Can a dotcom driver turn
schools around?
In October Indonesian President Joko Widodo
startled teachers, parents and political seers by making Nadiem
Makarim, 35, Minister for Education and Culture.
The Harvard-educated entrepreneur
is not a politician. He has no public
sector experience. The last two ministers
were also outsiders – but senior academics. Makarim’s skills are in applying
information technology to everyday matters.
He upended the taxi industry with his on-line transport system Go-Jek, now
reportedly worth about US $10 billion.
Widodo hopes his captain’s pick will drive
the nation’s bogged school system back on Highway 2Morrow. But steering the lumbering
education road train around the bollards of rigid thinkers won’t be like zipping past potholes on
a motorbike.
Dr Totok Suprayitno (right) gets a tad defensive when talking to a
foreign journalist.
No problems handling local media, but the head of research
and development at the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) has a fair idea
of the issues that puzzle outsiders.
There’s one particularly awkward question:
Why is the state of Indonesian schooling so bad when the Constitution
mandates 20 per cent of
spending must go
on education?
Suprayitno tried but got choked by jargon.
The World Bank explains the conundrum better than most:
‘By 2018, spending on education was greater than any other sector,
approximately meeting the 20 percent target of total government expenditure.
However, since the national budget is 15 percent of GDP, this education
expenditure is only three per cent of GDP, one of the lowest in the region.’
“The figure is now 3.3 per cent,”
said Suprayitno.
“Yes, it’s below Malaysia
with almost six per cent, but all countries face challenges and these are
always changing.
One size does not fit
all.
Even in your country (Australia)
you have problems.”
This is where the stats get squishy.
Federations like Australia,
the United States and Malaysia
fund education nationally and through the States, so comparisons can be flawed.
“Education control used to be based in Jakarta
but is now being decentralized,” Suprayitno said.
Then he added:
“But too much decentralization isn’t good.
We have to concentrate on the quality of
learning outcomes.”
The last sentence means ‘check results’.
It’s
the sort of verbiage
beloved by educationalists world wide.
Their highly competitive profession chews up
experts and theories, and then vomits messes of acronyms and geekspeak for others
to mop up - and recycle.
A corny and mildly sexist joke in the business says it’s unwise to chase a
bus, a pretty woman or an education policy, as another will pass by shortly.
At the heart of the squabbling is understanding how humans learn – a topic
still furiously debated. How are we able to look at sets of markings and turn
these into speech where ideas can be expressed?
Cognitive science is the discipline
and one of the most prominent experts is Virginia University psychologist
Daniel Willingham, a critic of the
traditional ‘learning styles’ theories once popular in Indonesia.
These hold that individuals absorb knowledge
differently so need specialized teaching.
Willingham has focused on study habits which he claims have been shown to
work through scientific research.
Topping the policy pop charts for the last few years have been responses to
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Program for
International Student Assessment (PISA).
Every three years it tests 15-year-olds across the world in reading, maths
and science. The results are supposed to show how well adolescents will handle
problems when they grow up and want to enter the workforce.
The thinking behind PISA
is this mantra: ‘Modern economies reward individuals not for what they know,
but for what they can do with what they know’.
In 2018 more than half a million teens from 80 countries took PISA tests; the results have
still to be released. In the 2015 study Indonesia ranked 62 out 72
participating nations.
Although there
were marginal improvements from the 2012 results, the overall outcomes were
dismal.
One glimmer of hope:
Indonesian girls
are doing better than boys across all subjects and particularly reading.
Not many want to take up the hard disciplines
like science but those who do are usually female.
The World Bank has analyzed these and other figures to conclude that 55
percent of Indonesians who complete school are ‘functionally illiterate’
compared with 14 percent in Vietnam
and 20 per cent in other OECD countries.
Demographic
trends suggest that by 2030 the population will be around 296 million
(currently estimated at 271 million) and heavily skewed to youth; the country
has a median age of 28 compared to the US
and Australia's
38.
This means the Republic will soon have a vast and overflowing labor lake. Whether
these potential employees will be able to navigate their way into work – and jobs
that are satisfying and well paid – will depend on the education they’re getting
now.
In the recent past the need was for
brawn.
Now it’s brains.
Almost all Indonesian children finish elementary school.
Then the dropouts start, with just above half
completing secondary school according to the World Bank.
Indonesia is the 16th largest economy in
the world. Optimists are predicting it
will be in the top ten by 2030, a forecast which depends on investments and workforce qualities. As economists
say, a
strong economy begins
with a strong, well-educated workforce.
In this gloom Indrah Pratiwi (right) is a beacon.
The daughter of farmers in a remote West Java
village, she was the first in her family to get a tertiary education.
After graduating in international relations
from the nation’s top public campus
Universitas
Indonesia she got work with the MEC gathering data.
The 29-year old
could be a poster
child for Indonesia’s
post millennials: “I’m educated and independent.
I have a good job which is well paid.
I can set an example of what a woman from an
isolated area can achieve if she stays at school.”
But her research led to some embarrassing discoveries.
At a Jakarta
workshop for teachers from distant districts she projected charts illustrating
her findings.
Every one showed Jakarta, Yogyakarta (Central Java) and Riau (Central Sumatra) tops on school retention, reading and most
other subjects.
The images also had West Kalimantan and
Papua squatting at the bottom. Troubled by these stats she’s bypassed education
authorities by using social media to show what’s possible.
This is not Pratiwi’s job;
it’s her passion.
“I write stories about children being successful through education,” she said.
“Boys in particular can’t see the value and want to get working with the men in
jobs like fishing.
“I put my stories on Facebook and send them back to children in my
village.
They keep asking for more.”
Then comes the crunch:
When asked if
she’d want any children she might have in the future to be teachers Pratiwi’s
response was decisive: “No.
The salaries
are so poor.”
She said that during the presidency of Soekarno (1949 – 1967) teaching had status
and was a well rewarded profession; however it had since been diluted by
training colleges lowering entry standards to boost enrolments.
She alleged this had attracted mediocre
students wanting a secure job with a pension rather than drawing idealists motivated
to help lift the next generation.
In October almost 90 teachers gathered in Jakarta for the half-day workshop run through
an Australian aid program called Inovasi.
This claims to use ‘a distinctive locally focused approach to develop
pilot activities’.
Through autopsies of
these programs it hopes to discover what does and doesn’t work.
Its projects are in East Java, Kalimantan
and the eastern islands of the archipelago.
The program will die mid 2020 unless renewed.
Further funding should depend on results but Australia has been felling aid to Indonesia.
In 2015 it cut funding by 40 per cent from AUD 542 million to AUD 323
million.
Next year the axe will chop
deeper to AUD 298 million.
When the budget was first slashed the Australian Foreign Minister was Julie
Bishop.
Now out of Parliament she works
for one of the biggest foreign aid contractors Palladium.
This manages the Inovasi program so there are
hopes her influence may keep the show on the road.
Erix Hutasoit (left) the provincial communications officer for an Inovasi project
in Kalimantan, stressed the need to see every
district separately, and not just because of ethnic, cultural and language
differences.
“In the past it was them and us,” said Hutasoit.
“The teacher was the ultimate authority.
He or she sat on a platform at the front of
rows of desks and told the students what to write and read.”
Modern classroom practice has teachers interacting with students,
encouraging them to express themselves and question; this behavior bumps into
some cultural traditions which expect little people to accept whatever a big
person says is factual.
“We’re not hostile to Western ways of thinking and doing, or ideas from
abroad,” Hutasoit said. “But the structure and economy of every village in Kalimantan depends on the environment.
Some schools are really small.
It’s not like Java where the policies are
made.”
Kalimantan takes up almost three quarters of the island of Borneo.
The rest is owned by Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) and Brunei. The
province is four times larger than Java though with only 12 per cent of the
population.
President Widodo has
authorized the building of a new capital in Kalimantan to ease pressures on
overcrowded Jakarta.
Ratih Niati (left) is a Dyak, the original inhabitants of Kalimantan.
She teaches because “I want to be useful to
my people.”
She’s clearly a star,
covering her class walls with pictures and being energetically engaged with students
by reading stories.
Children’s books in the West are no longer an afterthought to adult fiction
and now have the status of literature with high-level incomes for ace authors
and illustrators.
British writer Joanne (J K) Rowling, creator of the
Harry Potter series pitched to teens is reported to be the world’s
first billionaire author.
Her books have
been translated into Indonesian though her fantasy world of wizards in Hogwarts School sits more comfortably in British society
than Indonesian culture.
Hutasoit said commercial publishers were now becoming more adventurous and
realizing that pictures helped children read and release their imaginations.
However there were no examples provided at
the workshop.
Indonesian school books tend to be wordy and uninviting; only those approved
by checkers in Jakarta
get used after being scrutinized for subversive views and ensuring the right
moral messages are enforced.
This is a hangover from the authoritarian Soeharto era of last century when
heavy rules were imposed on publishers to purge manuscripts of opinions hostile
to authority.
Bookshops were more like
pharmacies, with volumes kept inside locked cabinets like addictive drugs. This
led to a vast reduction in reading which modern educators are trying to
address.
A
World's Most Literate Nation
study last year by Central Connecticut State University ranks Indonesia bottom
but one of 61 countries in terms of reading interest.
The lowest is Botswana,
the highest Finland.
The
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
had earlier reported that just one in every thousand Indonesians read books regularly.
Qoriatul Azizah is in the 0.1 per cent.
Although from another Inovasi project she wasn’t at the Jakarta workshop.
Had she attended and brought along her
teaching gear the East Java chalkie would have
been a star turn.
For she spends much of her personal time designing large colorful story
books
dominated by art, a stark opposite
to the pedestrian text-dense titles provided by the Ministry and its
departments.
“Most of our students come from homes without books,” she said.
“That means the parents don’t even tell
fairytales to their children so there’s no culture of learning by sharing.
“We have a rich oral tradition using
wayang
(shadow) puppets so there’s no shortage of stories.”
She has modeled her books on those developed by a non-sectarian
non-governmental organization called
Room
to Read based on the US West Coast.
It’s funded by philanthropists and claims to have
‘benefited 16.8 million children across more
than 37,000 communities in 16 countries’ since it started in 2000.
It began operating in Indonesia
in 2014.
In 2017 along with the
Google.org charitable foundation it started
‘a digital platform that combines literacy professional development
videos and engaging children’s stories.’ It’s producing more than 200 digital
storybooks in Indonesian and 20 teacher-training videos.
Over three years
Room to Read says
it’s gathered a stable of a hundred writers and illustrators who have produced
60 ‘culturally relevant’ new titles to support the official National Literacy
Movement. Around 420,000 books are being distributed to four thousand schools.
All good and worthy – till the mists lift and the size of the mountain is
revealed:
No Western states are as complex and huge as Indonesia, with more than 50
million students and close to three million teachers.
It’s the fourth largest education system in
the world after China, India and the US.
About 16 per cent of the nation’s 250,000 primary schools are supervised by
the Ministry of Religious Affairs and seven
per cent are
private; the rest are run by the MEC.
Teacher Azizah says she wants to go overseas to study classroom
techniques.
Her principal Asri
Suprihatin has visited schools in Malaysia
and Singapore
– and it shows.
Suprihatin
runs Sekolah Dasar Negeri (State
elementary school
SDN) Punten 1, just
outside Batu in the Central East Java hills, is the sort of campus which gives
visitors hope that the archipelago’s education system can one day rank high on
world lists.
Every Thursday is Java Day when the 500 students and 31 teachers dress in
traditional Javanese clothes, eat Javanese food and speak Javanese. It’s the
school’s initiative.
In this district Indonesian
is the second language among those born locally.
Punten 1 staffers appear to be flexible and professional; absent is the grim
weariness which infects some restrooms:
‘This would be a great job if it wasn’t for the kids.’
However English teacher Lena Letor said it was difficult to handle classes
of 30 students in small rooms when presenting difficult subjects.
She still focuses on grammar when modern
methods stress communication and building vocabularies.
The adults interact easily with their charges in a bright and airy
environment which is more garden than yard.
It helps being among apple orchards and vegetable farms 1,000 meters
above the baking plains below.
The teachers have changed their 40-year old sterile classrooms into art
galleries with murals of fun facts to stimulate young minds.
It’s the norm in the West, but still rare in Indonesia where decorations are
often considered distractions. The Lowy Institute gave a damning report last
year saying the ‘high-volume, low-quality enterprise’ of Indonesian education was
ill equipped to meet expectations of creating an internationally competitive
system:
This outcome has reflected inadequate funding, human
resource deficits, perverse incentive structures, and poor management but has
most fundamentally been a matter of politics and power.
The political causes of poor education performance include
the continued dominance of political, bureaucratic, and corporate elites over
the education system under the New Order and the role that progressive NGOs and
parent, teacher, and student groups have had in education policymaking since
the fall of the New Order government (in 1998), making reform difficult.
One
of the Room to Read program’s main
goals is to boost literacy, particularly among girls in poor nations. Fortunately in this area Indonesia has lifted its game; according
to UNESCO 99.7 per cent of young people can now read and write. But as reported earlier that’s not
necessarily ‘functional literacy’.
The
problems come with comprehension, retention rates and school leavers equipped
for a workforce rapidly moving from manual tasks to digital solutions.
A
simple example: Indonesian motorists now
have to buy cash-loaded cards to tap-and-go on toll roads. For decades the gates have been controlled by
staff taking cash. Good for drivers as
the bottlenecks have gone. Bad for the
semi-skilled workers whose jobs have also driven away.
When
the story was published the education portfolio was in two places, with
technical and further education (TAFE) slotted into the Ministry of Research,
Technology and Higher Education.
Under
the new minister TAFE has returned to Education in the hope that the whole
school experience can be integrated.
The
World Bank says almost 26 million Indonesians live below the poverty line, and
another 20 per cent ‘vulnerable of falling into poverty, as their income hovers
marginally above the national poverty line.’
The
consequences of millions of unwanted youth in overcrowded cities competing for
a shrinking number of manual jobs are also worrying. An Australian government report put it
succinctly:
Unemployment is a major life event. It can have a devastating impact on people’s
lives. It affects not just the
unemployed person but also family members and the wider community.
The impact of unemployment can be
long-lasting. As unemployment becomes
more long-term, its impact becomes more far reaching, often affecting living
standards in retirement. The loss of
income by the parents can damage the prospects of the next generation.
This is the stark reality facing Minister Makarim and his
staff. If he doesn’t tear his hair out
and quit in frustration from dealing daily with bureaucratic procedures from
the Mesozoic Age, he has just five years to deliver the goods.
The next election will be in 2024.
The law forbids Widodo standing for a third term. The eighth president will have their own
solutions to any lingering education crisis and probably their own Dr Fixit,
for everyone has been to school and is consequently an expert.
It took Makarim a decade to develop Go-Jek when he was mainly dealing with can-do business hustlers and
cogent problem-solvers, not can’t do bureaucrats and self-serving politicians.
To
make the FINISH line and still be sane, Makarim will need to make many
extraordinary educational policy and administration backups and U turns.
These
would warrant a book if successful. Go-Ed
maybe? If it’s a best seller that might
prove Mr Dot.com’s Gen X skills are just what’s needed to move Gen R2R (Raring
to Read) into the fast lane.
##
First published in
Strategic Review 5 Dec 2019. See: http://sr.sgpp.ac.id/post/back-to-school
