Off to a good start

Let us be honest about it. Many of the books that officials at the Ministry of National Education picked as required material for Indonesia's elementary and secondary schools in the recent past were widely considered to have benefited the publishers and bureaucrats more than the students who were supposed to use them. And each year they were discarded after the school year was over.

One does not need to be a genius to grasp the enormity of the profits that stood to be reaped by the publishers and printers of those books with the arrival of each new school year, and of the "commissions" that many cynics say our civil servants harvested from such "projects."

Their users -- the tens of millions of school children who will be Indonesia's future leaders -- are unlikely to gain very much in the way of insight, wisdom or knowledge gained, critics say, due to the often deficient manner in which the material was presented. School books are often inconsistent in their content and are often ineffective in building the skills they aim to develop in the children. But the financial burden that they place on parents is considerable, and often means that children of the less privileged are deprived of their constitutional right of receiving a proper education.

Hence the chorus of approval from parents and guardians that has greeted the government's recent announcement that henceforth, once they are prescribed, school books will remain in use for five years instead of one. Printers and publishers, on the other hand, joined in a chorus of disapproval, saying that the new policy would compel them to seek to balance their operational costs from other sources.

School book publishers, of course, have an important function to fulfill in society and deserve to be supported with appropriate government policies, such as easier taxation policies and better protection against piracy. In the face of the dilemma over school books, however, our stand must be clear: Any obstacles that stand in the way of our children getting a proper education must be removed. Good books must be made available, and at affordable prices, to every Indonesian child so that they will be able to go forward in life properly equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge. School fees must be set as low as possible so as to enable all parents to send their children to school, without placing too much of a burden on the finances of the schools in question.

In the meantime, the public, and parents in particular, must realize that making books affordable is not the only problem our school system must solve. Teachers' salaries are still ridiculously low and are totally inconsistent with the importance of the services they render society. So improving the teachers' lot must be placed high on the government's priority list. Care must be taken that cuts in teachers' salaries will no longer occur and their pay will be delivered to them on time.

The quality of the training and education of teachers in this country, especially at the basic education levels, is in dire need of improvement, as are their living standards. In this age of high-technology and information, even rich nations can no longer rely on the wealth of their country's natural resources but must, either by necessity or by choice, depend on the quality of their human resources. Hence, no other option is left for Indonesia but to raise the quality of education, lest it will remain forever dependent on the whims of the policies of other, more advanced, nations.

All in all, the tasks, which the officials at the Ministry of National Education have in front of them, are daunting indeed. However, all things considered, its recent step to extend the useful life of school books from one to five years is a sound policy decision that will no doubt help many of the less privileged parents send their children to school. Hopefully, it marks the beginning of an era of significant improvements in our education system -- improvements that are long overdue.