Technology education key to future

Technology education key to future

By Nirwan Idrus

JAKARTA (JP): The knowledge society is growing fast, and for a
long time, particularly in Asia, everyone has been aware that a
passport to a better future is indeed knowledge and hence
education.

But many of this century's discoveries -- ranging from
antibiotics and the pill, to photocopying, planes and
microprocessors -- that have brought prosperity to the majority
of people in the world, have occurred in the West.

It is true that necessity is the mother of invention. It is
also true as Edison said that "genius is 1 percent inspiration,
99 percent perspiration".

And it is also true that both of those utterances are as
applicable to people in Asia as they are to those in the West.
The leading position that Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and
Malaysia enjoy in the world in terms of their products and
services is a testimony to that fact. The common denominator in
these countries, it seems, is the preprioritization of pervasive
technical competence in their populations.

Leadership, support and encouragement toward such
preprioritization is naturally mandatory. And those leaders must
walk their talk. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia was
the first known ruling prime minister of any country in the world
who took a two-month "sabbatical" to learn first hand about new
technology. He visited technology incubation and research
centers. He talked with the movers and shakers of new technology,
such as Bill Gates. And then put money into his vision with the
Multimedia Super Corridor and Cyberjaya.

A few decades earlier, the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of
Singapore instituted what could have been an undemocratic
decision when Singaporean students at the end of their Year 9
were streamed according to their exam marks. Students were
streamlined into either an academic, a technology or a trade
education from which they were not allowed to deviate. The
Singapore government knew what sort of human resources they
should have in order to respond to the competitive world out
there. As Lee had stated many times, Singapore does not have any
other resources other than its people. It is perhaps not an
accident of nature that some 75 percent of his cabinet ministers
at that time were technically qualified -- either engineers or
scientists. As they said, the rest is history. In 1996, quite a
number of years ahead of their own schedule, Singapore was
recognized as a developed country.

A recent submission by the Institution of Professional
Engineers New Zealand (IPENZ) to the New Zealand government's
"Bright Future" program lamented the lack of engineers and other
technical people to ensure survival in the upcoming era of
globalization. The paper called "Prosperity or Poverty" concluded
that the past is not going to be any guide to the future of New
Zealand, that the base upon which wealth creation must be built
will be "knowledge intensive" and hence that education is
critical. Interestingly, it also concluded that "the rest of the
world is not waiting for New Zealand", indicating that the
proverbial development train waits for no one. If you want to
develop, then you must make sure that you are on board. Another
important factor is the lengthy time span of the submission's
focus, namely 100 years. [http://ftp.ipenz.org.nz/documents/
Papers/].

If our already more advanced neighbors continue to upgrade
their technical knowledge, should we not do even more than them
in order to keep up? Indonesia needs more technical and
technically qualified people, but enrollments at universities and
polytechnics over the last few decades in the technology areas
have been a meager 30 percent or less. Attempts at reversing this
trend have met with all sorts of problems and no change in the
figure has been observable. Indonesian higher education
institutions have produced many economists and lawyers, but look
at the country's economy and application of its laws. It is time
to get young Indonesians to take up studies and fields of
competency in things that matter -- for their own sake, for the
country's sake and for the sake of everyone's future.

But the question that must be asked is: "What type(s) of
technology education do we provide for these young Indonesians
who will have to battle in the inevitable globalized world of the
near future?"

Indeed, this is an extremely important question to answer. The
traditional engineering courses have not helped produce the sorts
of engineers and technicians the country requires. The
traditional delivery of engineering courses at Indonesian
universities and polytechnics has also not helped produce the
types of engineers and technicians the country requires. These
courses' contents and their delivery quite naturally beg a lot of
other questions, ranging from physical and human resources to
curricula content. The underlying question is, why are Indonesian
engineers and technicians not as good as those from overseas
countries which include the Philippines, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

It is also extremely humbling to find out that until the
recent monetary crisis, Indonesia was paying US$200 million a
month to expatriates working in the country. It is infuriating to
find out that 40 percent of these expatriates were not even
experts, only operators.

The combination of all these factors is the backdrop to
current efforts to come up with an appropriate
technical/engineering education as Indonesia inches into the new
century.

It would seem logical for Indonesia to set up a task force to
look into this very question of appropriate technology education.
The Michigan Japan Technology Management Program (MJTMP) at the
University of Michigan, the United States, can, if necessary, be
used as a model. In brief, MJTMP brought in experts in relevant
areas, including the field of Japanese culture and language, to
work on specific research topics. The outcome of the efforts
became significant input for the development of new curricula in
undergraduate engineering and other courses, as well as topics
for short courses for business and manufacturing executives.
Through these and other means, new findings that would be helpful
to American businesses in facing Japanese competition were widely
disseminated.

Although perhaps a little late, the Indonesia Globalization
Program (IGP) -- a name that could be used for the proposed task
force -- should be able to plan and execute the plan
effortlessly. It is not a secret that implementation of plans has
been one of the weaker links in getting things done in Indonesia.

Therefore, it is imperative that the planning and execution of
actions recommended by this IGP are focussed on by everyone in
the program. In order to ensure success, it is also important
that we do not chew more than we can eat. Given that engineering
education is the backbone of globalization -- and which has been
proven to be the case in other countries -- it is therefore
suggested that IGP should make engineering education in Indonesia
its first and major field of investigation.

Reports are available on the subject of engineering education
in Indonesia and deliberations on them could become very
technical. However, what appears to be the main areas of
importance can be summarized as curriculum ideology, curriculum
contents and curriculum delivery.

It is high time that current perceptions about the curriculum
in Indonesia be reformed. The national curriculum is
anachronistic. A centralized curriculum is appropriate for basic
education, but constrictive for higher education. It has created
a "caste" system of engineers. Those from other islands have to
find work in Java, Batam or one of the more advanced areas of the
country, because their qualifications are less or not applicable
at the place of graduation. However, because of the national
curriculum requirements, these graduates could not be trained and
educated about the requirements of their respective geographical
areas. In trying to find work in Java and Batam, for example,
they have to compete with those engineers who graduated from more
prestigious universities or institutes of technology in Java,
who, as one would expect, have greater recognition than those
from outside Java. This situation has to be addressed if equity
in the development of the whole country is desired.

In theory, the curriculum contents, when compared to
engineering courses elsewhere in the world, appear to be
reasonably weighted between basic science, engineering science,
engineering practice and non-engineering. But on closer
inspection, particularly on the amount of contact hours, it can
be shown that on average Indonesian engineering students have
almost twice the contact hours of Australian and New Zealand
engineering students. The time for reflection, personal study,
further reading and general broadening of their vision simply
does not exist for Indonesian engineering students. Such factors
are extremely important for students' creativity, innovation and
self-confidence in formulating and solving technical problems.

Without going into the details of the weighting mentioned
above, it is revealing to find that about one half semester of an
eight-semester engineering course, is filled with subjects
unrelated to engineering, such as religion, state ideology,
military and strategic studies. How can Indonesian engineers
compete against those who on these two counts are more advanced
because of the time they must spend on engineering.

Finally, there is the factor of curriculum delivery. It is
difficult for any university student to become a competitive
graduate when his/her lecturers only turn up for less than half
of the scheduled teaching time, when new educational technology
is not allowed to be used by government decree or regulations and
when facilities and resources are not available or so poorly
maintained that when required are not operable. These limitations
are in addition to frequent reports of poor faculty, departmental
and laboratory management.

While the situation may seem somewhat discouraging, it does
provide a measure of the current problems facing Indonesia in
respect to its endeavor to be competitive in the decades ahead.
Somebody also once said, if you cannot measure it, then you
cannot improve it. Like the IPENZ submission to the New Zealand
government, we must likewise cut ourselves off from the unhelpful
past.

To start anew is to embrace new thinking, which should allow
us to accept the need for new curriculum management ideology,
curriculum contents and curriculum delivery, especially in our
engineering and technical education. The suggested Indonesia
Globalization Program (IGP) is a potential vehicle to deliver the
new paradigm of appropriate and effective technical education for
Indonesia.

The writer is an international higher education consultant
living in Jakarta. This article reflects a personal opinion only.