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.