The future of our children

The future of our children

Indonesian students rank among the lowest in basic skills
compared to their peers in other countries, according to a
recently published survey of 15-year-olds. The research, which
covered 43 countries on five continents, was conducted by
UNESCO's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

PISA is a collaborative effort among the participating
countries to measure how well 15-year-olds approaching the end of
compulsory schooling are prepared to meet the challenges of
today's societies. PISA administers tests and background
questionnaires to between 4,500 and 10,000 students in each
participating country to assess three forms of literacy: reading,
mathematical and scientific. The assessments focus on how well
students apply knowledge and skills to tasks that are relevant to
their future life, rather than on the memorization of subject
matter knowledge.

In reading literacy, well over 50 percent of students surveyed
in Indonesia performed at level 1 - the lowest out of five - or
below. Level 1 represents those students who have serious
difficulties in using reading as a tool to advance and extend
their knowledge and skills in other areas. Level 5 indicates
those students who are able to manage information that is
presented in unfamiliar texts, show detailed understanding of
complex texts and infer which information is relevant to the
task, and critically evaluate and build hypotheses with the
capacity to draw on specialized knowledge and concepts that may
be contrary to expectations. The lowest results were scored in
Albania, Indonesia and Peru.

As with reading literacy, Indonesian students similarly
perform at the lowest level in the mathematical as well as the
scientific literacy. They are weak at mathematics in terms of its
relation to its use in people's lives, in using mathematical
knowledge and procedures to solve problems, in formulating and
communicating the outcomes, and in other aspects of mathematics.
The lowest performers are Indonesia, Brazil and Peru.

They are weak at scientific literacy in terms of using
scientific knowledge, recognizing scientific questions, and in
other aspects of scientific literacy, including in communicating
these aspects of science. In these respects too, Indonesian
students fall in the category of the worst performing countries,
above only Albania, Brazil and Peru.

Are Indonesian students really weak in all those basic skills?
It must be wrong to draw that conclusion if we really look into
the factors associated with student's literacy proficiency,
including student engagement in the learning process in Indonesia
as compared to other countries participating in this program.

What Indonesia should do is to assess the strengths and
weaknesses of our education system in the perspective of other
countries' performance. Indonesia should look into how it
formulates its education policy in seeking to bring about
improvements in schooling and better preparation for young people
as they enter an adult life of rapid change and deepening global
interdependence.

To judge by the deliberations in the House of Representatives,
and later the passing of the new law on national education, it is
obvious that preparing young Indonesians for the world of
tomorrow through education has been less of a concern than the
political interests of the Indonesian elite toward next year's
general election.

With its convoluted structure of thinking, the House passed
the national law on education that will give Indonesian schools
and teachers the impossible task of transforming Indonesian
students into perfect human beings. The House is not concerned
with the basic skills needed by the young generation to prepare
themselves for an entirely different adult life that their older
generations faced. The House seems totally disinterested in
whether or not the students will have the capacity to face a
harsh and much more competitive world in the future.

Now, it is left to the schools and teachers themselves, with
the support of the civil society at large, to push for a better
educational system that would equip our students with the basic
skills to meet the challenges of the future world. If need be,
this must be done by working against the mainstream of the
Indonesian political elite.