Nothing has been done for education

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.