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.