Sixty years after independence, Indonesia is still struggling to

Sixty years after independence, Indonesia is still struggling to
provide primary and secondary educations for its school-age
children, lagging far behind other neighboring countries such as
Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

According to Ministry of Education figures from 2004, the
number of elementary school dropouts reached 650,000, and more
than 500,000 others did not continue on to secondary education.
At the intermediate level, the number of junior and senior high
school dropouts reached 150,000.

In the same year, Indonesia's came 111th in the human
development index (HDI), just a step above Vietnam, but far below
the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. The number of illiterate
reached 15.5 million, while almost 70 percent of the 90 million
workforce were elementary school graduates and dropouts.

The poor condition of primary and intermediate education in
Indonesian has contributed to the poor quality and low
productivity of the country's workers in general. This is
indicated by the large numbers of uneducated and unskilled
workers going overseas and the poor competitiveness of Indonesian
university graduates on the domestic and global labor markets.

What is wrong with our education program? Why can't the people
obtain good educations and why do so many children have to
dropout of school? What should we do to ensure that all school-
age children enjoy good primary and intermediate education?
The answers to all these questions bear a close correlation with
the limited financial capabilities of most parents in paying for
good educations for their children, financial constraints faced
by the cash-strapped government and the absence of a credible
long-term education development program.

All parents are aware of the importance of education and they
do want their children to have a good future, but financial
problems deny them access to good education as shown by the
dropout rate.

A recent survey on underprivileged families conducted by the
International Labor Organization (ILO) revealed that one in seven
school-age children in North Sumatra, West Sumatra, Jakarta and
West Java did not attend school because of financial constraints.
An elementary school student has to pay more than Rp 374,000
(US$38) annually in fees, while a junior high school student will
need at least three times that amount. Most families in the lower
income brackets are not able to simultaneously send two or three
children to elementary or junior high school.

The country's lingering economic difficulties, exacerbated by
two fuel price hikes this year, have significantly increased the
number of those categorized as poor to more than 38 million at
present from 25 million in 1997. With gross monthly incomes of
between Rp 1 million and Rp 2 million, the majority of people
working in the agricultural and industrial sectors already have
difficulties in satisfying their daily needs, making it more
difficult for them to finance their children's education. The
problem has been worsened by the numerous levies imposed on
children by bureaucrats and schools. In fact, as things stand at
the moment, only children from the middle classes can afford a
reasonable education.

In both rural and urban areas, most students from lower-income
-bracket families have to help their parents earn money, thus
leading to many of them not having enough time to devote to their
books.

Critics say that the root of the problem is the lack of
political commitment on the part of the government in investing
in the education sector despite an amendment to the Constitution
that stipulates that the government is obliged to allocate 20 percent of the
state budget on the education sector, and the issuance of Law No.
20/2003 on education, which provides that the government must pay
for the compulsory nine-year education program so as to make it
accessible to all.

The 2006 education budget stands at Rp 34 trillion, a 12
percent increase compared to 2005, but nevertheless only
represents 1.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). By
comparison, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore allocate between
five percent and eight percent of their GDPs on the education
sector.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's recent apology to the
public for the government's inability to comply with the
constitutional imperative is in reality of little help.

Like in developed countries, education and health in Indonesia
should be free as it forms part of the services the government
must provide to the public based on the taxes the people have
paid to the state.

The government's measures to liberalize the education sector
and decentralize its powers will only move the problem to the
regions. Besides the limited financial resources of the local
governments, they also appear to have little interest in boosting
the sector.

A draft law that aims to push schools to make more money will
only worsen the situation as learning institutions will be
managed more like corporations and thus pay less attention to
educational goals.

A plausible solution is to manifest a political commitment to
complying with the Constitution's target of allocating 20 percent
of the state budget to the education sector. If the government
complied with this imperative, the 2006 education budget would
have been at least Rp 115 trillion, a sufficient sum to provide
free basic education for all, develop infrastructure and improve
the working conditions of teaching and administrative staff.

Regarding the poor skills of teachers, a recent survey
conducted by the Education Ministry revealed that almost 50
percent of the total 2.6 million teachers nationwide do not
possess the required teaching skills and failed the tests prior
to the implementation of the 2004 competence-based education
curriculum.

According to the survey, most respondents said they opted for
a career in teaching as a last choice as they had failed to get
admitted to other, more preferred courses at university. Many
teachers are unable to improve their skills as they also have to
seek side jobs to compensate for their low incomes.
To cope with this problem, teaching must be made an attractive
profession to enable the government and schools to recruit
professional teachers.
The bill on teachers and lecturers that was recently endorsed by
the House of Representatives will likely give rise to a serious
problem as it only covers staff teaching in state schools and
universities. Many private schools and universities cannot
produce quality graduates because they cannot pay their teaching
staff adequately.

Regular changes to government education policy and curricula
(a new minister often changes the policy of his predecessor),
have also contributed to the state of our education as shown by
the poor results achieved by students in the 2005 national exams.

Over the last two decades, the education curriculum has
changed twice. After the 1994 curriculum that placed emphasis on
student comprehension, a new competence-based curriculum emerged
in 2004, encouraging students to be more active intellectually.
But the fundamental problem of the low quality of school leavers
has remained, while more and more parents can no longer afford a
good education for their children due to financial constraints.

In order to overcome the fundamental problems afflicting our
education system, the government has to show its political
commitment to allocating 20 percent of the annual state budget to
education, and should view this as a long-term investment the
results of which will only be harvested in the next 20 or 30
years, when, hopefully, the nation will have a skilled and
versatile workforce and the sort of technocrats needed to enable
it to catch up with neighboring countries.