Indonesia behind the learning
curve By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - Indonesia is arguably Asia's
least well-educated country, and the government is
largely to blame. With 30% of its 242 million
population school-aged, the world's largest Muslim
country ranks lowest among its Asian neighbors in
terms of public education expenditure.
A
minuscule 0.03% of the Indonesian workforce has
earned a university degree, according to
government statistics. Only 39%
of
12-to-15-year-olds ever make it to secondary
school. Addressing a major world conference this
month on training and development in Kuala Lumpur,
Telkom Indonesia chairman Tanri Abeng lamented
that more than 80% of Indonesians have only a
primary-school education.
With a record 40
million people unemployed, the education system's
failure means that Indonesia's pool of unskilled
and increasingly unemployable labor is growing
exponentially. That's bad economic and social news
for a country that nearly a decade after the
1997-98 Asian financial crisis is still straining
to recover from the economic adversity and
displacement.
Indonesia has in recent
years witnessed a worrying process of
de-industrialization, with massive foreign
divestment in many of the export-oriented
industries that drove the country's spectacular
economic growth throughout the 1980s and into the
1990s. In 2003, foreign investors pulled US$597
million out of the country, according to a recent
report by the United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development (UNCTAD).
Nowadays, the
availability of low-cost labor has only a limited
bearing on a country's ability to attract foreign
capital, particularly in knowledge-based Western
industries. The UNCTAD report notes that future
foreign-investment flows to top developing
countries in Asia will increasingly go toward
so-called human-capital-intensive industries. The
likely high-growth industries of the future, such
as information technology and biotechnology,
require an increasingly skilled labor force.
Moreover, Southeast Asia's fragmented
markets are a tougher sell nowadays with foreign
investors in light of China's and India's growth
potential, where untapped unified markets present
huge economies-of-scale benefits for multinational
manufacturers. In human-capital terms, Indonesia
is now viewed less favorably as a
foreign-investment destination than Thailand,
Singapore and arguably even Vietnam.
Part
of that perception, no doubt, can also be chalked
up to Indonesia's aging infrastructure, its
unpredictable legal system and the lingering
threat of terrorist attacks against Western
targets. At the same time, Indonesia's decrepit
education system and its woefully unskilled labor
force are emerging as the largest deterrent to
desperately needed new foreign investments.
Poverty of learning In 2003,
Indonesia's education spending stood at about 1.5%
of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with
5.3% in South Korea and 2.8% in comparatively
underdeveloped Vietnam, according to World Bank
data. Thailand, which spends 3.7% of GDP on
education, announced this week plans to increase
that to 4.5%-5% beginning next year to improve
Thai students' analytical abilities.
This
year China will spend 13% of its total national
budget on education, India 12%, the Philippines
17%, Malaysia 20%, Hong Kong 23% and Thailand 27%.
Indonesia's education budget this year, in
comparison, represents less than 10% of the
government's budget, while the draft budget for
2007 proposes a tiny upgrade to 10.2% of total
national spending.
Those meager
allocations are in effect bankrupting Indonesia's
public education system. For instance, in 2005 the
cost of education was Rp71 trillion (US$7
billion), well above the Rp21.38 trillion
allocated by the state budget, according to
official statistics. A constitutional amendment in
2002 decreed that the government must spend 20% of
the annual budget on education - but politicians
have been slow to follow up.
Officials say
they plan to increase education spending to 14.7%
in 2007, as part of a phased plan to achieve the
constitutionally mandated 20% by 2009. But as with
previous governments, spending on roads, bridges
and power stations has once again taken precedence
over education under President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono's administration.
Indonesia's
education failures are grounded deep in history.
National founder president Sukarno favored a
system of mass political education, aimed at
unifying the population rather than empowering
them with employable skills. Under president
Suharto, a compulsory nine-year education program
was implemented, but the education system still
completely failed to meet the needs of a modern
workforce.
Now government funding is
concentrated at the primary-school level, where
enrollment rates have jumped from 62% in the early
1970s to about 95% today. Yet the lack of a modern
curriculum and capable teachers is holding back
Indonesia's most ambitious students and in turn
the country's future economic prospects.
Across the board, rote learning is
emphasized over the development of critical
thinking skills. Sector specialists say less than
half the country's primary-school teachers and
two-thirds of secondary-school teachers possess
even the minimum qualifications required to teach
effectively. Instructor absenteeism on any given
day is reportedly about 20%.
Most of the
country's 3 million teachers and university
lecturers moonlight to supplement their income.
That's because pay scales, set by the government,
start at a low Rp1.5 million ($165) a month for
schoolteachers and Rp3 million ($330) for college
lecturers. According to a recent Ministry of
Education survey, about 80% of schoolteachers take
on outside jobs to bolster their incomes - to the
detriment of their commitment to public-school
students.
This inattentiveness was
recently exemplified in the failing results of a
basic placement examination taken by thousands of
graduating high-school students who had already
been accepted for university places. Of the
privileged few who do make it to university,
graduates are criticized by employers for their
lack of analytical skills and inability to solve
problems - hardly surprising given the political
emphasis of the national curriculum.
Worryingly, it appears the situation is
set to deteriorate. In Indonesia, families are
free to send their children to state, private or
Islamic schools, yet the spiraling costs of
education and related expenses have recently
caused a growing number of dropouts.
Last
year the government tried to cushion the effect of
fuel-price increases on education enrollment
through the so-called Bantuan Operasional Sekolah
(BOS) program, which was designed to help cover
the cost of tuition, registration, books and exams
for needy children aged between six and 15 years.
Yet according to Indonesian Corruption Watch
(ICW), schools still charged most parents for
these items, and in any case, the increased costs
of transport for schoolchildren after the
abolition of fuel-price subsidies has largely
negated any of the BOS benefits for parents.
Indonesia is widely ranked as one of the
most corrupt countries in Asia, and state schools
are badly plagued by embezzlement and bribery. The
Indonesian Coalition for Education claims that
corruption permeates the national education
system, where budgets earmarked for educational
purposes are seldom fully used for school purposes
and instead end up in the pockets of institutions'
administrators, it contends.
For instance,
it notes that textbooks and uniforms are marked up
for sale to pupils, and teachers often give low
marks in examinations to make students sit for
repeats, which, of course, the students have to
pay for. Contractor fees for school-building
repairs and improvements are chronically inflated.
Islam fills the gap Significantly, the state's education failure
has opened the way for cheaper Islamic-oriented
education. Recent estimates suggest that as many
as 20% of Indonesia's school-aged children are
enrolled in Islamic schools. And enrollment rates
are increasing by about 7% every year, though
education experts say the quality of instruction
and emphasis on religious studies mean most
Islamic-school graduates will lack the skills
needed to participate in a competitive job market.
The government funds 10% of the secular
Islamic day schools, or madrasahs, and an
even larger portion of the traditional Islamic
boarding schools, known locally as pesantrens.
Pesantrens played a key role in national
education before and during the early years of
independence in the 1950s, but six decades later
the standards, curricula and instruction methods
are widely considered even lower than at state
schools.
Attended by an estimated 2
million pupils, most pesantrens are in
rural areas and under the direction of Muslim
scholars. The standard pesantren syllabus
includes teaching blocks for an understanding of
the Koran, the Arabic language and Islamic law, as
well as Muslim traditions and history.
Indonesia's 38,500 madrasahs enroll
21% of all students at the junior-secondary level,
according to statistics compiled by the Asian
Development Bank (ADB). In general,
madrasahs serve the rural poor and are most
active in isolated areas that offer few other
educational opportunities.
These are often
in areas of the country affected by chronic
unemployment and poverty, a desperate mix that
radical Islamic groups have been known to exploit
for recruits to their sometimes violent causes.
Madrasahs provide schooling for an
estimated 5.7 million students nationwide, or 13%
of all school-age students and more than half of
madrasah students are children of farmers
and laborers.
Foreign donors, for their
part, are trying to help fill Indonesia's learning
gap. The ADB has worked with madrasahs
since the mid-1990s, aimed mainly at integrating
their curriculum with the secular national
education system. So, too, has the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID)
through a $157 million program aimed at
modernizing Islamic schools through teacher
training and updating curriculum to include
lessons relevant to the workplace. Those efforts,
however, have so far met with only limited
success.
Notably, USAID in 1997 had
prepared to close down its Indonesia-based
operations on expectations that the then rapidly
growing country no longer needed foreign aid. Now,
Indonesia desperately needs to attract new foreign
investments to rejuvenate growth and employ its
vast, underemployed population. But without
substantial domestic investment in human capital,
those foreign investments likely won't arrive, and
Southeast Asia's largest economy's prospects just
grow dimmer and dimmer.
Bill
Guerin, a Jakarta correspondent for Asia Times
Online since 2000, has worked in Indonesia for 20
years, mostly in journalism and editorial
positions. He has been published by the BBC on
East Timor and specializes in business/economic
and political analysis related to Indonesia. He
can be reached at softsell@prima.net.id.
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