Streamlined learning load works best

By Hendra Gunawan

BANDUNG (JP): It is often said that you can do anything as long as you have the motivation and the ability to do it. But actually there is another thing you must also have, namely the opportunity. You might have the motivation and the ability to do something, but if you do not have the opportunity, you may never get the chance to accomplish it.

Every child has the motivation and the ability to learn about a lot of things, but many of them do not have the opportunity. Here, opportunity can mean time, place, money, facilities, learning sources, teachers or schools. Thus, for instance, they might have time and a little money, but not the place, facilities or teachers to help them learn.

Schools exist to offer an opportunity for children to learn. But many children cannot afford to go to school. In this case, it is the government's task to make schools affordable to all children. The Constitution states clearly that it is the right of every citizen to have an education. Thus, the government program wajib belajar (obligation to study) should be interpreted as a government obligation to provide free education to children, not an obligation by children to go to school.

Education is like an investment, not only for students themselves and their family, but also for the nation. If the government wants to increase individual participation in the nation's development, the government should invest a substantial amount of money in the education of the young.

Developed countries are very much aware of this. They spend a lot of money on education, although some countries like Australia, for instance, are reducing their budget for higher education.

But let us not compare our country with developed ones. One of our neighbors would suffice for a comparison. In 1997, Malaysia invested US$128 for every child per year for primary education, while we invested only $35, according to an article by Maria Hartiningsih published in Kompas Nov. 7, 1997. With the crisis, how much do we now spend on our children's education?

A low investment in education is already bad news. What makes it worse is how education is run in our country. One of the main problems is the content of the curriculum, what we teach our students. What do our students learn at school? It seems that we want to teach too much to our students, but what happens is our students learn only a little. Furthermore, with the overloaded curriculum that we have now, we do not give our students the opportunity to learn about learning itself.

Another problem is the quality of our teachers. It is common knowledge that teacher salaries are very low -- no one can survive on it. As a consequence, our best students are unlikely to later become teachers. There are, perhaps, some good teachers recruited, but since they have to support their family, it is hard to expect them to perform well at school. The victims are then the students.

These two problems have an adverse effect on the teaching and learning process. To make their job easier, teachers choose to do the learning for their students. To hide their lack of knowledge, teachers conduct classes in such a way that students do not have the opportunity to ask questions, express ideas or play with an idea because they do not want students to find out what they do not know.

In such a situation, students are also discouraged to think differently, explore alternatives or discover things by themselves. In short, students have no autonomy or freedom at school. They are just treated as the objects of teaching, not the subjects of learning. Students are deprived of their opportunities to develop their learning abilities.

This contrasts with the situation in countries where education is taken seriously. In order to make teaching effective, teachers in such countries consciously study how their students learn. They realize that students should be given more responsibility for their own learning. Thus, for instance, they encourage students to think about what they are learning, how they are learning it and whether they understand what they are learning.

So what do we have to do now to improve the quality of our education? No one objects that teachers must be better compensated to insure their performance at school. But since we are in the middle of a crisis, the government is unlikely to raise teacher salaries in the near future.

And we must also be reminded that increasing salaries would not automatically improve the quality of existing teachers. It would only raise the chances that we could recruit better teachers in the future. Still, it does not guarantee that the teaching and learning process would be improved.

What we can do right now is trim the current curriculum. The reason is clear: Even good teachers give up on the current curriculum because it is just too heavy. It does not matter how much you pay teachers because they cannot do much about it. A lean and flexible curriculum is an urgent must. And it does not cost a lot of money.

If the teaching load is not too heavy, teachers might be expected to do better. Of course, it would be much more desirable if they were also paid better. But at the present, they still have to wait for a substantial increase in their salary.

Let us now hope that the new minister of education and culture will do something significant to improve national education, and not just, for example, change the high school acronym SMU to another one.

Education should provide students with the opportunity to learn and develop their learning abilities. This is what should be focussed on at the moment.

The writer is a lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at the Bandung Institute of Technology.

Window: ...students have no autonomy or freedom at school. They are just treated as the objects of teaching, not the subjects of learning. Students are deprived of their opportunities to develop their learning abilities.