Quality schools vital for nation's survival

Quality schools vital for nation's survival

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): The Jakarta Post has carried five advertisements
and one report on quality education from April 4 to 15. The
advertisements were placed by the Jaya Global School in Jakarta,
the Millfield Co-educational Boarding School in England, the
Singapore-style International School (to be opened in Jakarta),
the British International School in Jakarta, and the Canadian
International School in Singapore. The one report highlighted the
educational model that is currently being carried out at the
elite Al-Azhar boarding school in Lippo City, Jakarta.

As I understand it, these advertised schools offer education
that will assist pupils to accomplish four fundamental
objectives: academic competence, moral integrity, social
maturity, and cultural modernity. It is my impression that these
four objectives are also parts of the pedagogical design at Al-
Azhar boarding school in Lippo City, Jakarta.

This particular campaign suggests to me that there is a real
market for quality education in Indonesia. There would be no
advertisements of this kind in the first place if there were no
potential "buyers", such as parents who, for their children, are
looking for "alternative education" different from and more
relevant than the one that has been offered thus far by our
ordinary schools.

It seems that more and more people have become aware that life
in the years beyond 2000 will be entirely different from life as
it is now. More and more parents seem to realize that, to prepare
their children in a serious way for a competitive future, they
must give them education that can effectively help them acquire
solid competence in languages -- Indonesian, English, and a third
language which can be Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or another
modern European language -- mathematics and natural sciences,
social and human sciences, and a certain degree of literacy in
computer technology.

In short, these parents do not wish their children to receive
an education that will make them stuck in outlooks and lifestyles
which do not correspond to the demands of modern life. They do
not want, among other things, education that will cause their
children to be linguistically uncultivated, scientifically and
technologically illiterate, and unable to find their way in the
maze of modern cyberspace.

All the elite schools now operating in Jakarta promise just
what these parents demand. And as I see it, the efforts that will
be made to fulfill this promise will, as a consequence, generate
a type of school that will be significantly different from the
standard school we now have. In the end, the Indonesian school
will be transformed by efforts to deliver this "quality
education."

One very fundamental question which arises in this regard is
whether quality education will remain restricted to schools
patronized by the rich. This is a question we cannot afford to
take lightly.

If this nation is to survive the economic, political, and
cultural "onslaught" of modern life in the future, providing
quality education to a significantly large segment of the young
generation is imperative. Leaving the majority of the young
generation incompetent in languages, uninformed about new
advances in science and technology, and illiterate in the use of
modern communication technology will make our nation unable to
compete effectively with other nations.

Must quality education be expensive? In a way, yes. It has
been shown throughout the history of education that quality
education never comes cheap. Quality education can only be
delivered by quality teachers -- they have to be paid well -- who
have at their disposal quality teaching materials and quality
teaching aids, both of which are relatively costly.

Out of the three, teachers are the most critical factor in
improving the quality of schools. It is still possible to provide
good education in the absence of modern teaching materials and
modern teaching aids as long as there are quality teachers. But
it is impossible to have good education if there are only
mediocre teachers, no matter how modern the teaching materials
and teaching aids are.

The continuous upgrading of teachers is thus the key strategy
towards increasing the ability of our schools to provide quality
education. This can be done by providing the opportunity to our
school teachers to be informed about new developments in
education, and by continuously encouraging them to improve their
teaching competence.

Service for the upgrading of this type of teacher will, I
think, become a real demand in the near future. Schools which are
not capable of motivating and facilitating their teachers towards
continuous self-improvement will be doomed to become an obsolete
and irrelevant institution.

The writer is rector of the IKIP-Muhammadiyah Teachers
Training College, Jakarta.