Textbook thinking
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.