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.