Teachers lose deserved places

By Wimar Witoelar

JAKARTA (JP): Just the other day, I visited my high school mathematics teacher of 30 years ago. Although he is retired with a pension of Rp 250,000 a month, he is still teaching on a stipend basis because schools continue to seek his services.

He has a very kind wife and good children and grandchildren. He lives in a rented house and has never made much money, certainly not as much as the "voluntary entrance fees" being charged of students registering at schools in the capital.

He is one of the best teachers of calculus in the country. And most people like him are no longer available for teaching, since companies will now pay five times a teacher's salary for a seminar moderator or talk show host.

That very same evening, my good friend and prominent lawyer Nono Anwar Makarim expounded on a very fundamental crisis facing our society. Since I did not take any notes, any errors in interpretation will be mine, but I have to attribute the lucidity of these observations to Nono.

Take a look at our airport in Cengkareng on any given evening in July. You will find crowds of parents meeting their children as they arrive home for summer vacation from their overseas schools. You will see the same crowds in August when the kids leave the country to further their education. This, says Nono, is a vote of "no confidence" in the Indonesian educational system. You cannot really blame these parents.

Commitment to education is declining to almost zero. The educational system puts more importance on hierarchy and stability than on creativity. Better to follow guidelines and memorize history by rote, rather than instill democratic values into an impatient generation. As the state system in education declines, private institutions step up the competition.

Here I leave Nono and add my own views. Because the system does not prize academic quality, the competition shifts to physical facilities. This leaves quality teaching and quality teachers out.

Nono actually sees this crisis as one indication of the decline in state sovereignty. Another sign of this decline is personal security. Every upper-class neighborhood in Jakarta features homes with security guards. Private security for homes and offices is a booming industry.

Crime is becoming daily newspaper fare, yet police handling of criminal cases leaves many questions on the public's mind. In this situation of uncertainty, the only assurance of security is the Armed Forces. In a crunch, there is no greater comfort for the population than the protection of ABRI. That is why there is so much concern for the maintenance of ABRI's neutrality, which is a prerequisite in preserving its traditional role as the protector of the people.

Yet another case of the erosion of sovereignty is infrastructure. In the basic design of the national economy as indicated in the 1945 Constitution, there is much flexibility concerning the way the nation's resources are to be developed for the public welfare. But the one sector Indonesians have always jealously guarded is infrastructure.

Telecommunications, electrical power and sleek, modern highways are perceived as fundamental to the comfort of all. Hence, they will always remain in the public portfolio. Who would dream that large chunks of these vital sectors would be privatized?

Note that most people are happy at the prospect of better service, quicker installation and modern technology (even at higher rates) coming from the private-sector operators.

But one cannot help but be a little uneasy at the way this public trust is transferred to private business groups, whose commitment to the public good is at best untested. When the transfer is less than transparent, public sentiment adds to the increasing tension in society.

So what happens as a result of this crisis in sovereignty? People become restless, power relies more on its application than on mutual trust. Like a parent with problems at the office who slaps rather than listens to his restless child, power gets impatient at critics and recalcitrants, no matter how sincere and well-intentioned these good citizens are.

If you think these kinds of crises are unique to our time and place, let me mention the name of another good friend, Parakitri Tahi Simbolon. Again, let all responsibility for misinterpretation be mine, and leave Parakitri with the role of the beacon of our thoughts.

From what I understand of his excellent book Menjadi Indonesia (Becoming Indonesia), which is a review of the roots of Indonesian nationalism, many powerful nations -- big and small -- have come and gone throughout the last few hundred years in this archipelago.

In many cases, the kingdoms or sultanates flourished before they declined. In fact, the first symptom of the death cycle is an overly high degree of concentration of power. The center becomes unnaturally strong as initiative and autonomy are taken away from the nation's subsystems. This brings about the decline of institutions, which no longer have the authority and competence to deal with the public interest.

As the concentration of power cannot substitute for participative management through public institutions, unrest among the people causes panic among the power elite, largely owing to their own insecurity.

The final crunch comes with the breakdown of communication. In a sense, it is a case of the state's power eating at itself, inside the very core of the nation's soul.

If this seems gloomy, at least we know it is all history. But the bad news is that history tends to repeat itself, unless we learn from its lessons.

To jump to the end of this lesson, the only answer is democracy. To cope with the complexities of a modern nation, we need all the strength and resources of all the people. This means orchestrating the combined wisdom, perspectives and skills of the population at large.

It was Kenichi Ohmae, another smart friend and noted Japanese international thinker, who observed that you can bring a poor country to a reasonable level of prosperity, say to a GDP of US$1,000 per capita, using regimentation and centralized economic power. But to take it the next phase -- into the ranks of a middle class country -- you have to unleash the nation's creativity and energy by opening up the nation's political doors to democracy.

We are not necessarily interested in who is in power, or how to redistribute important political positions. That is secondary. Power breeds itself in any nation. The primary task is to have ordinary people rise to the challenge of being citizens in a democratic system. This calls for the empowerment of people and groups with visions of a just society, instilling confidence in professionals who know the value of hard work and need to be encouraged by a level playing field.

Fairness is a simple word, but that is the ingredient most absent in this period of growth, economic opportunity and rewards. People like my high school math teacher deserve a bigger slice of the "rewards of development" pie. At present, the elite positions in development are not given to teachers or producers of exceptional value, but rather to a few lucky people who happen to be in privileged places.

Give the teachers their deserved places in the distribution of the nation's wealth. Give them their due comforts and rewards so they can continue to be human resource developers of this great nation. If money is difficult to distribute, we can start with distributing our voices, invoking democratic processes to benefit from the perspectives of ordinary people.

The writer is an expert in communication.

Window: To cope with the complexities of a modern nation, we need all the strength and resources of all the people.