Soeharto halts tryout of 5-day school week

JAKARTA (JP): Trial five-day school weeks in some elementary and junior high schools will be abolished by the end of the year as President Soeharto believes they pose overly heavy burden to the students.

The President worries that the shorter week, with their condensed curriculum and longer daily learning hours, will have a negative impact on children's development in the long run.

The experiment, however, will continue at high school and university levels as these students are generally physically and mentally strong enough to endure the more rigorous scheduling.

Soeharto's message was conveyed on Saturday by Minister of Education and Culture Wardiman Djojonegoro, who reported the results to the president. The experimental school week was intended primarily to enable students to spend more of their time socializing.

The tryout, which followed the introduction of a five-day working week for civil servants, met strong opposition from Moslem leaders who feared that it would be unsuitable for Islamic schools.

In many areas, students go to Islamic schools in the afternoons after attending regular classes in public schools in the morning. Moslem leaders in Java warned that the shorter school weeks would threaten the very existence of many Moslem schools.

The five-day school week is being tested at some public and private schools on a strictly voluntary basis.

Wardiman quoted the President as saying that the five-day school week was best tried out for senior high schools because the students were physically and mentally more mature.

Burden

"A condensed curriculum would become a heavy burden for students at the elementary and junior high schools and the learning/teaching process wouldn't be optimum," he quoted the President as saying.

Wardiman said a shorter school week would have been impossible to implement in poor areas where children traditionally have to help their parents earn a living.

In some areas, poor parents may not able to afford lunch for their children at school, he said. This, he added, may spark social jealousy if some of the students come from wealthy families.

"It's also difficult to be practiced in remote areas where students have to walk several kilometers to school," he said. "The economic disparity among the population is a major problem."

President Soeharto, according to Wardiman, stressed that Indonesia should, instead, focus on how to make the nine year compulsory education a success.

The government this year extended the compulsory education program from six to nine years for areas which already have adequate facilities.

"The nine year compulsory education scheme has to be secured in the first place," Soeharto was quoted as saying by Wardiman. (pan)