Textbook thinking
Although the idea to allow elementary and secondary schools throughout Indonesia to select textbooks for use in their schools on their own is at this stage no more than just that -- an idea -- the enthusiasm with which it has been greeted by educators and parents alike, can justly be taken as an expression of the pent- up discontent that has for decades been brewing among the public.
It has been a open secret for a long time that publishers of textbooks for schools at the "basic education" level -- that is, schools from the elementary level up to junior and senior high schools -- are selected not so much on the merit of their quality as on how close those publishers' personal relations are with the officials in charge at the Ministry of National Education, or its former title, the ministry of education and culture.
As a consequence, pupils and students at those levels of education were for decades literally fed "knowledge", which was mostly not only trash but erroneous or misleading. At the same time, privileged book publishers were getting rich at the cost of our younger generation and of the Indonesian public at large, which according to some accounts, had to spend some Rp 1.4 trillion for printing, publishing and distribution projects handed out by corrupt officials to unscrupulous publishers. Little wonder Indonesia has for many years been ranked poorly in the field of education on the international stage.
While the idea of granting schools at all levels the right of autonomy to select at least some of their teaching subjects and textbooks at their own discretion has been around for a long time in the minds of teachers and educators, it is only now that the thought has been talked about out loud.
Then a few days ago, Minister of National Education Abdul Malik Fajar told reporters he had no objection to teachers selecting textbooks for use in their schools at their own initiative, as long as the government and the Indonesian Publishers Association (Ikapi) retained the responsibility of overseeing the quality standard of the books selected.
This is progress. It does not of course necessarily eliminate the possibility of corruption and collusion, but by bringing the sources of education materials closer to individual schools, at least it gives parents and the public, as well as the students themselves, better control over the process of providing books for the education of their children. Thus parents can hope that their children's brains will no longer be crammed with incorrect or misleading nonsense.
Naturally, standards have to be kept up and it is fair for the Ministry of National Education to require that textbooks autonomously selected and used in schools meet certain minimum standards. In this context, the idea that is being offered by Arief Rachman, a highly reputed educator from the Jakarta State University, deserves considering.
What he proposes is the establishment at every school of a committee of evaluators consisting of teachers, parents and representatives of the public to monitor the process. Guarantees must be sought that everything proceeds openly and transparently to avoid the return of corrupt practices at these lower levels.
If everything goes to plan, the government will in the near future no longer be responsible for procuring, prescribing or conducting tenders for the publication of textbooks for state schools. All publishers will be given an equal opportunity to produce and sell school-prescribed textbooks -- a market which Ikapi says is currently dominated by a few select publishers who obtained the right through unfair bidding processes.
On paper all this seems to point in the right direction -- that is, in the direction of the long-sought principle of autonomy in education and the elimination of corrupt practices in the book publishing business. For the rest, let's just see how things work out in practice -- if indeed it ever gets that far.