around that their government ministry, the Ministry of
National Education, could be more accurately named the Ministry
of Teachers and Forced Labor -- or, in Dutch, the department of
"Onderwijzers en Heerendiensten", a sarcastic reference to the
department's old name of Onderwijs en Eeredienst (Education and
Religious Worship) in the colonial period.

Of course, as social and political jokes normally go, that
crack at the way teachers are still being treated at present --
after 57 years of independence -- is an exaggeration.
Nevertheless, sad to say, it aptly illustrates the general
unfairness and ill-treatment of teachers in general, especially
those employed in government schools. Not only are salaries in
the teaching profession generally among the lowest in government
service, teacher's paychecks are often cut by unscrupulous
provincial officials for a variety of reasons, real or invented.
Often, they are also late in reaching their addresses, especially
in remote areas of the country.

All this makes one wonder why this should be so. Until
relatively recently, the teaching profession was held in high
esteem by many of the hundreds of ethnic groups that inhabit this
vast archipelago. Even in the early years of Indonesia's
independence -- somewhere in the late 1940s and early 1950s --
teachers were held in high esteem and many young and talented
Indonesians made it their ambition to become teachers after
graduating from college.

How that old prestige lost its luster is not precisely known.
It seems that the subject of the decline of the stature of the
teaching profession lacks sufficient intellectual interest to
warrant a study. Many observers, however, believe that the slide
began somewhere in the late 1950s or early 1960s, to accelerate
in the 1970s under the influence of society's increasingly
materialistic outlook. As teachers' salaries failed to keep pace
with the growing thirst for wealth among Indonesians, fewer and
fewer young Indonesian university or college graduates felt
attracted to the profession. This, in turn, led to a decline in
quality and hence to a further loss of prestige. At this point it
seems that the nation has not succeeded in finding a way to
escape this spiral of decline.

Yet, Indonesia's future standing in the world lies in the
hands of its teachers. Many Indonesians who recall how in the
1950s Malaysia relied on teachers it recruited from Indonesia to
help build its modern education system, now note with concern how
the tables have since been turned. In many fields of expertise,
such as information technology, Malaysia is now far ahead of
Indonesia.

What all this leads up to is that it is high time for
Indonesia to make a real effort to catch up with other countries
in this part of the world in developing a modern base of industry
and technology. For that purpose enough qualified teachers must
be provided to take on the task of training the human resources
that are necessary. That, again, means improving the lot and the
prestige of teachers to attract the best and the brightest of
Indonesia's younger generation to the profession. In short,
Indonesia must make every effort to find its way back to its old
respected place in the world of education by stopping the
downward slide and moving up the spiral once again.