Nothing has been done for education

Fuad Abdul Hamied, Vice Rector for Cooperation Indonesian University of Education (UPI), Bandung, West Java

The Indonesian public education system has long faced several complicated challenges in nurturing reliable human resources expected to be capable of competition in the global arena. Education and the situation of human resources has worsened because of our inability to handle the multidimensional crisis since 1997, plus the social and political chaos taking place in every corner of the country.

The ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) which has come into effect, followed by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in less than a decade, are two momentous events that will require us to drastically improve our human resources to compete in the economic battlefield, in which our Asia-Pacific neighbors are already way ahead of us.

The main issues of education will still be the recurring problems of quality, opportunity and efficiency. Other factors such as curriculum design and educational resources and facilities are also a major problem. All of these problems desperately require a robust and effective national management system regarding educational policies. That, of course requires political will and sincere commitments by our leaders -- both features which are severely in shortage.

One of the most easily identified indicators is the quality and competitiveness of human resources.

The World Competitiveness Yearbook placed Indonesia's competitiveness rank at 39 in the year 1997, but it fell all the way to the bottom in 1999 to rank 46 among 47 countries on the list and to rank the last among 49 countries in 2001. In 2002, the rank slightly rose to 47 among 49 countries.

A report on human resources, industry and science and technology conducted by the Institute for Management Development (IMD, 1999) indicated that Indonesia ranked 44th among 46 nations in the provision of engineers, and ranked last in technology cooperation among businesses and research cooperation between industry and higher education institutions.

Likewise, based on the United Nations human resource development index (UNDP, 1999), Indonesia ranked a shocking 105th among 108 countries. In short, our human resources are still far from an acceptable level if we intend to compete at all with other countries.

One of the more disheartening impacts of the crises on education is the inability of millions of parents to pay for their children's public education -- which can be very expensive for low-income families, given the many fees. In contrast there is a small percentage of wealthy elite parents who pay millions of rupiah a semester for private schools with international standards.

But for the poor, the public school fees have caused a high increase in the dropout rate, thwarting the nine-year compulsory basic education scheme. Many of the dropouts have not reached employment age and thus are forced to work with low skills. There are over 1.5 million workers with only an elementary education, 5.6 million elementary school dropouts, and 8.2 million junior high dropouts currently at work in the country.

Despite educational participation rates at the elementary and junior high levels were quite promising in 1997 (above 90 percent and 50 percent respectively), during the economic crisis the dropout rate from elementary school increased by 2.5 percent (about one million) every year since.

Elementary school-leavers continuing on to junior high fluctuated in the last 10 years, with the lowest point at 64 percent only in 1998. The dropout rates at the junior high school level plummeted to its lowest point at 6.19 percent at junior high schools and a higher rate of 8.5 percent at the madrasah tsanawiyah (Islamic junior high schools).

At the high school level, the dropout rate also worsened by 5.9 percent and an even worse rate of 18.5 percent for madrasah aliyah (Islamic high schools) in 1998. Access to higher education is not promising either with a rough participation rate of less than 12 percent (totaling less than 25 million of the entire population), whereas for comparison, one of our neighboring countries, Thailand, a decade ago, had a tertiary education participation rate of more than 16 percent.

Centralization has been blamed for the inability of each regional government in handling educational problems in their province, as all educational policies were handled at the national level, including the appropriation of the annual budget for education.

A centralized management is believed to be effective only regarding national policies, but such management is insensitive to problems specific to each region. Grave concerns abound regarding the improper understanding of the coverage and procedures of the regional autonomy law -- and who is ultimately responsible for education.

When each region claims to have its own autonomy without considering the significance of sharing, cooperation and interdependence among regions, education will fail to instill nationalistic thinking and standardization; and hence benchmarking at the national level, moreover on the global stage, would become hard to advocate. Sagacious and better orchestrated efforts at the national level are a logical necessity, or our education will continue to deteriorate into an abyss.

In brief, Indonesian education in 2002 is in a dire state, even it were not facing open competition with neighbors -- and worsens when only handled with rhetoric. We are in an emergency situation and nothing concrete is being done, so, we need earnest commitment from people from all walks of life -- as education is too significant to be left to educators alone.